種性本來同 Natures Are One At Root
逐句解 Line by line
Natures, however many, were one at the root; the sea takes in what has no end.
The chapter opens on a poem rather than a story, and the first line states its case at once: however many kinds of nature there are, they began as one. 種性 zhǒng xìng is the Buddhist idea of gotra — the seed of temperament a being is born with, which decides what it can eventually become. 若干 ruò gān means "a certain number, however many"; 干 keeps its gān reading here, as it does everywhere in this chapter.
A thousand thoughts, ten thousand cares, come at the last to delusion; form upon form melts into one accord.
Now the opposite: thinking splits the one thing into thousands. 妄 wàng is the technical word for the deluded picture-making the mind does when it carves the world into separate pieces, and 和融 hé róng is its cure — difference melting back together. The two lines set restless thought against the undivided nature named a moment ago.
There shall come a day when the work is finished and the practice full, when the round-bright dharma-nature towers high.
A promise about the end of the road. 功完行滿 is the stock phrase for a course of self-cultivation carried through to completion — the work done, the practice full. 法性 fǎ xìng is dharmatā, the way things simply are; 圓明, "round and shining," is its usual description.
Suffer no discriminating mind to go running east and west — lock it fast, and cage it.
The one thing to guard against is the mind that divides. 差別 chā bié renders vikalpa, discriminating thought, and takes chā, not the chà of 差錯 ("a mistake"). Note that the poem writes 走西東 rather than the ordinary 東西 — the order is flipped for the rhyme.
Gather it in and settle it within the cinnabar furnace; refine it until it glows like the golden crow.
Halfway through, the poem switches idiom entirely and starts talking like an alchemist. 丹爐 is the cinnabar furnace, which in inner alchemy is not a piece of equipment but the adept's own body. 金烏 jīn wū is the three-legged crow that lives in the sun, standing here for the refined yang spirit. 得 is the light, toneless de that links a verb to how it turned out, not the dé of getting something.
Bright and blazing, lovely to look upon — then let it ride the dragon, going out and coming in.
And the finish: the refined thing set free. 乘龍 chéng lóng, "to ride the dragon," pictures a perfected spirit moving between one state and another as easily as a rider changes direction. 出入, "going out and coming in," is the standard alchemical phrase for that freedom of movement — not travel.
Most chapters open with the narrator clearing his throat. This one drops the reader straight into a poem — no 詩曰, no 有詩為證, not even the 話說 that normally starts the prose. You are set down inside a piece of doctrine and left to find the story afterwards, which makes the poem an argument rather than a decoration.
The argument runs out from unity and back to it. Natures are 本來同, one at the root; thinking shatters them into 千思萬慮, a thousand thoughts and ten thousand cares; the pieces are then to be gathered up, caged, and cooked down until they come together again as one bright thing. That is exactly the shape of the chapter just finished, in which a second Pilgrim had to be destroyed before the journey could go on — and the poem's word for the disease, 差別, discrimination, names the mind that splits one into two.
The vocabulary changes gear halfway through and the novel does not bother to hide the seam. The first three couplets are Buddhist: seed-nature, dharma-nature, the round and shining, delusion. The last three are Daoist laboratory talk: the cinnabar furnace, the golden crow, the refining fire, the ridden dragon. Two rival systems, spliced without apology, because both supply the same picture — something scattered gathered into a vessel and made single by heat.
Which is also a warning. The chapter ahead is ruled by fire that will not go out, and the poem has just spent six lines praising fire as the thing that perfects you. The Mountain of Flames is the same element with no furnace around it.