原文 Original text
繁體 Traditional
Reader's edition
含詞賦 With rhapsody
安邦先卻 To Settle A Realm
咦！正是：咦！正是：
安邦先卻君王病，守道須除愛惡心。安邦先却君王病，守道须除爱恶心。
逐句解 Line by line
咦！正是：
咦！正是：
Ah! Truly:
One syllable of storyteller's exclamation, and then the tag that opens the closing couplet.
安邦先卻君王病，守道須除愛惡心。
安邦先却君王病，守道须除爱恶心。
To settle a realm, first drive out the sovereign's sickness; to hold to the Way, one must root out the mind that loves and hates.
惡 is wù here, to hate — the reading 康熙 glosses 憎也，疾也, citing a phrase from Mencius, 羞惡之心, which is this line's twin. It is not the è of the demon's ugliness a few lines ago: the same character, both readings, inside one chapter. 卻 is què, to drive off.
The closing couplet does what the chapter's own title promised. The Mind-Lord compounded medicines by night; here the second line ends on the mind again — the mind that loves and hates, which is the thing that has to be rooted out.
The two halves are a physician's parallel. To settle a realm you first drive out the sovereign's sickness; to hold to the Way you first drive out attachment and aversion. The chapter has spent nearly six thousand characters demonstrating the first half literally — a kingdom set right by a purgative — and the couplet claims the second half follows by the same logic.
Read against the story just told, it is a harder saying than it looks. The king's sickness was love and grief for a wife he handed over himself, and what cured it was a dumpling coming loose. The couplet asks you to take that as an allegory of the mind, and leaves you to do the arithmetic.