自恨當時 I Would Not Listen
側耳聽時，卻原來是三藏聲音，哭道：「悟空啊，我：侧耳听时，却原来是三藏声音，哭道：「悟空啊，我：
逐句解 Line by line
He turned an ear to listen, and it was Tripitaka's voice after all, crying: "Wukong! I—"
The cue is folded into the sentence that identifies the speaker, so this unit opens the poem rather than announcing it. 我： breaks off on a colon — he gets as far as I — and the four couplets that follow are what he would have gone on to say.
I hate myself for not listening to him then, which has brought me to this day's calamity and peril.
The first line is a confession, and it is the reason the poem exists. 伊 is the literary third person: he calls Wukong by name to open, then refers to him as him for the rest of the poem — talking about the man rather than to him, which is what people do when they are alone. 當 is dāng in 當時, at that time.
Inside the golden cymbals you were hurt; bound with hemp rope, who knows of me?
The couplet balances the two captivities and gets the first one wrong: Pilgrim was parched and shut in, not injured, and he was let out through a horn. 有誰知 — who knows of me — is the self-pity the second half turns on, and it is being overheard by the one person who does.
Four of us met this by the bitterness of our fate, and three thousand meritorious acts are all thrown down.
三千功行 is the standard reckoning of the merit a pilgrimage piles up, and he writes the whole account off in one line. 盡 is jìn, down to the last of them, and 行 is xíng here — conduct, practice, the things you do — not the reading for a written line.
By what means shall this floundering calamity be undone, so that we may go west by an open road and come back again?
難 is nàn, a calamity — a thing that happens to you — and not the nán of something being hard, which the same graph takes elsewhere in the chapter. It is the same reading as 患難 a few graphs on. 得 is dé after the interrogative frame, heading a claim of its own: to manage the undoing.
A regulated poem in four couplets, and unlike the fighting poem before it this one rhymes level all through — 伊 危 知 頹 歸, with the first line pulled into the rhyme. Only two of its graphs needed a reading settled against the automatic one, where the fighting poem needed four.
It is also the first thing Tripitaka has said since he insisted on going in. The opening line is a confession — I hate myself for not listening to him then — and the rest of the poem works outward from it: the two captivities, the four of them, the merit lost, and a question about how any of it is to be undone.
The accounting is a little generous to the man doing it. He puts Pilgrim's injury first, counts the party as four when thirty-three celestial officers are tied up in the same room, and asks who knows of him. Then again, he does not know they are there — and the poem is being overheard.