西江月 A Chapter-Opening Lyric
詩曰：诗曰：
逐句解 Line by line
A poem runs:
The chapter opens, as often in the novel, with a set-piece 詞 rather than narrative; the tag 詩曰 ("a poem runs") introduces it. The lyric is set to the tune-pattern 西江月 and belongs to the didactic, Neidan-inflected verse the novel inherits from the 悟真篇 (Wuzhen pian) tradition.
Idle fancies need not be forcibly quelled; / as for suchness — why must it be sought at all?
妄想 (delusive thought) is set against 真如 (tathatā, ultimate "suchness"). 強 here is qiǎng, "by force": the couplet states the Chan-Neidan paradox that neither the suppression of delusion nor the grasping-after of enlightenment avails, both being contrivance.
The primal self-nature is cultivated in the Buddha's presence; / do delusion and awakening lie the one before the other?
自性 (svabhāva, "self-nature") is held already to contain buddhahood, so cultivation happens "before the Buddha" that is one's own nature. The second line denies any temporal sequence between 迷 (straying) and 悟 (awakening): the latter is a turning within the same nature, not a state that follows the former in time.
Awaken, and in a kṣaṇa one attains the right; / stray, and through myriad kalpas one sinks and drifts.
The antithesis of 悟/迷 is measured against 剎那 (kṣaṇa, the briefest instant) and 萬劫 (ten-thousand kalpas): awakening is instantaneous, delusion interminable. 成正 = to attain the correct [fruit]; 沉流 = to sink in the stream of saṃsāra.
Could a single thought accord with true cultivation, / it would extinguish sins numberless as Ganges sands.
一念 (a single instant of mind) accordant with 真修 (true cultivation) suffices to dissolve all defilement. 恆沙 (Gangā-vālukā, "sands of the Ganges") is the stock Buddhist figure for the uncountable; 罪垢 = sins-and-defilements. The lyric closes on the soteriology of the one accordant thought.
The chapter is prefaced, in the manner of the tale-teller, by a 西江月 lyric of unmistakably syncretic cast: its vocabulary (真如, 自性, 剎那, 萬劫, 恆沙, 罪垢) is Buddhist, but its governing conceit — that a single accordant thought (一念) collapses the whole labor of cultivation — belongs to the Quanzhen and 悟真篇 line of inner-alchemical verse the novel habitually absorbs. The doctrine is quietist: delusion is not to be beaten down nor suchness chased after, for both moves mistake the nature that already is what it seeks.
Placed here, the lyric works as ironic overture. The narrative it introduces shows the pilgrims doing precisely what the verse warns against — 迷 (straying) rather than 悟 (awakening): Tripitaka bound and weeping, Eight Rules and Sha Monk unable to prevail. The gap between the verse's serene claim that awakening is a matter of one instant and the plodding, embodied difficulty of the journey is the novel's recurrent joke and its deepest subject at once.