灰冷花殘 Cold Ash And Fallen Flowers
師徒們進得門來觀看，但見那：师徒们进得门来观看，但见那：
逐句解 Line by line
Master and disciples came in at the gate and looked about them, and this is what they saw:
進得門來 is a come-in-through frame and its 得 is the light linking de. Nothing is obtained here: the gate is passed through, not got hold of, which is what separates this from something like 求得扇子來, where the fan really is come by. The test settles it — turn the frame negative and you get 進不得門, and that shape takes de everywhere in this project. The announcement 但見那：, and what they saw was, is printed as part of the same run, so this line opens the description.
In the old hall the incense-lamp is cold; down the empty gallery leaves sweep in the wind.
Here is the character of the chapter title making its first appearance in the text, and it is used of leaves blowing along a corridor long before anybody picks up a broom. 掃, to sweep.
A pagoda of a thousand chǐ piercing the cloud; a few pines nurturing their nature.
The 尺 chǐ is the Chinese foot, roughly a third of a metre; a thousand of them is a way of saying very tall indeed and not a measurement. 養性 is a Daoist term for cultivating your inner nature, applied here to the pines — which are doing precisely what the absent monks are not.
Fallen blossom covers the ground and no visitor passes; before the eaves the spiders' webs are left to climb and cage as they please.
無客過, no visitor passes, is the whole complaint of the poem in three characters. A temple with no visitors has no offerings and no reason to be swept.
The drum is mounted to no purpose, the bell hung in vain; dust lies thick on the painted walls and the coloured images are dim.
空 and 枉 are a matched pair, emptily and vainly. Drum and bell are the instruments that call a monastery to its hours, so a drum mounted for nothing is a community that has stopped keeping time.
The lecture-seat stands in shadow and no monk is to be seen; the meditation hall is silent, and birds are often met with there.
講座 is the raised seat the dharma is expounded from, 禪堂 the hall where the community sits. Both are named by their function and then reported empty, and the birds in the meditation hall are the sharpest touch in the poem.
Desolation enough to sigh over; a loneliness whose bitterness has no end.
The only couplet that states a feeling rather than describing a thing, and it is placed second from last so that the closing couplet can go back to the objects.
Before the Buddha a censer is indeed set out; but the ash is cold, the flowers are spent, and every thing is empty.
雖 grants the censer in order to take it away again. And the last three characters carry the poem's one piece of wordplay, saved for the end: 事事空 closes on the Buddhist word for emptiness while meaning, at the plain level, that there is nothing in any of it.
This poem is the exact negative of the one seven passages back. That one described a capital in the vocabulary of dynastic praise and found everything full: markets loud, stairs clean, tribute arriving. This one describes a temple inside the same walls and finds everything empty — lamp cold, gallery bare, ground unswept, drum silent, seat dark, censer unlit.
The method never varies: name a thing by its function, then report that the function has stopped. A lecture-seat with nobody to lecture, a meditation hall with birds in it, a bell hung for nothing. Nothing is broken and nothing has been smashed. The building is intact and simply unused, which is a more disquieting picture than ruin would be.
Two details point forward. The pagoda is introduced here in a single line about height, and 掃 makes its first appearance in the chapter — of leaves blowing along a corridor. The chapter's title puts those two together, and sweeping the pagoda turns out to be what washes a heart clean. At this point the poem has shown you a tower and some unswept leaves.