女王慚愧 The Queen’s Shame
慌得那西梁國君臣女輩，跪在塵埃，都道：「是白日飛昇的羅漢，我主不必驚疑。唐御弟也是個有道的禪僧，我們都有眼無珠，錯認了中華男子，枉費了這場神思。請主公上輦回朝也。」女王自覺慚愧，多官都一齊回國不題。慌得那西梁国君臣女辈，跪在尘埃，都道：「是白日飞升的罗汉，我主不必惊疑。唐御弟也是个有道的禅僧，我们都有眼无珠，错认了中华男子，枉费了这场神思。请主公上辇回朝也。」女王自觉惭愧，多官都一齐回国不题。
逐句解 Line by line
So alarmed were the sovereign and the women officials of the Kingdom of Western Liang that they knelt down in the dust, saying together, “These are arhats ascending in the light of day. Our sovereign need feel no alarm or misgiving.
白日飛昇 — "ascending in broad daylight" — is a Daoist term for an adept who rises bodily into heaven without having to die first. The court applies it to a party of Buddhist monks, which is a category error, but a reverent one; they are reaching for the only vocabulary they have. 慌得 uses 得 as the linking particle de, "so alarmed that…", against the attainment dé of 聞得 in the passage above.
“The Tang emperor’s sworn brother too is a monk of Chan possessed of the Way. We had eyes but no pupils in them: we mistook him for an ordinary man of the Middle Flowery Land, and squandered all this contriving for nothing.
有眼無珠 — "eyes but no pupils in them" — is still what Chinese reaches for when someone has failed to recognise what was right in front of them, and it is exactly the right idiom for a court that tried to marry a saint. 中華 reads zhōng huá. 男子 takes 子 as the full syllable zǐ, not the light zi. 枉 is always wǎng, "in vain" — a character worth remembering, because the poem over the scorpion's body at the end of the chapter turns on it.
“Let our sovereign mount her palanquin and return to court.”
朝 is cháo, the court, not the zhāo that means morning. A 輦 is the hand-drawn carriage reserved to a ruler — not a sedan chair anyone could hire.
The queen felt shame in herself, and her many officers went back together to the capital — of which we say no more.
自覺 takes 覺 as jué, awareness, not the jiào of sleep. 不題 — "we do not raise it" — is the storyteller dropping a thread, not a statement about anybody in the story. It is the equivalent of "but never mind them for now", and this chapter uses it three times to put one half of the plot to sleep while the other runs.
The Women's Kingdom gets four lines and then vanishes from the book. Its court watches three men fly away and reads the sight as 白日飛昇, ascension in broad daylight — a Daoist idea about rising bodily into heaven, applied here to Buddhist monks. Theologically it is a muddle. The novel lets it stand without a word of correction, because the women have no vocabulary for what they have just seen except the one their own world supplies, and the mistake is treated as piety rather than error.
Their self-reproach turns on 有眼無珠, to have eyes with no pupils in them, and on 錯認了中華男子 — they took a holy man for an ordinary fellow from China. The phrasing is generous to them. It quietly converts what was, one chapter ago, a state attempt to detain a traveller into a simple failure of recognition, which lets the marriage plot close without anyone having to be blamed.
The queen's 慚愧, her shame, is the last we ever hear of her. That the novel gives her embarrassment rather than anger, spends four characters on it, and then sweeps the entire court offstage with 不題, is a fair measure of how little interest it has in her once the ordeal she represented is finished. The thread is cut clean so the scorpion's can start.