西江月 The Opening Lyric: The West River Moon
逐句解 Line by line
Virtue and conduct ask eight hundred cultivated; hidden merit must be heaped to three thousand.
Before anything happens, the chapter posts a price. Daoist tradition sets a quota an aspirant has to clear before he can hope to transcend: 八百 good acts, and 三千 items of 陰功 — merit earned where nobody is watching, and therefore not spoiled by the credit. Both 要 and 須 mean must rather than should. This is a bill, not advice.
Level alike the thing and the self, the kinsman and the foe.
均平 means to level, and it levels two pairs at once: 物我, the world outside against the self, and 親冤, the people one loves against the people one hates. That is Buddhist even-mindedness dropped into a Daoist ledger of merit — this novel mixes its religions constantly, and here it does it inside seven characters.
Only then does one meet the original vow of the Western Heaven.
始 carries its full weight: only then, not a moment sooner. 本願 renders the Sanskrit pūrvapraṇidhāna, the founding vow a buddha makes before enlightenment and then spends ages making good on. Here it stands for the pilgrimage itself. The journey west is somebody's old promise being kept.
The demon rhinoceros flinched at neither blade nor spear; water and fire toiled for nothing, yet were blameless.
魔兕 is the 獨角兕大王 who has just cost the pilgrims three chapters — the rhinoceros demon whose white ring swallowed every weapon sent against him. 空勞…無愆 is a verdict of acquittal: Heaven's fire and water divisions laboured to no effect, and no blame attaches to them, because the ring defeated weapons as a class. You cannot fault a soldier for losing to a thing that eats soldiers.
Lord Lao subdued him and turned back to court in Heaven,
老君 is 太上老君, Laozi in his god-form. 降 is xiáng here, to subdue — 降伏 always takes that reading — and not jiàng, to come down. 朝天 is cháo, to present oneself at court: he collects his animal and goes back to work.
laughing, he led the green ox turning away.
牽轉 is simply to lead a thing round — the ox is walked home on a halter. That is the point of the line. Three chapters of ruin for the pilgrims; for the animal's owner, a laugh and a tug on a rope.
Almost every chapter of this novel opens with 話說, now it is told, and the storyteller's voice. This one does not. It sets an eight-line lyric in front of the narrator, in the tune-pattern called 西江月, the West River Moon, so that the reader is handed a verdict on the last three chapters before meeting a single new event. The pattern is strict and the poet keeps to it: six syllables, six, seven, six — then the same four lines over again.
The two halves do quite different jobs. The first is a rulebook. It names a quota — eight hundred good acts, three thousand unseen ones — and then, in its third line, quietly wrecks its own arithmetic by demanding an even-mindedness that would make counting pointless. To level 物我 and 親冤 is to give up exactly the habit of telling things apart that keeps ledgers in the first place. The stanza states a target and, in the same breath, the frame of mind in which the target stops mattering.
The second half tells the story instead, packing the whole 金兜山 episode into four lines. Its centre is 空勞…無愆: they laboured for nothing, and no fault attaches. That is a careful judgement and a generous one. This novel allows for failures nobody is to blame for — the ring beat weapons as such, so no weapon-carrier disgraced himself. What finally beat the ring was not a better weapon but a property claim. The thing had an owner, and the owner came and fetched it.
The closing picture is deliberately flat. Lord Lao laughs, takes the halter, and walks the ox away. Set against three chapters of wreckage the gesture is almost insulting in its ease, and the lyric means it to be: from a great enough height, the pilgrims' disasters are a domestic mishap in somebody else's household.