散誕逍遙 Roaming Free Toward The West
這一篇詞，牌名《臨江仙》，單道唐三藏師徒四眾水火既濟，本性清涼。借得純陰寶扇，搧息燥火過山。不一日行過了八百之程，師徒們散誕逍遙，向西而去。这一篇词，牌名《临江仙》，单道唐三藏师徒四众水火既济，本性清凉。借得纯阴宝扇，搧息燥火过山。不一日行过了八百之程，师徒们散诞逍遥，向西而去。
逐句解 Line by line
This one lyric, to the tune-name Immortal By The River, tells only of how Tripitaka Tang and his disciples, four in all, brought water and fire to completion, so that the original nature was made cool.
The caption arrives after the picture. The novel almost never tells you which tune a lyric is set to, and here it does. 牌名 pái míng is the tune-title, and 《臨江仙》 lín jiāng xiān, Immortal By The River, is one of the commonest of them all. The metre checks out: seven, six, seven, five, five characters to the stanza, twice over, the standard sixty-character form. 既濟 jì jì is the sixty-third hexagram of the 《易經》, water sitting above fire, and its name is After Completion — which is a fair description of the three chapters just finished.
Having borrowed the treasure fan of pure yin, they fanned the parching fire out and passed the mountain.
純陰 chún yīn is what the fan is made of: it belongs wholly to the cold principle, which is why it can answer a mountain of fire. Two characters here are worth keeping apart. 搧 shān is the verb, to fan; 扇 shàn is the fan itself. The previous chapter held that distinction at every single occurrence, and this chapter inherits it with exactly one of each.
In less than a day they had covered eight hundred lǐ of road, and master and disciples, free and unhurried, went on toward the west.
散誕 sǎn dàn is being off the leash, going at your own pace. The reading matters: not sàn, the verb to scatter, but the loose and unconfined sǎn you get in 散人, a man of no office, or 閒散, at leisure. The eight hundred lǐ is the width of the Mountain of Flames, which blocked the road for three chapters and is crossed here in half a sentence.
Now the prose says what the song would not, and names whose story that was. It also does something the novel hardly ever bothers with, and names the tune. Lyrics get dropped into these chapters constantly, normally announced by a formula — 詩曰, a poem says; 有詩為證, there are verses to prove it; 但見, and what they saw was — or by nothing at all. Here the poem comes first and the label second, like a caption arriving after the photograph.
The summary is brisk to the point of rudeness. Three chapters of trouble — the Mountain of Flames, the Rakshasi, the Bull King, the plantain fan — fold into two clauses, and the eight hundred lǐ that could not be crossed at all are crossed inside a day. The novel is sweeping the board.
One phrase survives out of all that: the original nature made cool. It is the result the song claimed in the language of alchemy, and it is also a plain description of four tired men on a good road in autumn. The rest of the chapter will test whether the coolness holds.