春融時節 Spring on the Westward Road
次早，方刷扮了馬匹，包裹了行囊出門，眾僧遠送方回。行者引路而去，正是那春融時節，但見那：次早，方刷扮了马匹，包裹了行囊出门，众僧远送方回。行者引路而去，正是那春融时节，但见那：
逐句解 Line by line
Early next morning they groomed and harnessed the horse, bundled up the baggage, and went out at the gate; the monks saw them a long way off before turning back.
刷扮: to curry and to caparison, one verb for each half of preparing a mount. 遠送方回 — they escort the party a good distance before turning back, the last courtesy of a house that has cost these travellers a great deal.
The Pilgrim led the road, and it was indeed the season when spring runs warm. Behold:
春融, "spring thawing," marks the passage of a winter in a single graph; the last season named was autumn, in chapter thirteen. 但見那 is the fixed formula introducing a set-piece description, and the two 那 of this segment are both demonstrative nà.
Grass cushions the jade-grey courser, and soft is the print of his hoof; the willow shakes out its golden threads, and the dew's sheen is new.
A regulated 七律 in four couplet-units. 玉驄 is the white-dappled horse of the poets — here, the dragon-prince of chapter fifteen. 蹄跡: 跡 is jì, a trace or print; pypinyin gives jī.
Peach and apricot fill the wood, contending in loveliness; the fig-vine winds along the path and puts forth its spirit.
薜蘿 — bì luó, the fig-creeper and the dodder, the recluse's clothing in the 楚辭. 遶 (U+9075's neighbour, U+9076) is the 世德堂本 writing of 繞, "to wind about," and takes rào by the loan-graph rule.
On the sandy dyke the sun is warm, and the mandarin ducks are sleeping; in the mountain stream the flowers are fragrant, and the butterflies are tame.
馴 is xùn, "tame, docile," not xún; pypinyin errs. The couplet is a small still life of unalarmed creatures — ducks asleep, butterflies unstartled — set immediately before a chapter of unmasking and flight.
Thus autumn goes, winter wanes, and spring is half over — yet who knows in what year the journey shall be full and the true scriptures had?
The closing unit breaks the seven-graph line for nine, as the narrator's voice intrudes on the scene. 行滿 is a Daoist term of art: the merit-quota fulfilled. 得真文 takes 得 as dé, "to obtain." Three seasons have passed and the pilgrims are not yet out of the borderlands.
The lyric performs the passage of time that the prose declines to narrate. Between the burning of Black Wind Mountain and the arrival at Gao Village lie a winter and half a spring, and the novel gives them four couplets and the phrase 五七日荒路. This compression is characteristic: the pilgrimage's fourteen years exist chiefly as a series of episodes with unmeasured intervals between them.
Yet the last unit refuses the consolation the first three have built. Having laid out warm sun, sleeping ducks and tame butterflies, the poem turns on 不知何年 — and the reader is reminded that this is only the eighteenth chapter of a hundred, and that Sanzang has as yet acquired precisely one disciple.