暗昧難明 A Matter Dark And Doubtful
三藏聞言，點頭歎道：「這樁事暗昧難明。一則是朝廷失政，二來是汝等有災。既然天降血雨，污了寶塔，那時節何不啟本奏君，致令受苦？」眾僧道：「爺爺，我等凡人，怎知天意？況前輩俱未辨得，我等如何處之？」三藏闻言，点头叹道：「这桩事暗昧难明。一则是朝廷失政，二来是汝等有灾。既然天降血雨，污了宝塔，那时节何不启本奏君，致令受苦？」众僧道：「爷爷，我等凡人，怎知天意？况前辈俱未辨得，我等如何处之？」
逐句解 Line by line
Tripitaka heard them out, nodded, and said with a sigh, "This affair is dark and hard to make out.
暗昧 is obscure in the sense of hidden from view rather than hard to reason about, and 難明 pairs with it: the facts have not been brought to light. 難 is nán here, the not-easy reading.
"For one thing the court has failed in its governing; for another, a calamity was owing to you.
The 一 of 一則…二來 is part of a word and not a number, so it holds yī where the ordinary rule before 則 would give yì. The two clauses split the blame between a political failure and a karmic debt, and Tripitaka states them as equal halves.
"Since heaven sent down a rain of blood and fouled the precious pagoda, why did you not memorialise the throne at the time, rather than let it come to this suffering?"
啟本奏君 is sending a memorial up to the sovereign — the same procedure the officers used and the monks did not. Tripitaka is asking why they failed to get their account in first.
The monks said, "Your Reverence, we are ordinary men. How should we know the mind of heaven?
凡人 is an ordinary person as against a sage or an immortal, and it is the whole of their defence: reading a portent is not work for people like them.
"And besides, the cohorts before us could none of them make it out. What were we to do about it?"
處之 takes chǔ, the verb. 康熙字典 gives that reading at 唐韻 昌與切, 音杵, glossed 制也, to settle or dispose of, and files the chù of a place separately at 昌據切, 所也. This project's standing table had 處 down as a single-valued chù, and this is the site that breaks it. 辨得 keeps the full dé, alongside 認得 and 曉得.
Tripitaka's judgement is careful and it is also a little cold. He divides the cause in two — a failure of government, and a calamity owing to the monks themselves — and then asks why they did not act. The second half of that division is orthodox karmic reasoning, and it puts a share of the blame on men who have just described watching two cohorts beaten to death.
The question he asks is practical and it has an answer. The court was already receiving memorials; the officers got theirs in and the monks did not. But the monks' reply is that they were never in a position to compose one, because they did not know what had happened either.
That is the point the chapter keeps coming back to. Nobody looked. The officers did not look, the king did not look, and the monks could not have looked, because nothing in their training tells a man how to read a rain of blood. The next thing Tripitaka says is that he will go up and see for himself.