靈臺無物 A Poem on the Numinous Terrace
詩曰：诗曰：
逐句解 Line by line
A poem says:
Almost every chapter of this novel opens with the storyteller clearing his throat — 話說, the story tells, or 卻說, now then. Chapter fifty-six skips the throat-clearing and opens on a poem. 詩曰, a poem says, is the standard way to announce one. The placement matters: the doctrine is laid out before a single thing has happened, so the reader knows the standard in advance and can watch everybody fall short of it.
When the Numinous Terrace holds nothing, that is what is called clarity; in stillness upon stillness, not one thought is born.
The 靈臺, the Numinous Terrace, is an old name for the mind, and anyone who started at chapter one has met it before — Wukong found his first teacher on 靈臺方寸山, the Mountain of the Numinous Terrace and the Square Inch. Catch what 謂之清 is doing: it defines rather than describes. Emptiness is not the road to clarity. Emptiness is what clarity means.
Pen the ape and the horse fast, and let them not run loose; hold spirit and vigour circumspect, and let them not rear up.
This is the line the chapter is named after. 猿馬 is short for 心猿意馬, the mind-ape and the will-horse, the novel's governing picture of a runaway inner life — and still the ordinary Chinese for an attention that will not sit still. Half of it, 心猿, stands in the chapter heading. 崢嶸 belongs to towering mountain peaks; hung on 精神, spirit and vigour, it means to rear up where you have no business rearing.
Cast out the Six Thieves, awaken to the Three Vehicles; let the ten thousand ties all cease, and clarity comes of itself.
Both halves of this line are promises the chapter keeps in the flesh. The 六賊, the Six Thieves, are the six senses that rob the mind of its quiet — and the novel has already staged them once as six actual bandits, cut down in chapter fourteen. They are about to walk back on as two robber chiefs. 三乘 is the Buddhist triyāna, the three vehicles, which settles 乘 as shèng, a vehicle, and not chéng, to ride.
When lust and heresy are quenched for ever, one crosses beyond into the realm of the real, to sit at ease in the Western City of Utmost Bliss.
極樂 is Sukhāvatī, the Pure Land of Amitābha — the Utmost Bliss — and because it names joy rather than music, 樂 is lè. 色邪永滅, lust and heresy quenched for ever, settles the account of the chapter before: the Scorpion Spirit who set on Tripitaka in the Cave of the Lute was 色邪 in person, and she is dead.
The chapter opens on doctrine instead of story, and the poem is load-bearing. It names, in advance, the two things the chapter will then act out. 猿馬牢收, pen the ape and the horse fast, is the instruction; the chapter title's 放心猿, the mind-monkey set loose, is the failure to follow it. 除六賊, cast out the Six Thieves, is the prescription; the two robber chiefs Wukong is about to kill are those same Six Thieves come round again with faces on.
The first couplet is a definition, not a pep talk. 靈臺無物謂之清 says that clarity is not something an empty mind achieves but the name for its being empty, and 寂寂全無一念生 pushes it to the limit: not thoughts quieted down, but not one thought arising. That is a stricter standard than fifty-five chapters of pilgrimage have ever met, and setting it in the opening lines guarantees that what follows will fall short.
The turn to 色邪永滅 in the last couplet looks backward, not forward. The Scorpion Spirit is dead and the Cave of the Lute is behind them, so the danger the poem declares extinguished really has been extinguished. The reader is invited to think the problem solved — which is the setup, because the violence that destroys Wukong in this chapter has nothing to do with 色 at all.