夏景炎天 The Blaze of Summer
且說他三眾在路餐風宿水，帶月披星，早又至夏景炎天。但見那：且说他三众在路餐风宿水，带月披星，早又至夏景炎天。但见那：
逐句解 Line by line
Now the three of them, on the road, supped on wind and lodged upon water, went girt with the moon and cloaked in the stars; and soon enough the burning season of summer was upon them. Behold:
餐風宿水 and 帶月披星 are the standard travelling-formulae of the vernacular novel, four graphs apiece and perfectly parallel. 三眾, read sān zhòng, is the Buddhist counting-word for a company of religious. The lead-in 但見那： stays with the prose, as always.
The flowers are spent, and the butterfly has no more courtship to relate; the trees stand high, and the cicada has voice enough to clamor.
A brief seasonal set-piece, unequal in line-length (6–6–7–6) and therefore a 詞 fragment rather than regulated verse. 花盡 takes 盡 as jìn, "spent, exhausted"; the butterflies have lost their occasion, while the cicadas have found theirs.
Wild silkworms wind their cocoons; the fiery pomegranate is fair; and over the pool the new lotus shows its face.
火榴 is the flowering pomegranate, whose blossom gives the fifth lunar month its other name. 妍, "fair," is the poetic register; 新荷, the young lotus, is the fixed emblem of early summer. In 新荷 the graph 荷 is hé, the plant, not hè, "to bear."
Four lines of seasonal verse do the work of a transition. Between the close of the Heart Sutra episode and the first sight of Yellow Wind Ridge the novel needs to move its travellers some hundreds of lǐ and some months of the year, and it does so by the oldest device in Chinese narrative: the calendar. Spring's flowers are finished, summer's cicadas have begun.
The couplets are also quietly ominous. Every image is of something that has reached its term — flowers spent, cocoons wound shut, the lotus only now emerging. Heat and closure are the note struck, and the chapter that follows will be a chapter of enclosures: a farmhouse door, a cave mouth, a monk bound in a demon's hall.