心地頻掃 Sweeping the Mind-Ground
詞曰：词曰：
逐句解 Line by line
A lyric says:
Most chapters open with a four-line poem. This one opens with a 詞, a song-lyric written to fit an existing tune, which is a slower and more reflective form. Only a handful of chapters in the novel begin this way, and the switch is a signal: what starts here is a new arc, not the next stage of the last one.
Sweep the mind-ground often; clear the dust of feeling away, fine grain by fine grain.
The lyric opens with housework. 心地, the mind-ground, is a Chan term for the mind as soil that practice is grown in; 塵情 is the dust of worldly feeling that settles on it. Sweeping and dusting sound like small domestic virtues until you notice that this chapter turns them literal: the ground gets swept, and Wukong draws a ring on it.
Let neither pit nor moat entrap Vairocana.
毘盧 is short for Vairocana, the cosmic Buddha of the Huayan school, standing here for the Buddha-nature that any person carries. 坑塹, pit and moat, are the traps desire digs. Even the cosmic Buddha, the lyric says, can fall down a hole.
Only while the original substance stays clear and still may one speak of the primal beginning.
本體 is the original substance of one's nature; 元初 the primal beginning, before anything had divided into things. This is Daoist inner-alchemy vocabulary laid over a Buddhist opening. The mixing is normal in this novel and not a slip — the author reaches for whichever tradition has the better phrase.
The candle of the nature must have its wick trimmed; let the Caoxi water be drawn in and breathed out at will.
性燭, the candle of one's nature, has to have its wick trimmed or it burns smoky. 曹溪 is the stream at Huineng's monastery and stands for the whole Chan lineage; putting it with 吸呼 turns a river into breathing practice. 挑 is tiǎo here, to lift or trim a wick, not tiāo, to carry on a pole.
Never let the ape and the horse draw a coarse breath.
猿馬, the ape and the horse, is a stock phrase for a mind that will not settle and a will that bolts. In this novel it also names two members of the travelling party outright: Wukong and the white horse. The lyric warns against exactly the agitation the chapter is about to stage.
Day and night let the breathing run unbroken — then, and only then, does the work show.
綿綿, unbroken like a drawn silk thread, echoes chapter 6 of the Laozi. 功夫 here means sustained effort at a practice — the older sense, before the word came to mean fighting skill in English.
The lyric works as a programme note. Sweeping, the trap, the trimmed wick, the ape and the horse are each cashed out in the narrative that follows, in that order.
Its argument is that lapses come from inside, which is what the chapter title says too: 情亂性從因愛慾 — the feelings run wild and the nature follows after them, out of love and desire.
This is the start of the 金兜山 arc, which runs on to the end of Ch.52.