Canonical Classics ← 第三十四回
第三十四回
wángqiǎosuànkùnxīnyuán
shèngténgnuópiànbǎobèi

The Demon King, by artful reckoning, confounds the Mind-Monkey; the Great Sage, by shifting sleight, filches away the treasures.

假妝痛哭
模式 Mode Read Study
拼音 Pinyin Off
字體 Script
原文 Original text 繁體 Traditional Reader's edition

假妝痛哭 The Feigned Weeping

sūnshèngjiànlegǎnjìnzhǐzàièrménwàizheliǎntuōtuōdeláidàozěndechéngshìjiù便biànkuàngxiānhǒngledebǎobèiyòudexiǎoyāoquèwèiérdāngshícéngxiàjiǔdǐngyóuguōjiùzhálecéngyǒudiǎnlèierzhǐwèixiǎngtángsēngjīngdenǎojiùlèichūtòngchángfàngyǎn便biànsūnshèngjiànlegǎnjìnzhǐzàièrménwàizheliǎntuōtuōdeláidàozěndechéngshìjiù便biànkuàngxiānhǒngledebǎobèiyòudexiǎoyāoquèwèiérdāngshícéngxiàjiǔdǐngyóuguōjiùzhálecéngyǒudiǎnlèierzhǐwèixiǎngtángsēngjīngdenǎojiùlèichūtòngchángfàngyǎn便biàn


逐句解 Line by line

sūnshèngjiànlegǎnjìnzhǐzàièrménwàizheliǎntuōtuōdeláidàozěndechéngshìjiù便biànkuàngxiānhǒngledebǎobèiyòudexiǎoyāoquèwèiér sūnshèngjiànlegǎnjìnzhǐzàièrménwàizheliǎntuōtuōdeláidàozěndechéngshìjiù便biànkuàngxiānhǒngledebǎobèiyòudexiǎoyāoquèwèiér

The Great Sage, at the sight, dared not go in; he lingered outside the second gate, covered his face, and fell to sobbing piteously. Now you ask what he wept for — could it be he feared her? Had he feared her, he'd not have wept; and having first swindled her of her treasures and killed her imps besides, why then should he weep?

仵著臉 (wǔ zhe liǎn), "covering the face" — durative zhe. 脫脫的哭 (tuō tuō de kū), "sobbing outright." 卻為何而哭 (què wèi hé ér kū), "why then weep?" — read wèi, "for what reason.”

dāngshícéngxiàjiǔdǐngyóuguōjiùzhálecéngyǒudiǎnlèierzhǐwèixiǎngtángsēngjīngdenǎojiùlèichūtòngchángfàngyǎn便biàn dāngshícéngxiàjiǔdǐngyóuguōjiùzhálecéngyǒudiǎnlèierzhǐwèixiǎngtángsēngjīngdenǎojiùlèichūtòngchángfàngyǎn便biàn

In his day he had gone down into the nine-caldron oil-vats and been fried seven or eight days without a single tear. It was only that, calling to mind the bitter toils of the Tang Monk's scripture-quest, his grief welled up from an aching heart, and he opened his eyes and wept.

當時 (dāng shí), "in that time, once." 一點淚兒 (yì diǎn lèi er), "a single tear" — diminutive er. 只為想起 (zhǐ wèi xiǎng qǐ), "only because he recalled" — read wèi, causal "because.”


總評 Commentary

The narrator's intrusion here is one of the novel's finest strokes of characterization by rhetorical question. Having shown Wukong weeping at the demon-mother's gate, the storyteller stops to interrogate the tears — surely not fear, from one who swindled and killed her? — and by ruling out every base motive, isolates the true one. The device makes the reader complicit in the reasoning, and the answer, when it comes, deepens rather than diminishes the trickster.

The contrast is exactly weighted: eight days in the oil-caldrons of Heaven drew no tear from the invulnerable Monkey, yet the mere thought of Tripitaka's sufferings on the scripture-road brings him to open weeping. The point is that Wukong's tears are not for himself and never were; they are the overflow of a loyalty that pain could not touch but love could. The feigned sobbing at the gate is a performance, but the grief beneath it is real, and the passage lets us see both at once.