四十年前 Forty Years Since The Womb
三藏合掌躬身答曰：三藏合掌躬身答曰：
逐句解 Line by line
Tripitaka joined his palms, bowed, and answered:
Eight characters standing alone and opening the showcase. The gesture is Buddhist where the four attributions before it were not: palms joined, a bow. The guest answers in his own form even while playing their game.
Forty years ago I came forth from my mother's womb; / before I was born, calamity had already fallen on my fate.
The poem answers the same question the four elders answered, and in the same measure — but where their poems gave a round thousand and then described a tree, this one gives a precise figure and then tells a life.
Fleeing for life I fell in the water and rolled along with the waves; / by good fortune I came to Golden Mountain and slipped my mortal frame.
The couplet compresses the whole story of the infant set adrift on the river and taken in at the Jinshan monastery. 落 keeps the one value it carries throughout the corpus.
Nurturing my nature and reading the scriptures I have never slackened; / bowing to Buddha with a sincere heart, how should I dare to hang back?
看經 takes kàn, to read, not the custodial kān of 看守, standing guard. 佛 is fixed at fó across the corpus.
Now by the Emperor's favour I am sent away westward; / and on the road I have met the immortal elders' condescending kindness.
差 is chāi, to send someone off on a commission — the value for an official posting — and not the chā of a discrepancy that turned up in 差疑 earlier in the chapter. The automatic reading gives chà, which is neither.
Tripitaka's poem is the only one in the sequence with a plot. The elders each gave an age and then described what they are; he gives an age and then narrates what happened to him — set adrift as an infant, carried on the river, taken in at Golden Mountain, sent west by an emperor. Four couplets and the whole of his biography is in them.
The contrast in scale is the point and he makes no attempt to soften it. They are a thousand years old and more; he is forty. Against their millennia of standing still he sets a life that has been in motion from before he was born, and the poem's verbs carry it — fleeing, falling, rolling, slipping free, sent, meeting.
It is also, quietly, a poem about obligation. Every good thing in it arrives from outside: fortune brought him to the monastery, the Emperor's favour sends him west, the elders' kindness meets him on the road. The four trees have spent their poems asserting what they are of themselves. Tripitaka spends his acknowledging what he owes.