衰殘自愧 No Immortal Bones Left In Me
云：云：
逐句解 Line by line
Saying:
A one-character attribution standing alone as its own unit, and the shortest in the chapter. It opens the showcase by itself. It is not folded backwards into the speech before it: the join that would do so is for a bare formula, and what precedes is a full attributed speech closing its own quotation, which stands alone however short.
Sturdy Joint, alone and lofty, laughs at the king of trees; / the numinous cedrela has not my renown.
The poem answers Tripitaka's in its rhyme and opens by naming its own author in the third person. 靈椿 is the great cedrela of the Zhuāngzǐ, whose spring and autumn each ran to eight thousand years — so the first thing the pine does is claim to outdo the standard emblem of longevity.
The hills standing empty, a hundred zhàng of dragon-and-serpent shadow; / the springs drawn a thousand years, and the fragrance of amber.
A zhàng is ten chǐ, so a hundred of them is a shadow several hundred metres long. Amber is fossil pine resin, so the second half names the speaker's own substance at a thousand years' remove — the same trick the Cloud-Brusher played with bamboo.
I know how to breed a bearing along with heaven and earth; / and I am glad that wind and rain transform my going out and withdrawing.
解 is jiě, to know how to. 乾 is qián, the trigram, inside 乾坤. 行藏 takes cáng again, echoing the same phrase in the poem being answered — which is exactly what answering in the same rhyme licenses.
Withered and worn, I am ashamed to have no bones of an immortal; / I have only my poria cake to make a field of long life.
Here is the joke inside the modesty. 苓膏 is the poria cake that was served to Tripitaka when he arrived at this hermitage. Poria grows on pine roots; the speaker is a pine; and he closes his poem by naming the refreshment he fed his guest as the only immortality he has. 場 is again cháng in rhyme position.
The answering poem keeps Tripitaka's rhyme and reverses his argument. He wrote about going west to fetch something; the pine writes about standing still and having everything already — a bearing bred with heaven and earth, a thousand years of amber, wind and rain doing the work of transformation.
It is also the most modest thing anyone says all evening, and the modesty is a boast. Withered and worn, ashamed to have no immortal's bones, nothing to show but a poria cake — and poria grows on pine roots, so the cake is made of him. He fed it to his guest eight passages ago. The humility and the claim are the same sentence.
The two poems together are the closest the chapter comes to stating its argument twice over. Tripitaka's ends at the gate of Utmost Bliss, which is somewhere else; the Duke's ends on a field of long life which is his own root system. Neither answers the other and both are perfectly polite.