心猿不捨 The Mind Monkey Would Not Give Up
有詩為證。詩曰：有诗为证。诗曰：
逐句解 Line by line
There is a poem in witness of it. The poem says:
Two tags in sequence, the first carrying its own full stop, joined forward into a single opening unit because the first announces the second and both stand on one line of the source. 為 takes wéi in 為證 by the registered pairing, and the spec given here matches that ruling rather than overriding it — which the authoring guard now enforces.
The Mother of Wood fell in with a water-fiend and was taken; / the Mind Monkey would not give him up, and sought him bitterly.
相 is xiāng in 相尋, the reciprocal adverb, where pypinyin gives the xiàng of a countenance. 木母 and 心猿 are the internal-alchemy names for Eight Rules and for Pilgrim — the Mother of Wood and the Monkey of the Mind — and each occurs exactly once in this chapter, both of them in this line.
In secret he plied an artful scheme and stole the lock open; / greatly he showed his divine power, and deep was his angry hate.
No graph in this line stands in any guard roster. 偷開鎖 is a summary rather than a report — what was actually opened was a rope, bitten through with a claw — and the difference is the licence a poem takes over the prose it stands beside.
The son-in-law hurriedly took the princess and hid; / the Dragon King shook with terror and his voice was cut off.
No graph in this line stands in any guard roster. 公主 is the Myriad Sage princess, who has been named in depositions since the chapter before this one and appears here for the first time as a person doing something — being led away to hide. 絕聲音 is the voice cut off rather than merely silent.
In the water palace and the crimson towers the doors and windows were ruined; / dragon sons and dragon grandsons, every one of them, lost their souls.
龍子 takes 子 at zǐ, the full noun-morpheme, and pypinyin supplies the neutral suffix — the exact reverse of the correction 一家子 needed in the passage before this one, a hundred and four graphs back. 盡 is jìn and 沒 is méi. 絳闕 are gate-towers painted crimson, the standard furniture of a palace in verse.
The quatrain is the only place in the chapter where the allegorical names appear. 木母, the Mother of Wood, is Eight Rules; 心猿, the Monkey of the Mind, is Pilgrim. Each occurs once in the whole chapter and both are in the first line, so the poem is speaking a register the prose around it never uses.
It also improves on the facts. The second line has Pilgrim stealing a lock open with an artful scheme; what he did was bite a rope with a crab's claw. The third and fourth lines are accurate enough — the son-in-law does take the princess and hide, the dragon is terrified, the furniture is destroyed — but the summary of the rescue has been raised a register to match the names.
The last line is the one that carries. Dragon sons and dragon grandsons, every one of them, lost their souls: it is the household of the ultimatum at the end of the recitation, the one Pilgrim promised to spare if the treasure came back. Nobody has given anything back, and the family is now being broken up by a pig with a rake.