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.
Chapters open with a poem before the story picks up again, and this one talks in the vocabulary of inner alchemy — the Daoist discipline of refining body and mind into something deathless. 本性圓明 (běn xìng yuán míng), the original nature made round and bright, is the state of full awakening; reach it and 道自通 (dào zì tōng), the Way opens by itself, with no more pushing. 網羅 (wǎng luó) means net and snare — the tangle of worldly business. Leaping clear of it with one twist of the body is Wukong's trademark move, and here it stands for a soul getting free.
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 come straight from the alchemist's workshop. 修成變化 (xiū chéng biàn huà) is winning the seventy-two transformations through long practice; 煉就長生 (liàn jiù cháng shēng) is smelting deathless life to completion, the whole point of the inner elixir. Then 豈俗同 — "how could that be the same as the common run?" — 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 swings from one man's achievement out to the age of the universe. 清濁 (qīng zhuó), the clear and the murky, are the two stuffs whose parting made Heaven and Earth. 數劫 (shù jié) counts in kalpas, the enormous Buddhist world-ages. Set against that, the realized being goes 任西東 — east or west, exactly as he pleases.
Free and unfettered through myriad myriads of years past all reckoning, one point of divine radiance pours forever into the Void.
Two loaded words close the poem. 逍遙 (xiāo yáo), "free and easy wandering," is the title of the opening chapter of Zhuāngzǐ, and about as concentrated an emblem of Daoist freedom as the language has. 神光 (shén guāng), spirit-light, poured forever into 空 (kōng), emptiness, welds Daoist and Buddhist vocabulary into a single image of a mind let loose.
This is a 回前詩, a head-verse: the poem a storyteller sets before the chapter proper, here in the strict eight-line regulated form (lǜ shī). The narrator will tell us in the very next line that it "secretly tallies" with Sun the Great Sage — a nudge to read it as being about him. The timing is where the wit lies. Wukong has just palmed the demons' real gourd, and a pickpocket's win is being written up as spiritual attainment: the monkey with a treasure up his sleeve reappears as the adept whose nature is round and luminous and whose spirit-light pours into the Void.
The wording mixes traditions on purpose. Daoist inner-alchemy terms (修成, 煉就, 清濁, 逍遙) sit beside Buddhist world-ages (數劫, kalpas) and the language of emptiness (空). Plaks reads verse like this as the novel's allegorical register, the place where the mind-monkey of the chapter title is at once the actual Wukong and a figure for the trained, unfettered mind.