披領袈裟 Wearing The Kasaya
老者道：老者道：
逐句解 Line by line
The old man said:
Three characters, an attribution with no bracket and nothing following it, so it stands alone and opens the recitation. The edition never opens this speech: there are five opening quotation marks in this block against six closing ones, and the sixth shuts the rhapsody. The asymmetry is the printer's and it is reproduced as it stands.
"That monk of the order, a kasaya draped over his shoulders.
僧伽 is sēng qié, a Chinese spelling-out of the Sanskrit saṃgha, the monastic order — and by extension one monk. The second character takes the Buddhist reading qié, not the gā that modern Chinese uses when transliterating scientific words. 袈裟, three characters later, is the same kind of borrowing: the kaṣāya, the patchwork robe.
"First he expounded the Peacock, and after that recited the Lotus.
Both are sutras — the Peacock and the Lotus, the second one of the most widely recited texts in East Asian Buddhism. 華 is huá in its title.
"Incense burning within the censer, a hand-bell gripped in his hand.
The rhapsody opens with equipment, which is how it establishes that the man was a professional. Not a word about whether he could fight.
"Right in the midst of the chanting, the demon was startled awake.
處 is chù, marking the moment something happens rather than a place.
"A wind sprang up and clouds rose, and it came straight to the farmstead.
Wind again — and it is the same signal the old man gave in his prose account a few passages back, where nobody saw the creature arrive and everyone felt the gust. The rhapsody is repeating the villagers' own evidence back at them in verse.
"Monk and monster fought, and it was truly worth the seeing: a fist driven in by turns, a claw raked in by turns.
一遞 means by turns, each in exchange for the other — blow for blow. This is where the four-character measure first gives way: the unit runs four and four, then five and five.
"The monk was still holding his own — holding his own, and his hair was gone.
應 is yìng, to answer or match, both times. 還 is hái, "still." The repetition of 相應 across the break is what sets up the joke: the phrase insists that the monk was holding his own, and then the second half arrives.
"In a moment the demon had won, and went straight back into the mist and cloud.
須臾 is a moment, an instant. The fight is over in one line, having taken three to build.
"And there he lay, a scab dried in the sun.
乾 is gān, dry. This line stands at five characters with no partner — the only unpaired half-line anywhere in this rhapsody or in the one that answers it.
"We came up close to look: the bare skull had been beaten till it was like a burst melon."
的 keeps its fixed light reading de; automatic transcription supplies something unrelated at this one site and nowhere else in the chapter. The closing half-line runs to nine characters, the longest in the piece.
Asked about method, the old man answers with a performance — and in a voice he has not used all evening. Five four-beat couplets set the scene: robe, sutras, censer, bell. Not one of them says anything about whether the monk could fight.
Then the measure breaks. The four-character line holds for five units, gives way in the middle of the sixth, widens to five and five for the fight, and reaches nine characters on the very last half-line. The form comes apart at exactly the rate the monk does.
The joke is placed with some care. 和尚還相應 — "the monk was still holding his own" — is repeated across the break, and the repetition sounds like insistence right up until the second half says his hair was gone. The piece ends on a smashed melon, which is the last thing a catalogue of censers and sutras prepares you for.