忍耐箴 The Opening Poem: On Forbearance
詩曰：诗曰：
逐句解 Line by line
There is a poem:
The set-piece verse (詩曰 (shī yuē), "the poem says") with which every chapter of a Ming vernacular novel opens. Here it takes the form of a moral admonition, sounding the keynote of the episode before the narrative resumes.
In making your way through the world, be sure to keep a blade set over the heart; in mending the self, mind well the inch that stands beside the “and.”
A graph-riddle. 心上刃 — a blade (刃) written above a heart (心) — composes 忍 (rěn), "to endure, to forbear"; 寸邊而 — an inch (寸) beside an 而 — composes 耐 (nài), "to bear patiently." Read together, the couplet spells out 忍耐, forbearance, the virtue the chapter will put to the test.
As the old saying has it, the blade-graph is a man’s very stock-in-trade; only think thrice, and guard against wrath and deceit.
刃字 ("the graph 刃") again points to the crown of 忍 from the line before — forbearance is made one’s livelihood (生意). 三思 ("think thrice") is proverbial for prudence; 怒欺 pairs the twin faults the patient man must master, anger and deception. Here 為 is read wéi, "to be, to serve as."
The highest sort, who never contend, are handed down through all antiquity; the sage, cherishing virtue, carries it on into his own age.
上士 ("the highest gentleman") and the ideal of 無爭 ("non-contention") are Daoist commonplaces, echoing the 道德經. 亙古 (gèngǔ) means "spanning all time." The couplet sets the man of forbearance against the merely forceful, whose fate the closing lines seal.
The hard and forceful will always meet a harder, stronger kind; and in the end it all comes down to emptiness and error.
A proverb in the mould of 山外有山 ("beyond the mountains, more mountains"): no strength but that another will overtop it. 空與非 ("emptiness and wrong") lends the moral a Buddhist coloring — brute contention leads nowhere. The verse thus frames the reconciliation to come, when the quarrel over the tree is settled not by force but by cure and kinship.
Like every chapter in a Ming vernacular novel (章回小說), the twenty-sixth opens with a set-piece poem (詩曰) — and this one is a small tour de force of graphic wit. Its opening couplet is a riddle: the components of 忍 ("forbearance") and 耐 ("patience") are described rather than named, so that the reader must assemble the characters in the mind’s eye. The theme so spelled out, forbearance, is exactly the virtue the chapter will test.
The choice is pointed. Only pages before, the Great Sage had wrecked the ginseng-fruit tree and traded blows with the Immortal Zhenyuan; now, unable to win by force, he must swallow his pride and go searching, cap in hand, for a cure. The warning that "the hard and forceful will always meet a harder kind" reads almost as a rebuke to Wukong himself, whose combative temper has landed the pilgrims in their present fix.
The verse also reconciles the novel’s Daoist and Buddhist registers, moving from the Daoist "highest gentleman who never contends" to the Buddhist verdict that strife "comes to emptiness and error." Restraint, not power, is the way forward — and the chapter’s ending, sealed in sworn brotherhood, will bear the lesson out.