赤腳大仙 The Barefoot Great Immortal
逐句解 Line by line
A sky of auspicious haze, its light a-shimmer,
This piece rhymes on -e and pulls its opening line into the scheme too: 曳, 絕, 葉, 別, 滅, 節 — six of its ten lines, and a different music from the -i and -ei of the peach-garden rhapsody.
five-coloured clouds of blessing, flying without end.
五色祥雲, the five-coloured cloud of blessing: the standard conveyance for an immortal arriving in state. In this literature you can tell rank from the transport.
A white crane's cry rings out, rousing the deep marsh;
振九皋 reaches back to 《詩經·小雅·鶴鳴》 and its 鶴鳴于九皋, the crane's cry carrying out of the deep marsh — a byword for talent that makes itself heard from obscurity. 皋 is the bank or margin of a marsh.
purple lingzhi, exquisite, unfolds its thousand leaves.
紫芝, the purple lingzhi: the bracket fungus that Daoist lore made the plant of immortality, and still the standard emblem of long life.
In their midst appears an immortal of high station,
一尊: 尊 is a measure word for a figure of dignity — originally a ritual wine vessel, applied to a person. Chinese still counts statues and deities this way, so the word quietly puts him on a pedestal before the poem describes him.
his features wholly natural, his bearing set apart.
相貌 reads xiàng mào, features or countenance; 丰采 (fēng cǎi) is bearing — the impression a presence makes on a room.
His spirit dances on rainbows, flashing through the starry sky;
漢霄: 漢 is the Starry River, the Milky Way — the same word as in the 河漢群神, the gods of the Starry River, back in the chapter's opening list. 幌 is to flash or dazzle.
at his waist hangs a sacred register, beyond birth and death.
寶籙 (bǎo lù) is a sacred register: the Daoist talismanic document that certifies rank and confers command over spirits. Worn at the waist, it works as a badge of office — the licence and the credential in one, and proof that everything the poem has claimed for him was formally granted.
His name is the Barefoot Great Luo Immortal,
大羅仙 is an immortal of the 大羅天, the highest of the Daoist heavens; 赤腳大仙 is his name, the Barefoot Immortal.
come expressly to the Peach Feast that lengthens life.
添壽節: the feast that lengthens life. Ten lines of praise, and the last word of them is that he is on his way to precisely the gathering the Great Sage has just discovered he was not asked to.
The praise-poem that introduces the Barefoot Immortal is built entirely out of emblems of genuine attainment — the white crane (白鶴), the purple lingzhi (紫芝), the sacred register that is beyond birth and death (寶籙無生滅). He is the real thing: a being who has earned the deathlessness the mind-monkey means to steal. And the placement is pointed. Exactly as Monkey sets out to gatecrash the feast, the narrative parades past him a true immortal holding every credential he lacks.
無生滅, without birth or death, is the goal of the whole alchemical enterprise — the state beyond the turning of 生滅 that the long ripening of the peaches was meant to confer. The Barefoot Immortal wears it at his waist like a warrant card. The mind-monkey will shortly try to take the same thing out of a wine cup and a gourd of pills. That is the contrast the chapter is drawing all through: immortality worn, against immortality snatched.