仙姬歌舞 The Dancing Immortals
佛祖合掌向王母謝訖。王母又著仙姬、仙子，唱的唱，舞的舞。滿會群仙，又皆賞讚。正是：佛祖合掌向王母谢讫。王母又著仙姬、仙子，唱的唱，舞的舞。满会群仙，又皆赏赞。正是：
逐句解 Line by line
The Buddha joined his palms and thanked the Queen Mother. She then bade the immortal maidens and lasses sing those who would sing and dance those who would dance; and all the host of immortals filling the assembly praised them in admiration. It was just:
謝訖: 訖 marks the completed thanks. 又著: 著 = zhuó (to bid/set to a task). The verse lead-in 正是 rides the end of this prose segment; the praise-verse follows.
Faint celestial fragrance fills the seats; in riotous profusion, immortal pistils and immortal flowers.
縹緲 (piǎo miǎo), faint and ethereal; 繽紛 (bīn fēn), profuse and mingled. The verse renders the feast as pure sensory plenitude — fragrance and flowers — the aesthetic of restored heaven.
The Jade Capital and Golden Towers, in great magnificence; rare wares and wondrous treasures, beyond all price.
玉京金闕, the supreme Daoist heaven-palace. The line piles splendor on splendor — the material glory of the celestial court at its banquet, the visible form of 宇宙清平.
Pair on pair, equal in age with Heaven; couple on couple, increasing through ten thousand kalpas.
與天齊壽, "of age equal with Heaven" — the immortals' deathlessness. The doubled 對對…雙雙 mirrors the paired dancers and the harmonious order they embody, the very pattern the monkey had broken.
Let mulberry-fields and blue seas change as they will — they themselves know neither alarm nor surprise.
桑田滄海 (sāng tián cāng hǎi) — "mulberry-fields to blue sea," the classic figure for cosmic upheaval across aeons. 任更差: 差 = chā (to vary/change). The immortals are serenely unmoved by the turning of ages — the perfect equanimity that is the opposite of the restless, alarmed 心猿 now fixed beneath the mountain.
A brief, lyrical coda to the banquet: the Queen Mother sets her immortal maidens to sing and dance, and the assembled host watches in admiration. After the dense doctrinal weight of the Buddha's victory and the long roll-calls of the pantheon, the chapter allows itself a passage of pure aesthetic pleasure — fragrance, flowers, music, and dance.
Yet even here the praise-verse carries the chapter's argument in its imagery. The doubled couplets — 對對與天齊壽，雙雙萬劫增加 — render the immortals as paired, harmonious, deathless, increasing across aeons. This is order as music and dance: difference held in concord, the many moving as one. It is the precise aesthetic opposite of the solitary, discordant monkey who tried to seize the single highest seat and threw all pairing and hierarchy into chaos.
The closing image is the deepest. The immortals watch "mulberry-fields turn to blue sea" — cosmic upheaval itself — "with neither alarm nor surprise" (無驚無訝). This serene equanimity before the turning of all things is exactly what the 心猿 lacked: the monkey was all alarm and grasping, restless to seize what was not his moment. In the inner-alchemical reading, the banquet's dancers embody the stilled, realized mind the monkey must become — and the five hundred years under the mountain are the long discipline by which that stillness will, eventually, be won.