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 is two verbs doing two jobs: curry the horse, then dress it out in its tack. 遠送方回 — they walk the party a long way before turning back, which is the correct courtesy for a departing guest, and the last one paid by 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 melting, does a whole winter's work in one character; the last season the novel troubled to name was autumn, back in chapter thirteen. 但見那 is the fixed signal that a set-piece description is coming — behold. Both 那 in this line are the pointing nà, not the question word.
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.
The set-piece is a regulated seven-syllable poem, 七律, in four paired units. 玉驄 is the poets' jade-grey dapple, which here happens to be the dragon prince of chapter fifteen doing duty as a packhorse. 跡 is jì, a trace or a hoofprint; jī is the default reading and it is wrong here.
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, is the fig-creeper and the dodder — in the 楚辭 these are what a hermit wears instead of clothes, so the plants carry a whiff of holy poverty. 遶 is the 世德堂本's way of writing 繞, to wind about; it stands in for that character and takes its reading, rào.
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 and unafraid, not xún — a reading machines get wrong. The couplet — two lines built to match each other, image for image — is a still life of creatures with nothing to fear: ducks asleep on a warm bank, butterflies that will not startle. It sits immediately before a chapter of unmasking and headlong 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 stretches from seven characters to nine, and you can hear the narrator's own voice pushing into the scene. 行滿 is a term of art from Daoist practice: the quota of merit filled up. The journey ends not when the miles run out but when the credit does. 得 is dé, to obtain. Three seasons have gone by, and the pilgrims are still in the borderlands.
The poem does the work the prose refuses to do. A winter and half a spring pass between the burning of Black Wind Mountain and the arrival at Gao Village, and the novel gives that stretch four couplets and the phrase 五七日荒路, five or seven days of wild road. The compression is typical: the pilgrimage's fourteen years survive as a string of episodes with unmeasured gaps between them.
Then the last unit takes back everything the first three offered. Warm sun, sleeping ducks, tame butterflies — and the poem turns on 不知何年, who knows what year. The reader is being reminded that this is chapter eighteen of a hundred, and that Sanzang has so far collected exactly one disciple.