漫山成海 A Flood Makes a Sea
真個是：真个是：
逐句解 Line by line
Truly it was:
真個是 — "truly it was" — is the storyteller's cue for the set-piece that follows.
Flooding over the mountain-tops, bursting open the stone cliffs.
The rhapsody opens with two four-character bursts, short and percussive, echoing the command that produced them.
Flooding the peaks with the force of an ocean, bursting the cliffs like a boundless sea.
Then the same two images again at greater length — the flood repeating itself as it spreads. 似 in 似汪洋 is sì, like a boundless sea.
Black mist swells to heaven, all a haze of water; dark waves shadow the sun and shimmer with cold light.
Mist to the sky, cold light on dark water. 滄波 is the gray-green swell of deep water.
Over every crag surge jade-white breakers; across the whole sea grow golden lotuses.
Jade-white breakers, and golden lotuses growing across the whole sea — the first sign that this is not merely a flood. 長 here is zhǎng, to grow. The 世德堂本 writes 連 where the sense requires 蓮, lotus, the two being near-homophones; the edition's spelling is kept as it stands.
The Bodhisattva unfolds her great demon-subduing art, and from her sleeve draws forth the body-stilling dhyāna.
And here the flood turns into something else. 定身禪 is the body-stilling meditation drawn out of her sleeve. 降 in 降魔法 is xiáng, demon-subduing; 中 in 袖中 is zhōng.
It is transformed into the immortal scene of Potalaka, exactly like the Southern Sea in every way.
The demon's mountain becomes a copy of Guanyin's own island. 伽 in 落伽 is jiā, giving Luòjiā for Potalaka; 落 is luò.
Fair reeds thrust up their tender udumbara blooms; fragrant grasses unfurl fresh palm-leaf fronds.
Two plants with Buddhist freight: the 曇花 is the udumbara, said to bloom once in three thousand years and so to stand for something almost impossibly rare; 貝葉 is the palm-leaf that scriptures were written on before paper.
On a few stalks of purple bamboo the parrots rest; in several clumps of green pine the partridges clamor.
Purple bamboo and green pine, parrots and partridges — the furniture of Potalaka, arriving with the water. 數 in 數簇 is shù, several clumps.
Ten thousand folds of billows spread lotuses to the four fields; one hears only the wind's roar and water flooding the sky.
And it closes on sound rather than sight: wind roaring, water everywhere. 蓮四野 is lotuses spread to all four horizons.
The rhapsody renders the poured sea in two movements. First the sheer force of water — flooding the peaks like an ocean, bursting the cliffs, black mist to heaven, cold light on dark waves. Then, as the Bodhisattva unfolds her demon-subduing art, a transformation: the flooded mountain becomes an image of Potalaka itself, with udumbara blooms, palm-leaf fronds, purple bamboo and golden lotuses spreading to the four horizons. The poem performs the chapter's central idea in miniature — the same power that floods can make a paradise, and the sea Guanyin pours out is not chaos but her own Southern Sea reproduced on the demon's mountain. The uneven line-lengths, four and four at the opening and five and five among the regular sevens, give the verse the surging motion of the water it describes.
The transformation has a sly point to it. Guanyin does not merely flood the demon's mountain; she reproduces her own island on top of it, so that the ground he has ruled becomes a copy of the place he counterfeited a Bodhisattva from. He faked the Southern Sea's mistress to catch Eight Rules, and now the Southern Sea itself arrives and settles over his home. The setting for his capture is the very thing he pretended to be.