僧眾出迎 The Monks Come Forth
長老下了馬，行者歇了擔，正欲進門，只見那門裡走出一眾僧來。你看他怎生模樣：长老下了马，行者歇了担，正欲进门，只见那门里走出一众僧来。你看他怎生模样：
逐句解 Line by line
The elder dismounted, the Pilgrim set down the load, and they were on the point of entering when out through the gate came a company of monks. See now how they were got up:
長老 (zhǎnglǎo), "elder," is the standing address for Sanzang. 擔 is read dàn here — the burden slung from the carrying-pole, not dān, "to shoulder." In 模樣 the first graph is mú. 你看他怎生模樣 is the storyteller turning to his audience, and cues the portrait-poem.
On their heads, caps pinned at the left; on their bodies, robes without stain.
笄 (jī) is a hairpin, and 左笄帽 a cap fastened on the left. 無垢 (wúgòu) renders Skt. vimala, "undefiled" — the robe is spotless in the ritual sense as well as the literal.
Bronze rings hang doubled from their ears; silk sashes bind their waists about.
銅環, bronze earrings, are an ascetic's ornament rather than a vanity. 腰圍 (wéi) is the girth of the waist that the sash binds.
Straw sandals make their walking steady; wooden fish they carry in their hands.
木魚 (mùyú), the "wooden fish," is the fish-shaped block struck to keep time in chanting — the fish, which never shuts its eyes, standing for wakefulness. 行 is xíng, to walk.
In their mouths, recitation without ceasing; in prajñā they take refuge, all of them.
作念 is to keep up the recitation of a name or formula. 般若 is prajñā, transcendent wisdom, and must be read bō rě — never bān ruò. 皈依 (guīyī) is to take refuge in the Three Jewels. The portrait ends on the perfect monastic act.
The portrait-poem is a set form — eight balanced five-syllable lines moving from head to foot to voice — and everything it reports is correct. Cap, robe, earrings, sash, sandals, wooden fish, unbroken recitation, refuge in prajñā: a checklist of the well-kept Buddhist. Wú Chéng'ēn is at his most deadpan here. He has just spent a 賦 and a quatrain on a flawless building, and now spends a poem on flawless men, and the reader who knows the chapter title reads every line as an indictment being drawn up.
Observe what the form cannot show. The poem describes only surfaces — what is worn, what is carried, what is said aloud. Of appetite, of two hundred and seventy years of accumulation, of what a man might do at midnight for a piece of embroidered silk, it has nothing to report, because such things do not appear on the outside of a monk. The chapter's whole method is here in miniature: the novel will let the exterior speak first, at length and without irony, and then let the interior speak for itself.