聽我道 Listen While I Tell It
你上前，聽我道：你上前，听我道：
逐句解 Line by line
Step up here, and listen while I tell it:
The tag that opens the recitation. It is not one of the ten standard verse introducers, and it was held back from the preceding stretch on purpose, since a tag may not be parted from the verse it introduces. No graph in it stands in any guard roster.
Old Sun's forebears dwelt on the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit, / in the Water Curtain Cave, amid the great sea.
間 stands at jiān by the corpus-wide ruling, the spatial between. The recitation opens where the novel itself opened, with the mountain and the cave, and it will take eighteen couplets to reach the bank the speaker is standing on.
From youth I refined an indestructible body, / and the Jade Emperor invested me as Sage Equal to Heaven.
不壞身 is the adamantine body of the adept, and 不 takes bú before the falling 壞 huài. 封 is to enfeoff, to confer a title — the Jade Emperor gave the title in order to contain the trouble, which is the joke the next couplet turns on. No graph in this line stands in any guard roster.
Only because I made havoc in the Palace of Dipper and Ox, / not one god of heaven could get the better of me.
斗 is dǒu, the Dipper, where pypinyin gives the falling dòu — the second time this chapter has had to correct that default. 斗牛 names two of the twenty-eight lodges, the Dipper and the Ox, and stands here for the celestial court at large. 難 is nán, difficulty, not the nàn of calamity.
Then they must call the Tathāgata, who spread forth Sumeru — / wisdom without bound, and no common exercise of it.
當 is dāng, then, at that point. 妙高 is Sumeru, the world-mountain, whose Sanskrit name the Chinese renders as the marvellous and high; the next couplet says what the Buddha did with it. 非凡用 means that the power exercised was of no ordinary order, not that it went unused.
For the sake of a somersault we wagered our divine powers; / his hand turned into a mountain and pressed me down with its weight.
The two 為 in this line take opposite readings and both specs are given by position. The first is wèi, the purposive — for the sake of a somersault; the second is wéi, the copular, in 化為, turned into. 觔斗 takes 斗 at dǒu again, the somersault being named for the peck-measure it resembles in shape. 重 is zhòng, weight.
A full five hundred years, down to this day, / until Guanyin spoke for me, and only then did I escape with my life.
觀 is guān and 解 is jiě; 勸解 is to intercede, to talk a quarrel down. 整 here means a full or round count rather than to arrange. 方 is the classical only-then, and it does the work of the whole line: the five hundred years end at somebody else's word, not at his own strength.
Tripitaka of the Great Tang goes up to the Western Heaven, / to bow from afar at Vulture Peak and seek the Buddha's hymns.
三藏 keeps 藏 at zàng, the three baskets of scripture. 靈山 is Vulture Peak, where the Buddha preached, and 佛 stands at fó by the corpus-wide ruling. The couplet changes subject without warning — for six lines the speaker has been telling his own history, and here a second man walks into it.
He loosed me from my bondage that I might guard him, / smelting demons and cleansing monsters, following him in the practice.
解 is jiě; 解脫 is the Buddhist term for release from bondage, used here of a mountain being lifted off a body. 煉 is the alchemist's smelting, and applying it to demons treats the road west as a refining operation — the same figure the chapter before last opened on. 行 at 修行 is xíng.
On the road we came upon the city of Jisai in the Western Region. / Wrongfully it had cost monks their lives through three generations.
⚠ This is the one couplet of the eighteen printed with a full stop inside it where every other carries a comma. The mark is kept exactly as it stands; only the segmentation is repaired, so that the line reads as the single couplet it is rather than as two fragments. The recitation now turns from the speaker's own history to the affair of the chapter before this one, and stays there for seven couplets.
We in our compassion asked after the old business, / and it was because the pagoda threw back no light.
No graph in this line stands in any guard roster. 舊情 is the old affair, the matter as it stood before they arrived. 映 is to shine back or reflect, and the whole grievance of the chapter before this one turns on a tower that had stopped doing it.
My master swept the pagoda to search the matter out plainly, / on to the third watch of the night, when the pipes of heaven fell still.
分 at 分明 is fēn, plainly. 更 at 三更 is gēng, the night-watch — the watches are turns taken, and pypinyin is inconsistent about this graph, getting 三更 right and other sites wrong. 天籟 is a term from 莊子 for the sounds the world makes of itself, with no one blowing them.
We caught the fiends and took a true deposition, / and they said that you were the ones who stole the treasure.
供 is gòng, sworn testimony, where pypinyin gives gōng at every site; the chapter before this one had nine occurrences and every one was the testimony sense. 汝等 is the literary you-plural, and its stiffness is deliberate — the speaker is reciting a legal finding, not talking.
Thieves in full partnership — there was a Dragon King, / and a princess named along with him, styled Myriad Sage.
為 is wéi here, to act as or to be, against the purposive wèi the same graph took eight lines earlier. 稱 is chēng, to be styled. 合盤 is the whole dish, hence wholly and together, and the deposition in the chapter before this one used the same phrase of the same pair.
A rain of blood drenched the light from the pagoda, / and you carried off his treasure to use it.
血 is xuè. The corpus holds the citation reading as the default and departs from it only by explicit registration, which is why 血淋淋 takes xiě while 血雨 does not; the chapter before this one has five occurrences of 血雨 and every one is xuè. 將 is the disposal marker jiāng.
The deposition before the throne had nothing false in it; / I obey the king's word and have ridden into these parts.
Both readings that pypinyin gets wrong and right sit in this one line. 供 at 供狀 is gòng, the written deposition, where the default is wrong; 更 at 更無虛 is gèng, still more, where it is right — the same graph that took gēng four lines above. 奉 is to receive and carry out a superior's word.
And so I have sought you out and demanded a fight; / you need not ask again what Grandfather Sun is called.
相 is xiāng, the reciprocal adverb, not the xiàng of a countenance. 不 takes bù before the level 須 xū. 孫爺 is not the registered kinship pair 爺爺 and takes an ordinary yé; the speaker called himself 孫爺爺 in the prose immediately before this recitation and calls himself 孫爺 here, two hundred and thirty-one graphs later.
Give the treasure back to him, and be quick about it, / and spare the lives of your whole house, young and old.
還 is huán, to give back — the verb, not the adverb hái that pypinyin supplies and that the same graph took at 還好計較 earlier in this chapter. 將 is the disposal marker jiāng, and 少 is shào, the young. The terms are the ones sent down to the Dragon King by the two maimed fiends, in different words: give it back and the household lives.
But if you are fool enough to make a parade of your strength, / I will have your waters dried, your mountain fallen, and the whole of it come to grief."
蹬 is dèng. 康熙字典 足部十二畫 gives 徒亙切 and 唐亙切, 音鄧, as the graph's first band and glosses it with this very compound — 說文 蹭蹬也, and 木華·海賦 或乃蹭蹬窮波, annotated 蹭蹬，失勢貌, to have lost one's footing; the 都騰切 band that gives dēng is listed last. 強 is qiáng, 教 is jiào in the causative, and 都 is the totalising dōu. The line runs to sixteen graphs where the other seventeen run to fourteen.
The recitation is eighteen couplets and falls into three unequal parts. Eight couplets of autobiography, from the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit to the release from under the mountain; seven that retell the affair of the chapter before this one; and three of ultimatum. The middle section is the point of the whole performance, and it sits in the middle rather than at the end, which is not where a modern reader would put it.
The autobiography is told as a sequence of things done to him. He was invested, he was defeated, he was pressed down, he was interceded for, he was released. He is the agent in only three clauses of the eight couplets — refining his body, making havoc in heaven, wagering his powers on a somersault — and two of those three are what cost him the five hundred years. He does not draw the moral and the poem does not either.
What he is actually doing here is serving notice. The seven couplets on Jisai are a summary of evidence — a wrong three generations old, a tower gone dark, a night's sweeping, a capture, a sworn deposition, two named thieves, a rain of blood — and they are laid out in the order a deposition would take. Then the demand and the alternative. It is a legal document delivered as a ballad.
The last line breaks the metre, running to sixteen graphs where the other seventeen run to fourteen. The extra two carry the threat: your waters dried, your mountain fallen, the whole of it come to grief. Having spent seventeen lines being precise, he ends by being long.