保神養氣 A Poem on Spirit and Breath
有詩為證。詩曰：有诗为证。诗曰：
逐句解 Line by line
There is a poem in witness of it. The poem says:
有詩為證 -- there is a poem in witness of it -- is the standard announcement that the story is about to stop and comment on itself, and 為 takes wéi in it, as it does throughout this corpus. The four couplets that follow are set as verse in the source.
To guard the spirit and nourish the breath — this is what is called the essence; disposition and nature were from the first one single endowment with form.
The poem is written in the language of inner alchemy, the Daoist discipline that treats the body as a laboratory. 精, 氣 and 神 -- essence, breath and spirit -- are its Three Treasures, and the couplet states the doctrine that they are not three separate substances but one endowment, 稟, taking bodily shape. Think of it as the difference between three ingredients and one recipe.
When the heart is disordered and the spirit darkened, the hundred ailments arise; when the form withers and the essence fails, the prime of the Way topples.
Both lines run cause and then consequence, and they are built to match exactly: 心亂神昏 against 形衰精敗, 諸病作 against 道元傾. 道元, the prime or origin of the Way, is the alchemists' term rather than the philosophers'.
If the Three Flowers do not come together, the toil is spent for nothing; if the Four Great are left desolate, the striving is wasted.
三花 is short for the Three Flowers gathering at the crown of the head, the stage of the work at which essence, breath and spirit are refined into one. 四大 is the Buddhist four great elements. The couplet puts a Daoist term and a Buddhist one in the same matching position, which is exactly what this novel's verse likes to do.
Earth and Wood achieve nothing, Metal and Water are cut off — with sloth like this, when will the dharma-body ever be brought to completion!
The last line names four of the Five Phases and pointedly leaves out Fire: 土木無功金水絕 -- Earth and Wood achieve nothing, Metal and Water are cut off. The novel's standing scheme assigns the phases to the travellers: Metal to Wukong, Wood to Bajie, Earth to Sha Monk, Water to the dragon-horse. Read that way the line is naming the company itself. The reading is invited by the scheme rather than stated by the text. 法身 is the dharmakāya, the body of truth a buddha is said to be.
The poem does not describe the scene it interrupts. Nobody in it is hungry or thirsty. It is a compact statement of inner-alchemy doctrine, moving from the unity of essence, breath and spirit, through what happens when they fail, to the question of whether the work can be finished at all. This is how the novel's verse usually behaves at a crisis: it lifts clear of the story to supply the frame the story is an instance of.
The frame it supplies is a diagnosis. Every couplet is about a system coming apart -- the heart disordered, the body wasting, the Three Flowers failing to gather, the phases cut off from one another. Read against the road it sits beside, that is a description of the pilgrim band after the expulsion: not a group in danger from outside, but one whose internal arrangement has stopped working.
The last line makes the identification hard to dodge. 土木無功金水絕 names four of the Five Phases and leaves out Fire, and the four it names are exactly the four the novel assigns to Sha Monk, Bajie, Wukong and the dragon-horse. With Metal driven off, the rest have nothing left to complete. The reader is not told any of this -- the scheme has to be brought to the line rather than found in it -- but the poem is placed where the inference is very easy to make.