心狂道難 The Mind-Monkey Set Loose
咦！這正是：咦！这正是：
逐句解 Line by line
Ah! This was indeed a case of:
咦 is a bare noise carrying its own exclamation mark — a storyteller clicking his tongue. 這正是 is the seventh and last of the chapter's handover formulae, and the only one that introduces a moral rather than a description. The 世德堂本 indents the line that follows as verse.
While the heart holds ferocity and madness, the cinnabar will not ripen; while the spirit has no fixed place, the Way cannot be achieved.
丹 is the inner cinnabar of internal alchemy — the elixir an adept refines inside his own body, which has to be brought to maturity like something on a slow fire, and which will not ripen if the fire is wrong. 神無定位 is the spirit with no fixed station. 難成 gives 難 as nán. The couplet reads the whole chapter as an alchemical failure rather than a moral one.
The closing couplet returns to the register of the opening poem and answers it point for point. 靈臺無物謂之清 asked for a mind holding nothing; 心有兇狂 reports a heart holding ferocity and madness. 猿馬牢收 asked that the ape be penned fast; 神無定位 reports the spirit unfixed. The chapter is framed at both ends by the same doctrine, and the frame is a verdict.
What is striking is where the verdict falls. 丹不熟 and 道難成 are statements about the adept's own progress, not about the two robbers, the household, or the boy whose head went into the ditch. Read strictly, the couplet says the killings matter because they have spoiled the elixir — that a moral catastrophe registers chiefly as a technical setback on the road west. The novel has spent the whole chapter making that reading feel insufficient, and then closes on it anyway.
The 咦 is worth its one character. It is a storyteller's noise, a small sound of dismay or recognition made out loud, and it stands between the disappearance of the Great Sage and the moral that explains him away. Whatever else the couplet does, it does not do the work of that syllable.