原文 Original text
繁體 Traditional
Reader's edition
含詞賦 With rhapsody
一竅通千竅 One Aperture Opens a Thousand
長老聞得，亦開茅塞。正是：长老闻得，亦开茅塞。正是：
理明一竅通千竅，說破無生即是仙。理明一窍通千窍，说破无生即是仙。
逐句解 Line by line
長老聞得，亦開茅塞。
长老闻得，亦开茅塞。
The elder, hearing it, had his ignorance too unblocked.
聞得 "having heard," 得 read de; 開茅塞 "to clear away the choking weeds," to dispel confusion; 長 read zhǎng.
正是：
正是：
Just so:
The verse-tag introducing a summarizing couplet.
理明一竅通千竅，說破無生即是仙。
理明一窍通千窍，说破无生即是仙。
When the principle is clear, one aperture opens a thousand; expound the No-Birth, and that itself is immortality.
一竅通千竅 "one aperture penetrates a thousand," a single insight opens all; 無生 "the Unborn, No-Birth" (the Buddhist anutpāda, that which neither arises nor perishes); 仙 "the immortal." The couplet fuses Buddhist and Daoist goals — to realize the Unborn is to become an immortal.
A brief hinge. Tripitaka, having taken in both Wukong's and Sha Monk's teaching, is himself now enlightened — the classical figure of "clearing the choking weeds" from a blocked mind — and the narrator caps the moment with a summarizing couplet.
The couplet states the symposium's upshot in a single balanced line, and does so by fusing the two traditions the discourse has been braiding together: the Daoist "one aperture opening a thousand" (a single realization illuminating all) beside the Buddhist "No-Birth," the unarisen and unperishing — with the striking equation that to expound this Buddhist truth "is itself immortality." The moment of shared understanding is presented as the true fruit of the moonlit night, before Bajie arrives to puncture it.