錯入傍門 Entering By A Side Gate
這正是：这正是：
逐句解 Line by line
And this was just it:
Three characters of bare cue standing in front of the verse, the same shape as 真個是： earlier on. What follows is not description but judgement — the first strictly regulated poem the chapter has used, and it arrives at the moment of total defeat.
The green-eyed ape knew the false from the true; the meditating mind saw an image and bowed to a golden body.
The couplet sets two men against each other, a line apiece: one told the false from the true, the other saw an image and bowed to it. 兒 is the throwaway vernacular suffix and takes the neutral tone. All fourteen occurrences in this chapter are suffixes of that kind and thirteen of them are neutral — the one exception comes much later, at 撲蚊兒, where the character stands in a rhyme position and has to carry a full syllable to fill it.
The Yellow Dame, blind, joined in the worship; Mother Wood, foolish of heart, joined in the talk.
黃婆 and 木母 are the alchemical code-names for Sha Monk and Eight Rules — the Yellow Dame and Mother Wood — and both turn up twice in this chapter. 論 reads lún, in the level tone, because the rhyme insists: this poem rhymes on 真 身 論 人 身 and every other one of those is level. The Kāngxī dictionary agrees, leading with 盧昆切 from the 唐韻, glossed 議也 and 說也, and putting the falling-tone 盧困切 second.
The wicked monster grew violent and bullied the original nature; the demon chief nursed his malice and cheated gods and men.
The two lines before this one named their men; this one deliberately does not. 本性 is the original nature that the whole enterprise exists to protect, and the poem leaves it unassigned — it belongs to all of them or to none. 強 is qiáng, forceful, not the qiǎng of compulsion.
Truly, where the Way is small the demon is great; enter by a side gate and you throw your body away for nothing.
傍門 is the heterodox gate of the set phrase — the side door, the wrong way in — and it names what has just happened without naming anybody who did it. 傍 reads páng, the character standing in for 旁; the Kāngxī entry opens at 步光切 and notes that the two are interchangeable. 為 is wéi, the copula.
Eight lines of seven characters, rhyming on the even lines with the first line pulled into the rhyme as well — the strictest form the chapter uses, and it is spent on a scorecard. The rhyme words are 真 身 論 人 身, and the last of them repeats the second, so the poem closes on the syllable it opened its argument with.
It changes register halfway through. Pilgrim and Tripitaka are named by what they did — the ape who told false from true, the meditating mind that bowed to an image — while Sha Monk and Eight Rules get their alchemical titles instead, blind and foolish. Then two lines on the demon, and a closing couplet that blames nobody at all and states a rule instead.
That rule is the chapter's whole argument in fourteen characters. Where cultivation is shallow the obstacle is large; go in by the wrong gate and you throw yourself away for nothing. Both halves describe exactly what has happened, and neither names a culprit.