水火相聯 Water And Fire Joined
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:
The two announcing formulas stand in sequence again, as they did before the quatrain earlier. What follows is the chapter's last verse and its only regulated eight-line poem. 為 takes the reading this edition rules for the pair, wéi.
The Mountain of Flames stretches eight hundred stages far; fire lights the great earth, and its name is known.
Four half-lines in a row open on 火, and reading them together settles this one. Seven-character verse breaks four-and-three, which gives 火焰山遙 | 八百程, 火光大地 | 有聲名, 火煎五漏 | 丹難熟, 火燎三關 | 道不清. The last two are plainly fire, then a verb, then a two-character object — fire boils the five leaks, fire scorches the three passes — and 火光大地 is built the same way. 光 is a verb here, to shine upon: the dictionaries gloss it 照耀 and cite 書·洛誥 惟公德明光于上下, and it also stands for 廣, to spread over, at 光被四表. So the fire lights the wide earth; 大地 is what it falls on, not a second thing that has a name. The English at this line has been corrected accordingly. 程 is a stage of a journey, so 八百程 measures the mountain by how long it takes to pass rather than by distance. The line rhymes with 名, 清 and 平 in the 庚 group; the poem's other rhyming position, 功 in the sixth line, falls outside it.
Fire boils the five leaks and the elixir will not ripen; fire scorches the three passes and the Way is not clear.
The doctrinal centre, and it is scrupulously even-handed: one line to each tradition. 五漏 renders the āsravas, the outflows by which an unenlightened mind leaks away, and 三關 are the three passes of the spine in inner alchemy. The same fire is said to obstruct both. 難 is nán.
Now the banana-leaf is borrowed to send down rain and dew; and by good fortune the generals of heaven have helped the divine work.
天將 takes 將 at jiàng, a general, and not the jiāng of "take, by means of" that this character carries at the great majority of its sites in this chapter. The reading for a general hides inside that frequency, which is how three earlier sites came to be set wrong and had to be repaired. 幸蒙 is the polite formula for help received from above, and the line concedes that the work was not done alone.
The ox is led back to the Buddha and its wildness is done; water and fire joined, the nature settles of itself.
牽牛歸佛 reads the literal action of the previous passage as an allegory: the ox is the untamed nature and the nose-rope is discipline. 水火相聯 completes the figure the alchemical poem began at 用芭蕉，為水意，焰火消除成既濟 — water set over fire is the hexagram of completion. 相 is xiāng.
The chapter's last verse is its only regulated eight-line poem, and it summarises rather than describes. Where the showcases were inside the fighting, this one stands at the end and reads the whole episode as a completed operation.
火煎五漏丹難熟，火燎三關道不清 is the doctrinal centre and it is scrupulously even-handed: the five leaks are the outflows of Buddhist psychology and the three passes are the spinal barriers of Daoist inner alchemy, and the same fire is said to obstruct both. One line each, and no attempt to rank them.
水火相聯性自平 closes the figure the alchemical poem opened ten passages earlier at 用芭蕉，為水意，焰火消除成既濟. Water set above fire is hexagram sixty-three, After Completion; the fan was named as the water trigram then, and the poem now reports the diagram as made.
One technical point the edition earns. Of the poem's five rhyming positions, four sit in the 庚 group — 程, 名, 清, 平 — and 功 in the sixth line does not. It is recorded rather than quietly emended.