無刑無剋 Without Punishment Without Conquest
慇懃道：慇懃道：
逐句解 Line by line
and said in earnest:
慇懃 is yīn qín, earnest and pressing, and it is the storyteller's word for how Eight Rules speaks now that he has stopped arguing. What follows answers the Great Sage's five rhymed lines with five more, in the same alchemical vocabulary and on a new rhyme.
"Yes, yes, yes; go, go, go; never mind whether the Bull King can or cannot.
The tripled 是是是，去去去 is a burst of street speech that would be out of place in any other verse in this chapter, and it is exactly how Eight Rules would say yes. 甚 is the question word shén — 管甚 is "never mind what" — not the intensifying shèn. (不 rises to bú before the falling tone of 會.)
"Wood is born in hai and is matched to the hog; lead the ox back and return it to the kind of earth.
亥 is the twelfth earthly branch and the pig's, so this line assigns Eight Rules to the wood phase by the calendar itself. 為 is wéi, "is". 牛兒 takes the full ér, the ox being alive. The line answers the Great Sage's poem in its own terms: the ox is to be returned to earth, which is what the previous verse called using earth to bring the source together.
"Metal is born under shen and is properly the ape; where there is no punishment and no conquest there is much concord.
申 is the ninth branch and the monkey's, and metal is the Great Sage's phase, so this couplet completes the assignment the previous line began. 無刑無剋 cancels the conquest cycle the earlier poem named at 三家刑剋: where the phases do not overcome one another, they agree. Eight Rules is arguing for cooperation, in verse, in the middle of a battle.
"Use the banana-leaf, take it for the sense of water, and when the blazing fire is put out, After Completion is made.
既濟 is the sixty-third hexagram of the Changes, water standing above fire, and its name is usually given as After Completion. The fan is being read as the water trigram: set water over fire and the figure of completion forms. 為 is again wéi.
"Day and night do not part from it; toil to the end of effort, and when the work is done hasten to the Ullambana feast."
盡 is held at jìn throughout this edition, exhausted or to the utmost. 盂蘭會 is the Ullambana assembly of the seventh month, at which offerings release the dead from suffering — roughly the Chinese All Souls. Eight Rules ends on it where the Great Sage had ended on Maitreya's dragon-flower assembly. Each disciple closes his verse with a feast, and they choose different ones.
Eight Rules answers five rhymed lines with five of his own, on a new rhyme, in the same alchemical vocabulary. It is the most unexpected thing he does in the chapter. The disciple who two passages ago wanted to walk round the mountain and quoted a proverb about bean-curd boats turns out to be able to argue the Five Phases in verse.
The argument he makes is not the Great Sage's. Where the earlier poem spoke of 三家刑剋, the three houses in mutual conquest, this one says 無刑無剋多和氣 — no punishment, no conquest, and much concord. Both disciples assign themselves to their phases by the calendar, wood born under hài and metal under shēn; but Eight Rules wants the phases to agree rather than overcome each other, and he wants the ox led back rather than destroyed.
用芭蕉，為水意 is the practical centre. The fan is read as the water trigram, and water set above fire is 既濟, the sixty-third hexagram, After Completion. The whole quest for the fan is thereby restated as the making of a figure in the Changes, and the fire on the mountain becomes the lower half of a diagram.
The two verses end on different feasts. The Great Sage closed on Maitreya's assembly under the dragon-flower tree, a horizon at the end of an age; Eight Rules closes on Ullambana, the seventh-month rite at which offerings release the dead. One looks to the far future and the other to an annual obligation, and that is a fair account of the difference between them.