笑和尚 The Laughing Monk
行者急走前看處，那個人：行者急走前看处，那个人：
逐句解 Line by line
Pilgrim hurried forward to look, and that person was —
The introduction is folded into its own line and leaves the sentence unfinished; the portrait completes it.
Great ears, a broad jaw, a square-set face; stumpy shoulders, a full belly, a fat frame.
相 is xiàng, outward appearance. 查 is read chá: 康熙字典 files it under 鋤加切 and glosses it as the same word as 槎, a log floating in water, which is the sense wanted of a pair of shoulders. Six features in fourteen characters, three to a half-line.
A breast full of spring feeling, brimming with delight; two eyes like autumn ripples, their light swaying and swaying.
Spring feeling against autumn ripples — the two seasons set in the two halves, each closing on a doubled word. Chinese poetry uses autumn waters for eyes so often that the phrase barely registers as a figure any more.
Loose sleeves floating free, and blessing in plenty; straw sandals unconstrained, and spirit in strength.
芒鞋, straw sandals, are the footwear of a wandering monk. Nothing in this portrait is armour or regalia — the god who solves the chapter arrives dressed as a pauper.
First of the venerable ones in the Land of Ultimate Bliss — hail, Maitreya, the laughing monk.
南無 is read ná mó and 彌勒 mí lè, both sound-borrowings from Sanskrit — namo, a formula of homage, and Maitreya. The automatic reading gives the second character as lēi, which is the everyday word for tightening a strap and quite wrong here. The poem withholds the name until its closing line, and the name is the point of the whole portrait.
The portrait describes a fat, cheerful, barefoot monk, and it is the chapter's third set-piece on a divine figure — after the hymn to the god of Wudang and the prince's self-portrait. The other two catalogued campaigns and titles. This one catalogues a body.
Its rhyme is the giveaway. Every line closes on a falling tone in -àng, where the prince's poem a few passages back rhymed level throughout. The two poems are built on opposite footings, and a listener would have heard the difference at once.
Withholding the name until the last line is the structural joke. The reader has been given ears, jaw, face, shoulders, belly, girth, sleeves and sandals, all of which identify Maitreya to anyone who has ever been inside a temple, and the poem names him only after the recognition is complete. Monkey, who asked nothing, is about to bow.