六道詩 Verse on the Six Paths
唐王聽說，點頭嘆曰：唐王听说，点头叹曰：
逐句解 Line by line
The Tang king, hearing this, nodded and sighed, saying:
The tag 嘆曰, "sighed and said," introduces the poem — eight five-syllable lines — and it is the emperor speaking, not the narrator. He has been taught a lesson and is repeating it back.
Good indeed, and truly good! Do good, and its fruit is freedom from calamity.
善哉, "how good!", is the exclamation Buddhist monks make in Chinese texts — the rough equivalent of "amen." 果 here is the fruit of karma: what a deed grows into.
Let the good heart be ever earnest, and the path of goodness opens wide.
切切 is earnest and pressing; 開開 is flung wide. Both are doublings that carry more feeling than sense, which is what a jingle is for.
Let no evil thought arise; be sure to lessen all craft and guile.
莫教 is "don't let"; 教 is jiào. 興 here is xīng, to stir up, not xìng, interest. 刁乖 is craftiness and perversity.
Say not that there is no requital: gods and ghosts have their appointed order.
報應, bào yìng, is retribution — the word Chinese still uses when someone gets what was coming to them; 應 is yìng. 安排 is "arrangement," and it is a wonderfully bureaucratic note to end on: the gods and ghosts have a system, and it is running.
The poem squeezes the doctrine of the Six Paths into a rhymed maxim on 善, goodness — the word turns up five times in forty syllables, and three times in the opening two lines alone — insisting that virtue pays and wickedness is billed, under the watchful administration of gods and ghosts.
It is the moral capstone of the hell-tour, and the register drops on purpose: the elaborate cosmology of the previous passage comes out as a jingle, short enough to be remembered and repeated, which is exactly what the emperor has just been told to do with it.