王母獻桃 The Queen Mother's Peaches
眾皆暢然喜會，只見王母娘娘引一班仙子、仙娥、美姬、美女，飄飄蕩蕩，舞向佛前施禮曰：「前被妖猴攪亂蟠桃一會，請眾仙、眾佛俱成功。今蒙如來大法鍊鎖頑猴，喜慶『安天大會』，無物可謝。今是我淨手親摘大株蟠桃數顆奉獻。」真個是：众皆畅然喜会，只见王母娘娘引一班仙子、仙娥、美姬、美女，飘飘荡荡，舞向佛前施礼曰：「前被妖猴搅乱蟠桃一会，请众仙、众佛俱成功。今蒙如来大法链锁顽猴，喜庆『安天大会』，无物可谢。今是我净手亲摘大株蟠桃数颗奉献。」真个是：
逐句解 Line by line
All were merry at the glad gathering, when in came the Queen Mother, leading a troop of immortal maids and lasses, fair girls and lovely women, drifting and floating, dancing up before the Buddha to make obeisance and say:
王母娘娘 (Wáng mǔ niáng niáng) — the Queen Mother of the West, keeper of the immortal peaches. 引一班: yì (before bān, 1st tone). Her arrival, with the dancing maidens, opens the banquet's procession of gifts.
"Before, the fiendish monkey wrecked the Peach Banquet, when I had invited all the immortals and Buddhas, and none could be accomplished. Now, by the Tathāgata's great Dharma, the stubborn monkey is chained, and we joyfully keep the 'Assembly for Pacifying Heaven.' Having nothing to offer in thanks, I now wash my hands and pick with my own hands a few peaches from the great trees to present."
一會: yí (before huì, 4th tone). 鍊鎖 (liàn suǒ), to chain/fetter. 淨手親摘, "to wash the hands and pick in person" — the Queen Mother's gesture of reverent personal service to the Buddha, the keeper of the peaches honoring the one who restored the feast.
Truly they were:
The verse lead-in 真個是 rides this short prose segment; the peach-poem follows, a self-contained encomium to the immortal fruit.
Half red, half green, breathing sweet fragrance; gorgeous immortal roots, enduring ten thousand years.
萬載長: 長 = cháng ("enduring long"). The peaches' "half red, half green" ripeness and millennial longevity are the standard marvels of the 蟠桃 — the same fruit whose theft helped doom the monkey, now offered in thanks for his binding.
Laughable, the strains grown at the Wuling source — how could they match Heaven's garden, rarer and finer still?
武陵源 (Wǔ líng yuán) — the Peach Blossom Spring of Tao Yuanming's famous fable, the earthly utopia of peach trees. 種 = zhǒng (the varieties grown there). The poem playfully ranks even that paradisal grove below the celestial peaches — Heaven's fruit outdoes the poets' Arcadia.
Purple-veined, tender and delicate, rare in all the mortal sphere; apricot-pit, pure and sweet, without a match in the world.
寰中少: 少 = shǎo ("rare in the world"). 緗核 (xiāng hé), the "apricot-yellow pit." The fine sensory detail — purple veining, tender flesh, sweet stone — renders the peaches as objects of refined connoisseurship, the banquet's aesthetic peak.
Lengthening life and extending years, able to transform the body; those with the karmic affinity to eat them become extraordinary of themselves.
延壽延年, to prolong life and years; 易體, to change/renew the body — the peaches' alchemical power. 有緣食者, "those with the yuán (karmic affinity) to eat them": even the fruit's benefit depends on karmic fitness, the same principle that governs the whole moral economy of the chapter.
The Queen Mother of the West, keeper of the immortal peaches, comes in person to the banquet. The detail is pointed: it was the theft of her peaches — and the wrecking of her Peach Banquet in Chapter 5 — that formed a central count in the monkey's indictment. Now she offers those same peaches in thanksgiving for his binding, washing her hands to pick them herself. The fruit that helped doom him becomes the gift that celebrates his defeat.
The peach-poem is a self-contained encomium, and its wit lies in ranking even Tao Yuanming's 武陵源 — the Peach Blossom Spring, classical China's most beloved image of earthly paradise — below the celestial garden. The literary allusion is deliberate: the poem measures Heaven's peaches against the most famous peaches in Chinese letters and finds the poets' Arcadia wanting. This is the banquet at its most serenely confident, the cosmos so thoroughly restored that it can pause to savor fruit.
Yet the closing couplet quietly reasserts the chapter's moral law. The peaches lengthen life and transform the body — but only 有緣食者, "those with the karmic affinity to eat them," become extraordinary. Benefit follows yuán (affinity), not appetite. The monkey ate the peaches by theft, without affinity, and they brought him not transcendence but the furnace and the mountain. The same fruit, the same power, opposite outcomes — determined, as the opening lyric promised, by 前緣分定, the bonds fixed in advance.