菩薩削篾 Guanyin at Her Weaving
行者久等不見，心焦道：「列位與我傳報一聲，但遲了，恐傷吾師之命。」諸天道：「不敢報，菩薩吩咐，只等他自出來哩。」行者性急，那裡等得，急縱身往裡便走。噫！行者久等不见，心焦道：「列位与我传报一声，但迟了，恐伤吾师之命。」诸天道：「不敢报，菩萨吩咐，只等他自出来哩。」行者性急，那里等得，急纵身往里便走。噫！
逐句解 Line by line
Pilgrim waited a long while and still she did not appear. Growing anxious, he said: "Sirs, take word in for me — if it is delayed, I fear for my master's life."
心焦, anxious; 遲了 takes 了 as the tag le. His impatience is the engine of the whole scene — it is what drives him past the attendants and into the grove uninvited.
The Devas said: "We dare not report you. The Bodhisattva's charge was only to wait until she comes out of herself."
哩, the spoken tag, li. The attendants' refusal is the obstacle, and Wukong does with it what he does with every obstacle.
Pilgrim was hasty by nature; how could he wait there? He sprang up in a bound and went straight in.
那裡等得: 那裡 asks, 那 nǎ, but asks rhetorically — "how was he going to wait?", which is a no dressed as a question. 得 dé. The rashness is essential to him, and the poem will make it the very first thing it says.
Ah!
噫 (yī) is the spoken cry of astonishment, standing here as a whole sentence by itself. It is also the cue: ten couplets follow, describing the Bodhisattva exactly as Wukong bursts in on her.
This Handsome Monkey King, hasty of temper and flighty with it;
鵲薄 is a colloquial pairing for flighty, rash, quick off the mark, with 薄 in its everyday sense of thin or slight, báo. Note where the portrait begins. Not with Guanyin at all, but with the rashness that has dragged the reader into the grove.
the Devas could not hold him, as he made to stride within.
蹕 (bì) properly means clearing the road ahead of a royal progress — outriders shooing people off the street so the emperor can pass. Applied to Wukong shouldering through a bamboo thicket it is comic, and the comedy is the point.
Dragging his steps into the deep grove, he opened his eyes and stole a look:
拽步: 拽 is zhuài, to drag or to stride, and the commoner zhuāi is a trap with this character. 偷覷著: 覷 qù, to peer; 著 zhe.
from afar he beheld the Reliever of Suffering, seated cross-legged on a worn rush mat.
遠觀: 觀 guān. 救苦尊, the Reliever of Suffering, is one of Guanyin's standing epithets. 殘箬: 箬 (ruò) is the broad leaf of a bamboo, and here it is the worn mat she is sitting on — which is to say, she is on the ground, and not on the lotus throne.
Idle and loose, she had shrunk from dressing her hair; her face and features were soft and lovely still.
懶散: 散 sǎn, the adjective, loose and idle. 綽約: 綽 chuò — an old pairing for supple, graceful beauty. The couplet registers the astonishing informality: she has not done her hair.
Her hair was gathered loosely in a single coil, not yet bound up with its tasselled net;
散挽: 散 sǎn again. 纓絡 is written for 瓔珞, the jewelled net that would normally bind and crown the hair in every image of her. Its absence is the whole line.
she wore no plain blue robe, but a small close-fitting jacket bound to the body;
素藍袍 is the plain blue robe of her standard iconography; 小襖 is a short everyday jacket, the sort anyone would wear about the house. The poem is stripping her, item by item, of the entire wardrobe her paintings are made of.
a brocade skirt loosely sashed at the waist, and a pair of feet left bare.
赤了一雙腳: 赤 is "bare," and 了 is the tag le. Bare feet on a bodhisattva are startling — in the images she is always shod, always composed. This is the mark of someone caught in the middle of a job.
No embroidered stole across her shoulders; her two arms bright and bare.
臂膊: 膊 bó, the upper arm. 精光, bare as bare. The list of what she is not wearing has now run nine couplets; the tenth will finally say what she is doing.
In her jade hand she held a steel knife, and was paring strips of bamboo skin.
And there it is. 削 is paring or whittling — shaving thin strips off with a blade; 竹皮 is the hard green outer skin of the bamboo, which is exactly what a basket-weaver strips and splits. Ten couplets have withheld this: the Bodhisattva of Mercy, undressed and barefoot on a worn mat, whittling bamboo with a steel knife.
This is the centre of the chapter and one of the most quietly astonishing images in the novel. Guanyin is shown stripped of every attribute her paintings are built from — no blue robe, no jewelled chaplet, no embroidered stole, hair uncoiled, arms bare, feet bare — sitting not on the lotus throne but on a worn rush mat, paring bamboo with a steel knife. The poem is constructed as a sustained withholding: nine couplets say what she is not wearing and where she is not sitting, and only the tenth shows the knife and the bamboo. Arriving with Wukong, the reader is made to see her exactly as he does, unprepared and at manual work.
The informality has a point to make. She has laid aside every mark of her office in order to weave, with her own hands, the humble thing — a bamboo basket — that will accomplish what every weapon in the chapter could not.
And the poem frames all this with a joke in its very first couplet. It opens not on Guanyin's serenity but on Wukong's rashness, 性急能鵲薄, and describes his headlong entrance with the word 蹕 — the clearing of the road ahead of a royal procession. He comes crashing through the bamboo like an emperor's outriders, and finds a goddess doing chores. The power of the scene is in that collision, supreme compassion and homely labour, and the novel trusts the picture to carry it without one word of explanation.