佛祖冷笑 The Buddha's Cold Rebuke
佛祖聽言，呵呵冷笑道：「你那廝乃是個猴子成精，焉敢欺心，要奪玉皇上帝尊位？他自幼修持，苦歷過一千七百五十劫。每劫該十二萬九千六百年。你算他該多少年數，方能享受此無極大道？你那個初世為人的畜生，如何出此大言！不當人子！不當人子！折了你的壽算，趁早皈依，切莫胡說！但恐遭了毒手，性命頃刻而休，可惜了你的本來面目。」佛祖听言，呵呵冷笑道：「你那厮乃是个猴子成精，焉敢欺心，要夺玉皇上帝尊位？他自幼修持，苦历过一千七百五十劫。每劫该十二万九千六百年。你算他该多少年数，方能享受此无极大道？你那个初世为人的畜生，如何出此大言！不当人子！不当人子！折了你的寿算，趁早皈依，切莫胡说！但恐遭了毒手，性命顷刻而休，可惜了你的本来面目。」
逐句解 Line by line
The Buddha heard him out and laughed a cold "ha-ha": "You wretch are but a monkey become a spirit — how dare you cheat your own heart and scheme to seize the honored seat of the Jade Emperor?
那廝: 那 = nà (demonstrative). 成精 (chéng jīng), "become a spirit/goblin" — the Buddha pointedly denies the monkey's self-image as a cosmic immortal, naming him a mere beast-turned-sprite. 欺心 echoes the chapter's opening lyric exactly.
He has cultivated himself from infancy, bitterly passing through one thousand seven hundred and fifty kalpas. Each kalpa is one hundred twenty-nine thousand six hundred years. Reckon how many years that makes — only then may one enjoy this Boundless Great Way.
一千七百: 一 before 千 (qiān, 1st tone) is yì. The figure 十二萬九千六百年 per kalpa is no accident — it is exactly the length of one cosmic 元 (yuán) in Shào Yōng's 《皇極經世》 chronology, cited in Chapter 1. The Buddha answers presumption with scale: aeons of cultivation against the monkey's few centuries.
You beast, only first entering upon human form — how dare you utter such big words! Unbecoming of a human! Unbecoming of a human! You shorten your own allotted span — submit at once, and by all means talk no nonsense!
初世為人: 為 = wéi ("be / become a man"). 不當人子: 當 = dàng (fitting/proper) — an idiom of reproach, "not fit to be a [proper] person." 折 (zhé), to diminish; 壽算, one's reckoned lifespan. 切莫: 切 = qiè.
I fear only that you will meet a cruel hand, your life ended in an instant — and what a pity that would be for your Original Face."
本來面目 (běn lái miàn mù) — the "Original Face," the foundational Chan term for one's true, unborn nature (from the Platform Sūtra's famous question). The Buddha's warning is double-edged: he threatens death, but the phrase he chooses reveals his real concern — the monkey's buried Buddha-nature, which the whole pilgrimage exists to recover.
The Buddha's rebuke answers the monkey's boast-poem point for point, and its rhetorical weapon is scale. Where the monkey claimed the throne by might and by the logic of rotation (皇帝輪流做), the Buddha replies with arithmetic: the Jade Emperor earned his seat across one thousand seven hundred and fifty kalpas, each of 129,600 years. That figure is not arbitrary — it is precisely one cosmic 元 in the Shào Yōng chronology the novel laid out in Chapter 1, so the rebuke silently invokes the whole 《皇極經世》 time-frame against the monkey's few centuries of cultivation.
The deeper move is the Buddha's diagnosis of category. He refuses the monkey's self-description entirely: not a cosmic immortal but a 猴子成精, a beast that has become a sprite, "only first entering upon human form." In the inner-alchemical and Chan reading, this is the 心猿 being told the truth about its actual station — vast in raw power, infantile in realization.
Yet the rebuke ends not on threat but on 本來面目, the "Original Face" — the single most loaded term in Chan, the true nature one had "before father and mother were born." That the Buddha pities the loss of the monkey's Original Face, even while warning of death, discloses the chapter's real stakes. As Anthony C. Yu notes, the punishment about to fall is never merely penal; the five hundred years under the mountain are a refining confinement, aimed at the very nature the Buddha here names.