飛砂蔽日 The Sand Blots Out the Sun
行者聽說「宰殺」二字，扢蹬蹬腮邊火發，按不住心頭之怒，丟了架子，掄著拳，斜行抅步，望妖魔使個掛面；那怪展長槍，劈手相迎。行者左跳右跳，哄那妖魔；妖魔不知是計，趕離洞口南來。行者即招呼羅漢把金丹砂望妖魔一齊拋下。好砂！正是那：行者听说「宰杀」二字，扢蹬蹬腮边火发，按不住心头之怒，丢了架子，抡着拳，斜行抅步，望妖魔使个挂面；那怪展长枪，劈手相迎。行者左跳右跳，哄那妖魔；妖魔不知是计，赶离洞口南来。行者即招呼罗汉把金丹砂望妖魔一齐抛下。好砂！正是那：
逐句解 Line by line
When Pilgrim heard the two words "be butchered," the fire flared up along his cheeks with a crackling; he could not hold down the anger in his heart, dropped his guard, whirled his fists, went in aslant with hooking steps and drove a blow clean across the fiend's face — and the monster spread his long spear and met him hand to hand.
The two halves are joined at the semicolon. 扢蹬蹬: 蹬 is dēng in both, imitating the crackle of the flare-up. 丟了架子: 了 is le, and 子 is the bare ending zi; 掄著: 著 is zhe; 長槍: 長 is cháng; 相迎: 相 is xiāng. 抅步 and 掛面 both come out of the boxing manuals: a hooking step that takes you in on the slant, and a blow driven across the opponent's face. So the narrator has dropped the military vocabulary for the vocabulary of the fighting hall — and Pilgrim has dropped his weapon-stance along with it, because he has no weapon left to hold.
Pilgrim jumped left and jumped right, drawing the fiend on; and the fiend, not knowing it was a stratagem, chased him away from the cave mouth and southward.
Joined at the semicolon. 那妖魔 points, so 那 is nà. 哄 here is "to lure, to draw on" — the manoeuvre the Tathāgata prescribed, executed exactly as instructed.
Pilgrim at once called to the arhats to fling the golden cinnabar sand down on the fiend all together.
一齊: 一 shifts to yì before a second tone. Two passages of careful planning are carried out in a single sentence.
Fine sand it was! Just this:
The bare exclamation 好砂！ carries its own end-stop and joins forward to the verse tag 正是那： on the same line of the source, following the joining rule established at Chapter 51. 那 in the tag is the pointing nà.
Like mist, like smoke, at first it spreads and scatters; / thick and dim it settles down to the sky's edge.
散漫: 散 is sǎn, the adjective, "loose, diffuse", not the verb sàn, to scatter; 似 is sì, the reading used throughout this edition. The rhapsody runs on the 麻 rhyme all the way down: 涯 差 家 麻 遮 車 拿 華 花.
A blank white haze — everywhere it blinds men's eyes;
到處: 處 is chù. The three-syllable openings 白茫茫 and 昏漠漠 break the seven-syllable run, and that irregularity is what marks this as a 賦, a rhapsody, rather than a regular poem.
a dull grey murk — flying through it, one loses the road.
找路差: 差 is chà, to go wrong or go amiss — against the chāi of dispatching an officer that the chapter used a few passages back.
The woodcutter cutting fuel has lost his fellow; / the herb-gathering boy of the immortals cannot find his home.
樵子 takes the bare ending zi; 失了: 了 is le. The couplet is a standard move in dust-storm verse, and it does something for the plot as well: the sand is indiscriminate, and it is falling on a landscape with people in it.
Fine, it drifts as light as wheat flour; / coarse, it tumbles over like sesame seed.
似芝麻: 似 is sì. Both comparisons come out of the kitchen — wheat flour and sesame seed — which plants this celestial weapon squarely in a Ming household.
The world is dimmed and the mountain tops go dark; / the long sky is drowned and the sun shut out.
長空: 長 is cháng. 迷沒: 沒 is mò, to sink or be submerged — the only place in the chapter this character takes that reading; the other three are the méi of 沒奈何 and 沒有別人.
It is not the clamorous dust that trails a fine horse; / it cannot be called the soft light stuff that lines a scented carriage.
難言: 難 is nán. Two couplets of pure denial: the poem takes some trouble to say what this sand is not — not the dust behind a fine horse, not the soft padding of a lady's carriage — before it commits to saying what it is.
This sand is by its own nature a thing without feeling; / it blankets earth and curtains heaven, and takes the monster.
And here is what it is. 無情物 is "a thing without feeling", which in Buddhist usage means the non-sentient — that which has no mind and cannot will anything. The couplet is the hinge of the whole rhapsody, and the reason arhats are permitted to use this weapon at all.
Only because the fiend encroaches on the true Way / do the arhats, upholding the Law, put forth this splendour.
只為: 為 is wèi, marking purpose; 豪華: 華 is huá. 阿羅 is short for 阿羅漢, arhat. The line supplies the justification a Buddhist weapon needs: the violence answers an encroachment, it does not begin one.
In their hands the bright pearls show at once; / in a moment it scours till the eyes swim with flowers.
手中: 中 is zhōng; 刮得: 得 is de. 眼生花 — "flowers before the eyes" — is the standard idiom for being dazzled, and it is still what Chinese says when someone is seeing stars.
The rhapsody is the third and last set-piece of the chapter, and the only one whose subject is an object. It runs on a single 麻 rhyme and spends ten lines making the sand enormous: mist and smoke, a white blindness, a woodcutter who has lost his companion, an immortal's herb-boy who cannot find his way home, flour and sesame, the mountains going dark, the sun buried. Two of the couplets are denials — this is not road dust behind a fine horse, not the soft stuff lining a scented carriage — as though the poem were warding off the ordinary comparisons before committing to its own.
The line that matters is 此砂本是無情物: this sand is by its nature a thing without feeling. In Buddhist usage the 無情 is the non-sentient, what has no mind and cannot will — and that is precisely the justification for putting it in the hands of arhats, who may not kill. The weapon does the blinding; nobody intends it. It is also, as the reader by now suspects, exactly why it will be useless. The ring takes objects, and the Tathāgata has just sent eighteen grains of the most impressive object in the chapter.