人有二心 A Poem In Witness
看那兩個行者飛雲奔霧，打上西天。有詩為證。詩曰：看那两个行者飞云奔雾，打上西天。有诗为证。诗曰：
逐句解 Line by line
Look at those two Pilgrims, flying the clouds and racing the mists, fighting their way up to the Western Heaven.
奔 is bēn here — running flat out, matching 飛雲 and heading nowhere in particular — as against the bèn of 投奔 and 直奔, which take a destination. Both readings stand in this chapter.
There is a poem in witness of it. The poem says:
為證 takes wéi as a fixed pair. The tag announces what is coming and runs straight into it.
When a man has two minds, calamity is bred; / to the sky's edge and the sea's corner, suspicion comes.
The poem opens by stating the chapter's title as a general law about people. 生禍災 — it breeds calamity — treats the doubling as a moral condition rather than an accident that befell somebody.
He covets the precious horse and the rank of the Three Dukes; / he yearns again for the Golden Bells and the terrace of the first grade.
一品 keeps its full yī: the first of the nine imperial ranks is an ordinal, and the tone does not shift — proposed. 金鑾 is the Hall of Golden Bells, where the emperor gave audience.
Campaigning south and punishing north, without rest or ceasing; / warding east and clearing west, and never yet settled.
南征北討 and 東擋西除 are two four-character military formulas set against each other — the restless mind rendered as a campaign that never ends. Both are still live idioms.
At the gate of Chan one must study the art of no-mind; / in stillness nourish the Infant, and knit the holy embryo.
嬰兒 takes ér, a word standing on its own feet. The Infant and the holy embryo, 聖胎, are terms from inner alchemy, and the novel uses them throughout for the spirit under cultivation.
The poem is the chapter's only piece of direct moral commentary, and it reads the whole plot as an allegory: the two Pilgrims are not two beings but one mind divided against itself. 人有二心生禍災 makes the claim flatly in the opening line, and everything after it follows from that reading rather than from the story.
The second couplet is the surprising one. It gives the divided mind a specific content — coveting office, the rank of the Three Dukes, the first-grade terrace in the Hall of Golden Bells — which has nothing whatever to do with anything in the story. No character in this chapter wants a court appointment. The poem is reaching past the episode to the general condition it stands for, and the ambition it names is worldly promotion.
The closing couplet supplies the cure in the vocabulary of inner alchemy: 無心訣, the art of no-mind, and 聖胎, the holy embryo nourished in stillness. This is the register the novel keeps for its deepest claims about itself, and it plants the two-minds problem squarely inside a frame of self-cultivation. The fight will be settled by the Buddha; the poem says it should never have been started.