Canonical Classics ← 第二十七回
第二十七回
shīsāntángsānzàng
shèngsēnghènzhúměihóuwáng

The Corpse-Fiend Thrice Mocks Tang Tripitaka · The Holy Monk in Wrath Banishes the Handsome Monkey King

回末總結
模式 Mode Read Study
拼音 Pinyin Off
字體 Script
原文 Original text 繁體 Traditional Reader's edition

回末總結 The Chapter Closes

jìngzhīfǎnqiětīngxiàhuífēnjiějìngzhīfǎnqiětīngxiàhuífēnjiě


逐句解 Line by line

jìngzhīfǎnqiětīngxiàhuífēnjiě jìngzhīfǎnqiětīngxiàhuífēnjiě

In the end there is no knowing how this parting would turn out — so listen to the next chapter's telling.

且聽下回分解 — pray hear the next chapter explain it — is the storyteller's sign-off, inherited straight from the platform performers the novel grew out of, and it closes almost every chapter in the book. The word to notice is 反復, reversals, turns of fortune. The narrator has just spent fifty passages breaking this bond, and in his last line he tells you to keep watching. ( is fēn.)


總評 Commentary

The chapter ends on the storyteller's stock formula, pray hear the next chapter explain it — the oral-performance signature the novel inherits from the vernacular tale-telling tradition, closing each chapter on a hook. Here the formula does more than mark an ending. The word 反復, reversals, quietly promises that the parting just witnessed is not the last word on the matter.

The hint is well founded. This rupture — one of the most famous partings in the novel — is real but temporary. Before long the master, captured and helpless, will have to send Bajie to fetch Wukong back, and the disciple whose sight was punished as murder will return to rescue the man who cast him out. The closing line's promise of reversals looks ahead to exactly that.

So the episode of the White-Bone Demon ends not in resolution but in suspension: the demon truly dead, the party broken up, the Great Sage weeping his way home, and the whole weight of the chapter's tragedy resting on a bond the narrator assures us will in time be mended. It is the pattern of the entire pilgrimage in miniature — trial, rupture, and the hard repeated work of reunion.