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.
The novel likes to open a chapter with a poem that both sums up the action and blesses it, and this one starts in the throne room. 大有 (dà yǒu) means "greatly abounding," and it is also the name of a hexagram in the 易經 (the Yijing) — so the emperor's decree arrives with a cosmic stamp of approval on it. 降敕封 is to send down a sealed edict of appointment, and 降 (jiàng) is literally "to descend": a piece of court paperwork described as though it were falling from heaven. 禪宗 is the Chan school — Zen, under its Chinese name — and 宗 (zōng) is the doctrinal source, the thing the pilgrim is being sent to get to the bottom of.
With steadfast heart, honed and polished, he seeks the dragon's lair; with fixed intent, cultivating discipline, he climbs toward Vulture Peak.
Now the poem turns from the court to the man. 磨琢 (mó zhuó) is "to grind and to carve" — a jeweller's work — and it is being used here for what the road will do to Xuanzang's will. 龍穴 (lóng xué), the "dragon's lair," is borrowed from geomancy, where it names the spot on a landscape where hidden power gathers; here it stands for the far goal of the whole journey. 鷲峰 is Gṛdhrakūṭa, Vulture Peak near Rājagṛha, where the Buddha is said to have preached, and 著意 (zhuó yì) is the deliberate fixing of purpose — mind made up.
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) is "how many," asked rhetorically: nobody is counting, that is the point. 前度 (qián dù) means "crossed in an earlier time," and it drops a hint that the pilgrim has been this way before, in another life — a thread the novel will pick up. 萬千重 (wàn qiān chóng) piles layer on layer, 重 being chóng, a fold or a tier: mountain ranges receding until you stop being able to see the end of them.
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) was once an official title, but here it means what the two characters plainly say — to part carriage, to set off on your own. 迦持 (jiā chí) is the keeping of religious observance, written with a transliteration-flavoured first character, the sort of coinage that sounds vaguely Sanskrit without quite being it. And 大空 (dà kōng), the "Great Emptiness," is śūnyatā — the Mahāyāna insight that nothing has a fixed self-standing nature. Eight lines in, and the poem has already named the thing the whole hundred chapters are walking toward.
Before anything happens, a poem. This is the novel's habit at the head of a chapter, and it works rather like the title sequence of a series: no plot, just the key the coming episode will be played in.
Watch the direction it travels. The first couplet is all court — sovereign, decree, imperial commission. By the last it is all religion — Vulture Peak, the Great Emptiness. In between sit the images of grinding and carving, of the dragon's lair, which quietly recast the hardships ahead as a discipline rather than a misfortune. The journey is being described twice at once: as a job the emperor handed out, and as a climb the soul makes.
What the poem withholds is any incident at all. Nobody moves; nothing is described. That is the point of a frame — it tells you how to hear what follows. And what follows, within a few hundred characters, is a monk falling into a pit full of things that eat people.