Canonical Classics ← 第五十八回
第五十八回
èrxīnjiǎoluànqiánkūn
nánxiūzhēnmiè

Two Minds Throw the Great Cosmos into Confusion · One Body Cannot Cultivate the True Nirvana

更無名號
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拼音 Pinyin Off
字體 Script
原文 Original text 繁體 Traditional Reader's edition

更無名號 No Name To Be Found

yīnjūnwényánhuànguǎn簿pànguāncóngtóuchákāngèngjiǎxíngzhězhīmíngzàikànmáochóngwén簿hóuzibǎisānshítiáoshìsūnshèngyòuniándàozhīshínàoyīnxiāomínggōuzhīhòuláifánshìhóushǔjìnmínghàoyīnjūnwényánhuànguǎn簿pànguāncóngtóuchákāngèngjiǎxíngzhězhīmíngzàikànmáochóngwén簿hóuzibǎisānshítiáoshìsūnshèngyòuniándàozhīshínàoyīnxiāomínggōuzhīhòuláifánshìhóushǔjìnmínghào


逐句解 Line by line

yīnjūnwényánhuànguǎn簿pànguāncóngtóuchákāngèngjiǎxíngzhězhīmíng yīnjūnwényánhuànguǎn簿pànguāncóngtóuchákāngèngjiǎxíngzhězhīmíng

When the Lords of Darkness heard this, they at once summoned the Registrar Judge to check through from the beginning, one by one; and there was no name of a false Pilgrim at all.

一一, one by one, is a set phrase and both characters keep their full , with no tone shift. 查勘 takes chá. 更無 takes gèng, not one at all.

zàikànmáochóngwén簿hóuzibǎisānshítiáoshìsūnshèngyòuniándàozhīshínàoyīnxiāomínggōuzhī zàikànmáochóngwén簿hóuzibǎisānshítiáoshìsūnshèngyòuniándàozhīshínàoyīnxiāomínggōuzhī

They looked again in the register of hairy creatures. The monkey kinds numbered a hundred and thirty entries — but already, in the year when the Great Sage Sun gained the Way in his youth, he had made his uproar in the courts of the shades, struck out the names of the dead, and cancelled them with a stroke of the brush.

毛蟲文簿 is the register of hairy creatures, one of the five classes of the Buddha will run through later. 得道 takes . The reference is to chapter three, where Wukong broke into this very underworld as a young monkey and struck the monkey entries out with a brush.

hòuláifánshìhóushǔjìnmínghào hòuláifánshìhóushǔjìnmínghào

Ever after that, all who belong to the monkey kind have been without name or title.

is jìn by a project-wide ruling; 名號 takes hào. One sentence explains why the search was doomed before it started.


總評 Commentary

The registers fail, and they fail for a reason the reader has been carrying since chapter three: Wukong destroyed the relevant records himself. As a young monkey he broke into this underworld, found the monkey entries in the register of hairy creatures, and struck them all out with a brush. The document search cannot identify a monkey because there are no monkeys on file.

This is the most elegant of the chapter's failures. It is not a limit of perception like the Bodhisattva's, nor of instrumentation like the mirror's. It is a consequence of Wukong's own past behaviour arriving five hundred years late. The one method that could have told him apart was destroyed by him.

自後來凡是猴屬盡無名號 states the consequence as settled law. A whole species was made administratively invisible by one monkey with a brush, and the chapter reports it without comment, as a fact the underworld has simply learned to live with. Wukong asked for the registers knowing this, which is either a lapse or a measure of how few options he has left.