詩曰 The Opening Poem
逐句解 Line by line
Great was the Tang sovereign who sent down his sealed decree; by imperial commission Xuanzang would inquire into the Chan school's truth.
大有 (dà yǒu) — “greatly abounding,” an auspicious opening that echoes the hexagram of that name in the 易經 (the Yijing) and lends the sovereign's act a cosmic sanction. 降敕封 is to “send down” (降 jiàng) a sealed edict of appointment; the diction casts an earthly commission as a mandate descending from on high. 禪宗 is the Chan (Zen) school, whose “truth” (宗 zōng, the doctrinal source) the pilgrim is charged to seek.
With steadfast heart, honed and polished, he seeks the dragon's lair; with fixed intent, cultivating discipline, he climbs toward Vulture Peak.
磨琢 (mó zhuó), “to grind and to carve,” is the lapidary's labour, here a figure for the disciplining of the will. 龍穴 (lóng xué), the “dragon's lair,” is borrowed from the language of geomancy for a place of hidden power — the far goal of the quest. 鷲峰 is Gṛdhrakūṭa, the Vulture Peak near Rājagṛha where the Buddha is said to have preached; 著意 (zhuó yì) marks the deliberate fixing of purpose.
Beyond the frontier he journeys far, through how many kingdoms; cloud-wreathed mountains, crossed in a former age, rise fold on fold, ten thousand thousandfold.
多少 (duō shǎo), “how many,” is a rhetorical measure of the road's vastness. 前度 (qián dù), “crossed in a former time,” carries a faint intimation of the pilgrim's karmic past; 萬千重 (wàn qiān chóng) heaps layer upon layer (重 chóng), the ranges receding without end.
From this day, setting his carriage apart, he casts himself westward; upholding the Teaching and its observances, he awakens to the Great Void.
別駕 (bié jià) here means simply to “part carriage” — to set out alone — rather than the old official title. 迦持 (jiā chí) renders the keeping of religious observance, a transliteration-flavoured coinage. 大空 (dà kōng), the “Great Emptiness” (śūnyatā), is the Mahāyāna insight into the voidness of all phenomena — the enlightenment toward which the whole journey tends.
The chapter opens, as chapters of the novel often do, with a regulated poem that both summarizes and consecrates the action to come. Its couplets move from the imperial world — the Tang sovereign's decree — to the religious — the Chan school, Vulture Peak, the Great Void — tracing in miniature the arc of Xuanzang's mission: a worldly commission that is also a spiritual ascent. The lapidary and geomantic images (grinding and carving, the dragon's lair) recast the hardships of the road as a discipline of the self, while the closing turn to 大空 announces the doctrinal horizon against which the pilgrim's trials will be measured. The poem withholds all narrative incident: it is a frame, not a scene, setting the key in which the prose to follow will be heard.