惠岸捧葫辭海 Mokṣa Bears the Gourd
惠岸聞言，謹遵師命，與大聖捧葫蘆出了潮音洞，奉法旨辭了紫竹林。有詩為證。惠岸闻言，谨遵师命，与大圣捧葫芦出了潮音洞，奉法旨辞了紫竹林。有诗为证。
逐句解 Line by line
Hui'an, hearing this, reverently obeyed his mistress's command, and bearing the gourd with the Great Sage, went out of the Tide-Sound Cave; obedient to the dharma-decree, they took their leave of the Purple Bamboo Grove. There is a poem to prove it:
奉法旨 ('in obedience to the dharma-command') and 有詩為證 ('there is a poem in witness'; 為 wèi) — the tag introduces the verse, which here stands without the added 詩曰 and reads as an alchemical gloss on the coming conversion.
The Five Agents, rightly matched, accord with Heaven's truth; and one comes to know again the old master of before.
五行匹配 ('the Five Agents paired and matched'; 行 xíng, 得 de) opens the alchemical reading; 舊主人 ('the old master') figures the disciple's true allegiance, recovered in conversion.
Refining the self and laying the base for its marvelous working, one discerns false from true and sees the first cause.
煉已立基 ('refining the self, establishing the foundation'; 為 wéi) is the language of inner cultivation; 辨明邪正 ('distinguishing the false from the true') is its moral fruit.
Metal returns to its nature and rejoins its kind; Wood goes to seek its feeling, and together they are made whole again.
金來歸性 ('Metal returns to its nature') and 木去求情 ('Wood goes seeking its feeling'; 還 hái) — the agents metal and wood, figures of the reconciling powers, restored to unity.
The Two Earths, their work complete, come to stillness; harmonizing water and fire, without a mote of dust.
二土全功 ('the Two Earths, their merit complete') and 調和水火 ('harmonizing water and fire'; 調 tiáo, to blend, not diào) — the completed elixir, and the reconciliation the conversion effects.
This short passage sends Guanyin's disciple Mokṣa — under his religious name Hui'an — down to the river with the gourd, and marks the transition with a verse. The poem is not narrative but doctrine: four couplets of inner-alchemy that read the coming conversion of the demon as the completion of an elixir. Its terms — the Five Agents matched, metal returning to its kind, wood seeking its feeling, the Two Earths brought to stillness, water and fire harmonized — belong to the same 內丹 vocabulary as the demon's own autobiography.
The alchemical reading is the novel's habitual way of interpreting its own plot: the gathering of the pilgrim-band is figured as the assembling and reconciling of the cosmic agents within a single body. That the demon should 'know again the old master of before' — his true allegiance to Guanyin and the Way — is the spiritual sense of his imminent submission. The verse stands, notably, on the strength of the tag 有詩為證 alone, without the doubled 詩曰, yet it is fully verse, an editorial gloss lifting the mechanics of the crossing into the register of doctrine.