飽經霜雪 The Cloud Brushing Elder
拂雲叟笑道：拂云叟笑道：
逐句解 Line by line
The Elder Who Brushes the Clouds said with a smile:
The third of three attributions of the same shape, each standing alone and each opening its showcase.
Through the cold of the years I have idled away a thousand autumns; / my late prospect is unconstrained, clear and deeper still.
度 is dù, to pass time — the same verb Tripitaka used of getting across the ridge. 更 is gèng, still more, not the gēng of the night watch; all six occurrences in this chapter are the adverb.
Unmixed with the clamorous dust, I am cool to the last; / sated with frost and snow, I have a distinction of my own.
風流 here is not romantic dash but the older sense of a distinguished bearing, which the English renders as distinction.
The Seven Worthies were my companions and discoursed of the Way with me; / the Six Idlers were my friends and traded songs with me.
This is the wittiest couplet in the chapter and almost nobody in the room hears it. Both allusions are to famous companies whose names contain the word bamboo — the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove and the Six Idlers of the Bamboo Stream — so the speaker names his own substance twice while appearing to boast about his friends. 為 is the linking wéi, to be, not the purposive wèi; the automatic reading gives the purposive.
Striking jade and sounding bronze — there is nothing trivial in it; / with a nature given by heaven, I roam in company with the immortals.
戛玉敲金, striking jade and sounding bronze, is a set phrase for the ring of fine writing. Said by a bamboo, it is also a plain description of what the stems do in a wind.
The third poem is the wittiest of the three and the most nearly a confession. Its central couplet names the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove and the Six Idlers of the Bamboo Stream — two celebrated companies of poets and drinkers, both of whose names contain the word bamboo — and claims their friendship. The speaker is a bamboo. He has told the truth twice in fourteen characters and been heard as name-dropping.
The self-description is built out of negatives. Unmixed with dust, cool, nothing trivial, no constraint: this speaker defines himself by what he has kept out rather than by what he holds, which is the right shape of argument for a plant whose stem is empty — and whose emptiness has stood for modesty of heart as long as anyone has written about it.
The closing image works the same double way. Striking jade and sounding bronze is the usual praise for well-made verse; it is also, exactly, the noise a bamboo grove makes in wind, which the pilgrims heard for themselves before they reached the temple. The chapter has been letting these trees identify themselves since the moment it introduced them.