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。王母又着仙姬、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 uses 訖 to mark the thanks as done and finished. 又著 takes 著 as zhuó, setting somebody to a task. The phrasing that follows is worth hearing — sing, those who would sing; dance, those who would dance — a construction Chinese makes effortlessly and English has to work at. The lead-in 正是 closes the prose.
Faint celestial fragrance fills the seats; in riotous profusion, immortal pistils and immortal flowers.
縹緲 (piǎo miǎo) is faint, drifting, half there; 繽紛 (bīn fēn) is scattered profusion, the word for petals coming down. Both are pairs of rhyming syllables that work by sound as much as by sense. The verse is doing nothing but pleasure here: scent, flowers, plenty.
The Jade Capital and Golden Towers, in great magnificence; rare wares and wondrous treasures, beyond all price.
玉京金闕 is the Jade Capital and its Golden Towers, the highest Daoist palace there is. The line piles splendour on splendour — the visible form of 宇宙清平, a cosmos at peace and showing it.
Pair on pair, equal in age with Heaven; couple on couple, increasing through ten thousand kalpas.
與天齊壽 is to be of an age with Heaven itself. Look at how the line is built: 對對, 雙雙, pair on pair, couple on couple. The doubling is the dancers, and it is also the argument — an order made of matched things, which is the pattern the monkey broke by wanting the single seat at the top.
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 turning into blue sea — is the standing phrase for change on a scale nobody lives through twice. It comes from the tale of an immortal woman who mentions, in passing, that she has now watched the eastern sea become mulberry fields three times. 任更差 keeps 差 as chā, to vary. Let it all change, says the verse; they are neither alarmed nor surprised. Which is the exact opposite of the creature now pinned under the mountain.
A short 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 doctrinal weight of the Buddha's victory and the long roll-calls of the pantheon, the chapter allows itself a passage of straightforward pleasure — fragrance, flowers, music, dance.
Even here the praise-verse carries the argument in its pictures. The doubled couplets — 對對與天齊壽, 雙雙萬劫增加 — show the immortals paired, harmonious, deathless, increasing across ages. This is order as music and dance: difference held in concord, 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 rank into chaos.
The closing image goes deepest. The immortals watch mulberry fields turn into blue sea — upheaval on a cosmic scale — with neither alarm nor surprise (無驚無訝). That calm in the face of everything turning over is exactly what the 心猿 lacked. The monkey was all alarm and grasping, restless to seize what was not his to take yet. Read as inner alchemy, the dancers at this banquet embody the stilled, realized mind he has to become — and the five hundred years under the mountain are the long discipline by which that stillness will eventually be won.