回前詩 The Opening Poem
逐句解 Line by line
Upholding the Law, they journey west; the road runs long and far; the autumn wind sighs cold, shaking down its frost-white flowers.
The 回前詩 (huíqián shī) — the regulated verse that opens the chapter — sounds the doctrinal keynote before the story resumes. 奉法 is to bear and uphold the Buddhist Law; 道路賒 (dàolù shē) uses 賒 (properly “to buy on credit”) in its poetic sense of “far, long-drawn.” 霜花 are “frost-flowers,” the feathery patterns of the season's first frost.
The wayward ape is chained fast — loose not the rope; the unruly horse, tightly reined — lay on no whip.
A couplet of pure inner-alchemy allegory. 乖猿, the “wayward ape,” is the 心猿 (xīn yuán), the Mind-Monkey (Wukong); 劣馬, the “unruly horse,” is the 意馬 (yì mǎ), the Will-Horse (the dragon-steed). To keep the mind chained and the will reined — 休解 and 莫加 — is the whole discipline of self-cultivation the chapter will test. 兜 here is dōu, to rein in or pull up.
Wood Mother and Metal Squire were, from the first, conjoined; Yellow Dame and Cinnabar Child, at root, without discord.
The line names the pilgrims by their alchemical ciphers. 金公 (Metal Squire) and 木母 (Wood Mother) are the paired agents of the elixir — in the novel's usual scheme the Monkey (metal) and the Pig (wood); 黃婆 (Yellow Dame, the Earth-spleen that mediates) is Sha Monk, and 赤子 (chìzǐ) (the “cinnabar child,” the primal spirit) the sought-for elixir itself. Here 子 is the noun zǐ (“child”), not the suffix. That these forces are 原自合 — united of themselves — is the reassurance beneath the coming comedy.
Bite through the iron pellet — the true tidings within; Prajnā-pāramitā bears you home to that far shore.
咬開鐵彈 is a Chan image: the seamless “iron pellet” (or iron ball) has no flavour and no purchase for the teeth — to bite it open is to break through to awakening, and taste the 真消息, the “true tidings.” 般若波羅 is Prajnā-pāramitā, the perfection of transcendent wisdom; note the Buddhist reading bōrě for 般若. 到彼家 — “reaching that home” — plays on 彼岸 (bǐ'àn), the “far shore” of nirvāṇa.
Every chapter of the novel opens with a set-piece verse, and this one is unusually programmatic. In eight regulated lines it restates the book's governing allegory: the pilgrimage west is, on the hidden register, an alchemical and Chan discipline of the self. Coming directly after the crossing of the Flowing-Sands and the winning of Sha Monk, it gathers the newly-complete band of four under a single doctrinal banner before the testing episode begins.
The dense cluster 木母・金公・黃婆・赤子 belongs to the vocabulary of 內丹 (inner alchemy), in which the Five Phases are personified and mapped onto the characters. Readers are meant to hear two stories at once: on the surface, four travellers and a horse; underneath, the conjunction of metal and wood, mediated by earth, coalescing into the primal spirit. The novel keeps this double exposure running for hundreds of pages, and the opening poem is where each chapter re-tunes it.
The final couplet fuses two idioms of enlightenment — the Chan 咬開鐵彈 and the Prajñā formula 般若波羅 — to insist that wisdom, not comfort, carries one across. That theme squares exactly with the chapter's title, 三藏不忘本 (“Sanzang does not forget his origin”): the pilgrims must hold to the root even when ease is offered. The poem thus arms the reader with the moral before the trap is sprung.