夢吞日光 A Dream Of Swallowing Sunlight
上帝祖師乃淨樂國王與善勝皇后夢吞日光，覺而有孕，懷胎一十四個月，於開皇元年甲辰之歲三月初一日午時降誕於王宮。上帝祖师乃净乐国王与善胜皇后梦吞日光，觉而有孕，怀胎一十四个月，于开皇元年甲辰之岁三月初一日午时降诞于王宫。
逐句解 Line by line
The Patriarch, Highest Emperor, was born of the King of Jingle and his queen Shansheng, who dreamed that she swallowed the light of the sun and woke to find herself with child. She carried him fourteen months, and in the first year of the Kaihuang reign, the year jiachen, on the first day of the third month at the hour of noon, he came down and was born in the royal palace.
A god's birth, told to a fixed recipe: royal parents, a portent in a dream, a conception with no ordinary cause, a pregnancy longer than nature allows, and a birth dated to the hour. 初一 is read chū yī — it is the first day of a lunar month, a set phrase, so 一 keeps its full tone instead of shifting as it normally would before a falling tone. 樂 in 淨樂 is lè, joy — the kingdom is Pure Joy. 降誕 is the formal term for the birth of a god or a sovereign, with 降 as jiàng, to come down.
Swallowing the sun is the portent proper to a god whose domain will be the pole of heaven. Everything else in the sentence follows the template for a divine nativity, and readers in the Ming would have recognised it the way a modern reader recognises the opening of a fairy tale.
The dating is exact where the surrounding prose is vague — reign, cyclical year, month, day and hour, all specified. That kind of precision is a claim to historical fact rather than a record of one, and it is the same move a temple inscription makes.
Placing the birth here, between the poem about the mountain and the hymn about the god, gives the sequence its order: first the place, then the life, then the titles. Monkey has not spoken since he landed and will not speak until the hymn is finished.