回前詩 The Head-Verse
逐句解 Line by line
When the essential nature is round and luminous, the Way runs clear of itself; with a single turn of the body he leaps free of the enclosing net.
The verse opens on the language of inner alchemy. 本性圓明 (běnxìng yuánmíng) — the original nature made perfectly round and bright — is the state of realized enlightenment, at which 道自通 (dào zì tōng), the Way opens through of its own accord. 網羅 (wǎngluó), "net and snare," is the tangle of worldly toils; to leap from it with one somersault is Wukong’s signature gesture, here read as spiritual liberation.
To cultivate the powers of transformation is no easy thing; and a long life refined and won — how could it be as the common run?
Both verbs are alchemical. 修成變化 (xiūchéng biànhuà) is the achieving, through cultivation, of the seventy-two transformations; 煉就長生 (liànjiù chángshēng) is the "refining to completion" of immortal life, the goal of the inner elixir. 豈俗同 ("how be one with the vulgar?") sets the adept apart from ordinary mortals.
Pure and turbid have revolved how many times with the turning of fate; cleft open across a span of kalpas, he goes east or west as he pleases.
The couplet sets the individual attainment against cosmic time. 清濁 (qīng zhuó), the clear and the murky, are the constituents whose separation made Heaven and Earth; 數劫 (shù jié) is a reckoning of kalpas, the immense Buddhist eons. Against that vastness the realized being moves 任西東 — freely, at will, in any direction.
Free and unfettered through myriad myriads of years past all reckoning, one point of divine radiance pours forever into the Void.
The closing couplet crowns the poem with two charged terms. 逍遙 (xiāoyáo) — "free and easy wandering" — is the title-phrase of the first chapter of the 莊子, the very emblem of Daoist transcendence. 神光 (shénguāng), "spirit-light," poured eternally into 空 (kōng), emptiness, fuses Daoist and Buddhist idiom in a single image of the liberated mind.
This head-verse (回前詩) is a regulated poem in the lǜshī form, and the narrator will tell us in the next line that it "secretly tallies" with Sun the Great Sage. Coming at the moment when Wukong has just carried off the demons’ true gourd, it lifts a trickster’s victory into a statement of attainment: the monkey who slips a treasure into his sleeve is glossed as the adept whose nature is "round and luminous" and whose spirit-light pours into the Void.
The diction is deliberately syncretic. Daoist inner-alchemy terms (修成, 煉就, 清濁, 逸遙) sit beside Buddhist cosmic time (數劫, kalpas) and the language of emptiness (空). Plaks reads such interchapter verse as the novel’s allegorical register, where the 心猿 — the "mind-monkey" of the chapter title — is at once the literal Wukong and the figure of the cultivated, unfettered mind.