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。今蒙如来大法炼锁顽猴，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 is Wáng mǔ niáng niáng, the Queen Mother of the West, who owns the peach orchard. 引一班 takes yì before bān (level tone). Her entrance, dancing girls and all, begins the procession of gifts that fills the rest of the chapter.
"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 takes yí before huì (falling tone). 鍊鎖 (liàn suǒ) is to chain and fetter. Then 淨手親摘: washed her hands and picked them herself. A goddess with an entire staff makes a point of doing the picking in person — the same gesture as a host who insists on cooking for you.
Truly they were:
Two words of prose to carry the lead-in 真個是, and then a praise-poem about fruit, complete in itself.
Half red, half green, breathing sweet fragrance; gorgeous immortal roots, enduring ten thousand years.
萬載長 keeps 長 as cháng, enduring long. Half red and half green, ripening across ten thousand years: the standard wonders of the 蟠桃. Keep in mind that this is the same fruit whose theft helped put him under the mountain, now being handed round to celebrate it.
Laughable, the strains grown at the Wuling source — how could they match Heaven's garden, rarer and finer still?
武陵源 is Wǔ líng yuán, the Peach Blossom Spring — Tao Yuanming's fable of a fisherman who rows up a stream through blossoming peach trees and finds a village that has never heard of the outside world. It is the best-loved image of paradise in Chinese letters. 種 is zhǒng, the varieties grown there. And the poem, entirely straight-faced, calls them laughable beside Heaven's.
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 keeps 少 as shǎo, rare. 緗核 (xiāng hé) is the pale apricot-yellow stone. Purple veining, tender flesh, a sweet pit — the poem has moved from cosmology to tasting notes, and this is the banquet at its most pleased with itself.
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 is to stretch out life and years; 易體 is to change the body itself. Then the catch, in the last three words: 有緣食者, those who have the yuán — the karmic tie — to eat them. The fruit works only for those fitted to it. That is the law the opening lyric announced, arriving here as a footnote on dessert.
The Queen Mother of the West, keeper of the immortal peaches, comes in person. 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 thanks 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 stands on its own, and its wit lies in ranking even Tao Yuanming's 武陵源 — the Peach Blossom Spring, the most beloved image of earthly paradise in Chinese writing — below the celestial garden. The allusion is chosen deliberately. The poem measures Heaven's peaches against the most famous peaches in the literature and finds the poets' paradise wanting. This is the banquet at its most serenely confident: a cosmos so thoroughly repaired that it can stop and taste fruit.
And yet the closing couplet quietly restates the chapter's moral law. The peaches lengthen life and remake the body — but only for 有緣食者, those with the karmic tie to eat them. Benefit follows yuán, affinity, not appetite. The monkey ate these peaches by theft, without affinity, and they brought him the furnace and the mountain rather than transcendence. Same fruit, same power, opposite outcomes — settled, as the opening lyric promised, by 前緣分定, the bonds fixed in advance.