壽星獻丹 The Gifts of Longevity
壽星又到，見玉帝禮畢，又見如來申謝曰：「始聞那妖猴被老君引至兜率宮鍛煉，以為必致平安，不期他又反出。幸如來善伏此怪，設宴奉謝，故此聞風而來。更無他物可獻，特具紫芝瑤草、碧藕金丹奉上。」詩曰：寿星又到，见玉帝礼毕，又见如来申谢曰：「始闻那妖猴被老君引至兜率宫锻炼，以为必致平安，不期他又反出。幸如来善伏此怪，设宴奉谢，故此闻风而来。更无他物可献，特具紫芝瑶草、碧藕金丹奉上。」诗曰：
逐句解 Line by line
The Star of Longevity arrived, paid his respects to the Jade Emperor, and then, seeing the Tathāgata, expressed his thanks, saying:
壽星 (Shòu xīng), the Star of Longevity, formally enters the assembly. 申謝, to state one's thanks. The structure of the next several passages is patterned: each great immortal arrives, thanks the Buddha, and presents a gift accompanied by a poem.
"I first heard that the fiendish monkey had been taken by Laozi to the Tushita Palace to be refined, and thought peace was surely assured — but unexpectedly he broke out again. Happily the Tathāgata has well subdued this fiend, and a banquet is set in thanks; so, catching word of it, I have come. Having no other gift, I bring only purple mushroom and jasper herb, blue lotus-root and golden elixir, to present." The poem says:
以為: 為 = wéi ("thought / assumed"). 善伏, well-subdued; 伏 = fú. 聞風而來, "came on hearing the wind [of it]." The verse lead-in 詩曰 rides the end of this prose segment; the gift-poem follows.
Blue lotus-root and golden elixir, offered to Śākyamuni; may the Tathāgata's myriad years be as the sands of the Ganges.
恆沙 (héng shā) — "the sands of the Ganges," the Buddhist measure of the innumerable. The gift-poem opens by wishing the Buddha a lifespan beyond counting, in pointedly Buddhist terms offered by a Daoist longevity-god — the syncretic courtesy of the whole banquet.
In pure peace and eternal joy, the brocade of the Three Vehicles; in health and long life, the flowers of the Nine Grades.
永樂: 樂 = lè (joy). 三乘 (sān shèng): 乘 = shèng — the Three Vehicles (śrāvaka, pratyekabuddha, bodhisattva) of Buddhist soteriology. 九品 (jiǔ pǐn), the Nine Grades of rebirth in the Pure Land. 長生: 長 = cháng. The couplet weaves Daoist long-life with Buddhist attainment-schemes.
In the gate of the Signless, the true Lord of the Law; on the heaven of Form-and-Emptiness, he is the immortals' own house.
無相 (wú xiàng), "signless / without marks" (animitta), and 色空 (sè kōng), "form and emptiness" (rūpa-śūnyatā), are core Buddhist terms — the Heart Sūtra's "form is emptiness." 相 = xiàng (mark/sign); 中 = zhōng. The poem now praises the Buddha in the deepest Mahāyāna vocabulary, the longevity-god speaking pure Prajñāpāramitā.
Heaven, earth and the great ground all call him Patriarch; his sixteen-chi golden body, vast in fortune and long life.
丈六金身 — the "sixteen-chǐ golden body," the canonical height of the Buddha's radiant form. Units stay in pinyin: 丈 = zhàng. 賒 (shē) here means "far-reaching / abundant." The poem ends crowning the Buddha as universal Patriarch — the Daoist cosmos acclaiming Buddhist supremacy in its own verse.
The Star of Longevity presents his gifts — purple mushroom, jasper herb, blue lotus-root, golden elixir — the pharmacopoeia of Daoist immortality. But the accompanying poem is striking for how thoroughly it praises the Buddha in Buddhist terms. A Daoist longevity-god wishes the Tathāgata years "as the sands of the Ganges" (恆沙), invokes the Three Vehicles (三乘) and Nine Grades (九品), and reaches the high Prajñāpāramitā vocabulary of the Signless (無相) and Form-and-Emptiness (色空).
This is the banquet's syncretism at its most explicit and most graceful. The poem does not merely have Daoist and Buddhist figures share a table; it has a Daoist deity articulate Buddhist doctrine as praise, ending by acclaiming the Buddha as the Patriarch whom "heaven, earth, and the great ground all call ancestor." The hierarchy established by the monkey's defeat is here ratified in verse, voluntarily, by the very Daoist pantheon that could not subdue him.
The closing image, the 丈六金身 — the Buddha's sixteen-chǐ radiant body — returns us to the chapter's governing contrast of scale. The monkey measured himself against a palm and lost; the Buddha's true body is measured in the canonical dimensions of cosmic Buddhahood, "vast in fortune and long life" (福壽賒). Following our standing convention, the measure-word 丈 is rendered zhàng rather than converted — preserving the texture of the original even as the image asserts the immeasurable.