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.
Every chapter of this novel opens with a verse before the story restarts, and a 回前詩 (huí qián shī) works rather like a title card: it states the theme first, then lets the action begin. Here the theme is the road itself. 奉法 is to carry and uphold the Buddhist Law, which is the pilgrims' entire warrant for being out there. The word worth stopping on is 賒: in a shop it means buying on credit, but poets borrowed it for distance, so 道路賒 (dào lù shē) is a road drawn out long and not yet paid for. And 霜花, frost-flowers, are the feathery patterns the year's first frost leaves on whatever it touches.
The wayward ape is chained fast — loose not the rope; the unruly horse, tightly reined — lay on no whip.
This is the couplet where the novel's hidden code shows through. 乖猿, the wayward ape, is the 心猿 (xīn yuán), the Mind-Monkey, which is Wukong; 劣馬, the unruly horse, is the 意馬 (yì mǎ), the Will-Horse, which is the dragon-steed he rides. Put the two together and you have 心猿意馬, still the phrase Chinese reaches for when somebody cannot settle to anything — mind like a monkey, will like a runaway horse. The instruction is to keep both tied: 休解, do not loosen the rope; 莫加, do not lay on the whip. That is the whole discipline this chapter is about to put on trial. 兜 here is dōu, to rein in, to pull up short.
Wood Mother and Metal Squire were, from the first, conjoined; Yellow Dame and Cinnabar Child, at root, without discord.
The line lists the travellers under their code names. Inner alchemy hands each of the Five Phases a character, and the novel keeps the labels running: 金公, Metal Squire, and 木母, Wood Mother, are the paired ingredients of the elixir — Monkey for metal and the Pig for wood, in the scheme the book usually follows. 黃婆, the Yellow Dame, is earth, and the spleen, the go-between that makes the other two mix, which is Sha Monk's job in every quarrel; and 赤子 (chì zǐ), the cinnabar child, is the primal spirit, the elixir they are all working to make. Here 子 is the full noun zǐ, a child, not the small unstressed suffix. The pair are 原自合, joined from the start — the quiet reassurance under all the comedy to come.
Bite through the iron pellet — the true tidings within; Prajnā-pāramitā bears you home to that far shore.
The closing couplet stacks two images of waking up. 咬開鐵彈 is a Chan figure: the iron pellet is seamless and tasteless and gives the teeth nothing to grip — bite it open all the same and you break through, and what you taste is the 真消息, the true tidings. Then 般若波羅, Prajnā-pāramitā, the perfection of wisdom that ferries you over. Note the Buddhist reading bō rě for 般若, nothing like the everyday reading of those two characters. 到彼家, reaching that home, leans on 彼岸 (bǐ àn), the far shore of nirvāṇa. Wisdom carries you across; comfort does not — which is exactly what the next thirty pages set out to prove.
Every chapter opens with a verse, and this one is unusually blunt about its business. In eight seven-character lines it restates the book's governing allegory: the journey west is also a discipline of the self, half alchemical and half Chan. It arrives at a well-chosen moment. The pilgrims have just crossed the Flowing-Sands River and gained Sha Monk, so the band of four is complete for the first time — and the poem gathers all four under one banner before the testing starts.
The cluster 木母, 金公, 黃婆, 赤子 comes out of 內丹, inner alchemy, where the Five Phases are given human names and pinned onto the cast. The reader is meant to follow two stories at once: on the surface, four travellers and a horse; underneath, metal and wood combining with earth between them to make the primal spirit. The novel runs this double exposure for hundreds of pages, and the opening poem is where each chapter resets it.
The last couplet welds two enlightenment idioms together — the Chan iron pellet and the Prajñā formula — to make one point: what carries you across is wisdom, not comfort. That is precisely the chapter title, 三藏不忘本, Sanzang does not forget the root. Hold to the root even when ease is on offer. The poem hands the reader the moral before the trap is set, which is a kindness the pilgrims themselves do not get.