祖師講道 The Patriarch Expounds the Great Way
一日，祖師登壇高坐，喚集諸仙，開講大道。真個是：一日，祖师登坛高坐，唤集诸仙，开讲大道。真个是：
逐句解 Line by line
One day the Patriarch mounted the dais and took the high seat, called the whole company of immortals together, and opened his discourse on the Great Way. It was truly a scene like this —
登壇高坐 — the master climbs the dais (壇 tán, a raised altar-platform) and takes the high seat, the formal posture for delivering a discourse. 真個是, "truly it was thus," is the storyteller's cue for the set-piece verse that follows; the 世德堂本 writes 個 where some Ming printings use 箇. (一日 reads yí rì, the 一 rising before the falling tone of 日.)
Heaven's blossoms tumbled down in showers;
天花亂墜 — heavenly flowers tumbling down in confusion — comes from the legend that blossoms rained out of the sky whenever the Dharma was preached perfectly. It has since hardened into a living idiom for dazzling, over-the-top eloquence, usually with a hint that the speaker is laying it on rather thick.
from the earth there welled up golden lotuses.
And the answering marvel from below: golden lotuses welling up out of the ground. The two go together as standard scenery for a sage in full flow. 湧 is the 世德堂本 form; some texts print the variant 涌.
Wondrously he expounded the teaching of the Three Vehicles;
三乘 (sān shèng), the Three Vehicles, are the graded Buddhist paths to awakening — 聲聞 (śrāvaka, the hearer), 緣覺 (pratyekabuddha, the solitary realiser) and 菩薩 (bodhisattva). 乘 is shèng for the vehicle, never chéng, to ride. And 教 here is jiào, the noun "teaching," against the jiāo, "to teach," of the opening passage.
subtle and exact, the myriad dharmas stood complete.
精微 is subtle and exact; 萬法, the myriad dharmas, takes in all phenomena and all teachings at once.
Slowly waving his deer-tail whisk, he spat forth pearls and jade;
A 麈尾 (zhǔ wěi) is a whisk made from the tail of the 麈, a large deer — the signature prop of the 清談 or "pure conversation" debaters among the medieval gentry, and later of Buddhist and Daoist expounders, waved slowly while holding forth. A conductor's baton for metaphysics. 噴珠玉, spraying pearls and jade, means pouring out precious speech. One textual point worth having: the 世德堂本 reads 麈, the whisk, where some printings corrupt it to 塵 (chén), dust — but one waves a whisk, not a handful of dust.
their sound, rolling like thunder, shook the ninefold heavens.
響振雷霆, the sound rolling like thunder, reaching up to the 九天 (jiǔ tiān), the ninefold heavens at the top of the sky.
A while he spoke of the Dao,
A while on the Dao — and then, in the very next line, a while on something else entirely. (一會 reads yí huì, the 一 rising before the falling tone of 會.)
a while he preached of Chan;
禪 is chán, Chan or dhyāna, meditation — not shàn, to abdicate, as in 禪讓. (一會 is yí huì again.) The master crosses from Daoist material to Buddhist without pausing to mark the border, which is the point of the whole verse.
the Three Schools, joined as one, were fundamentally so.
And here it is stated outright. 三家 are the Three Teachings — Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism — and 本如然 means "are fundamentally so," that is, 本來如此: they were one thing all along. This single line is the premise the entire novel runs on.
He laid bare in a single word the principle of devout refuge,
皈 (guī) is a variant of 歸 kept specially for 皈依, the Buddhist act of taking refuge, so 皈誠 is devout refuge. But notice what the whole sublime lecture is said to come down to: 開明一字, the laying bare of a single word. Hold on to that. The chapter is going to keep the promise, though not from a dais and not in front of witnesses. (一字 is yí zì, before the falling tone of 字.)
and pointed the way to the Unborn, to fathom the mystery of one's nature.
無生 (wú shēng), "the Unborn," is the Buddhist 無生法忍 — the insight that things neither arise nor perish — and stands for the unconditioned. 了性 is to fathom one's own nature, with 了 as liǎo, to understand or complete, not the toneless le.
The lecture is staged entirely in the conventions of Buddhist hagiography. Flowers rain from the sky, golden lotuses break through the ground — the standard marvels said to attend a perfect exposition of the Dharma — and the master waves a 麈尾, the deer-tail whisk carried by the 清談 debaters of the medieval gentry when they argued about Being. It is the picture of an ideal teacher at the height of his powers. But look at what he is actually teaching: 說一會道，講一會禪, a while on the Dao, a while on Chan, with the Confucian frame running underneath the whole time.
The fourth line states the premise without hedging: 三家配合本如然, the Three Schools joined together are fundamentally so. This is 三教合一, the "unity of the Three Teachings," which the Quanzhen (全真) Daoist tradition behind much of the novel's alchemical vocabulary held as an axiom. The wording is chosen to belong to everyone at once. 三乘 and 無生 are Buddhist terms, and yet 了性, "to fathom one's nature," answers just as neatly to the Buddhist 見性 and to the Neo-Confucian programme of 盡性, exhausting one's nature — which the schoolboy curriculum of the previous passage was already pointing toward. Plaks reads exactly this kind of layered, cross-confessional diction as the mark of a literati author writing for readers who would catch all three registers.
Two ironies frame the scene. First, the verse insists that the whole magnificent edifice resolves into 開明一字, the laying bare of a single word — a promise the chapter keeps in the most unexpected way, when the master raps Wukong three times on the head and stalks off with his hands behind his back, passing the one secret in private rather than from the dais. Second, this banquet of doctrine is precisely what the monkey is about to push away. In the exchange that follows he will hear the recognised gateways of the Way named one at a time — 術, 流, 靜, 動 — and refuse every one, because none of them delivers the thing he came for: 長生, life without end. The serene "three teachings as one" and the monkey's single-minded appetite for immortality are set side by side on purpose.