There is a poem:

Every chapter of a Ming novel opens with a poem, announced by this two-word tag: 詩曰 (shī yuē), the poem says. Think of it as the title card before the picture starts. This one is a scolding, and it names the virtue the chapter is about to test.

In making your way through the world, be sure to keep a blade set over the heart; in mending the self, mind well the character "and" set beside the inch.

Here is the trick, and it is a good one: the poem opens by refusing to name its own subject. It describes two characters by their parts and leaves the reader to assemble them. A blade set over a heart -- 刃 written on top of 心 -- builds 忍 (rěn), to endure. An 而 with an inch, 寸, at its right side builds 耐 (nài), to bear patiently. In both halves the part being named comes last in the Chinese, so the second line points at the 而 and not at the inch. The second half is where English runs out of road. 刃 and 心 each mean something you can see, so the first line works twice over -- it tells you how 忍 is written, and a blade held above your heart is also a fair picture of what endurance feels like. 而 means nothing you can see. It is a bare joint in a sentence, roughly and or and yet, and it earns its place in the riddle by its shape alone. So there is no image to be had, and a translation can only name it as a written mark and point -- which is why the English says the character "and" rather than pretending it is a thing. Read the two lines together and this couplet has spelled out 忍耐, forbearance, without once saying it. That is the virtue the whole chapter will spend its length testing.

As the old saying has it, the character for "blade" is a man's very stock-in-trade; only think thrice, and guard against wrath and deceit.

The blade is back. 刃字 means the character 刃, and that character is the top half of 忍 from the line before -- so what the poem calls a man's 生意, his livelihood, the trade he lives by, is patience. 三思, think three times, is still what Chinese reaches for where English says look before you leap. The two faults it warns against, 怒 and 欺, anger and cheating, are precisely the two Wukong is about to commit. 為 is wéi here, to be or 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 sort of man, and his refusal to compete -- 無爭 -- come out of the 道德經, where declining to contend is the mark of real strength rather than weakness. 亙古 (gèn gǔ) means spanning all time. The line sets the patient man against the merely forceful, whose fate the last two lines will settle.

The hard and forceful will always meet a harder, stronger kind; and in the end it all comes down to emptiness and error.

There is always a bigger fish. Chinese has the same thought in 山外有山, beyond the mountains there are more mountains -- no strength so great that nothing will overtop it. The closing 空與非, emptiness and error, tips the moral into Buddhist territory: fighting gets you nowhere in the end. Hold that thought. The quarrel over the tree will not be settled by anybody winning it.