鐵丸銅汁 Iron Pellets and Molten Bronze
阿儺回報道：「已將帖子貼了。」如來即辭了玉帝眾神，與二尊者出天門之外，又發一個慈悲心，念動真言咒語，將五行山召一尊土地神祗，會同五方揭諦，居住此山監押。「但他饑時，與他鐵丸子吃；渴時，與他溶化的銅汁飲。待他災愆滿日，自有人救他。」正是：阿傩回报道：「已将帖子贴了。」如来即辞了玉帝众神，与二尊者出天门之外，又发一个慈悲心，念动真言咒语，将五行山召一尊土地神祗，会同五方揭谛，居住此山监押。「但他饥时，与他铁丸子吃；渴时，与他溶化的铜汁饮。待他灾愆满日，自有人救他。」正是：
逐句解 Line by line
Ānanda returned and reported: "The slip is pasted." The Tathāgata then took leave of the Jade Emperor and the gods, and with the two venerables went out beyond the Heaven-gate; there he gave rise to a compassionate thought, intoned a true-word incantation, and summoned a local Earth-god to the Mountain of Five Phases, to join with the Five-Quarter Guardians and dwell there keeping watch over the captive.
已將 and 將五行山 both use 將 as jiāng. 一個 takes yí before gè (falling tone), 召一尊 takes yì before zūn (level). 五方揭諦 are Wǔ fāng Jiē dì, the Five-Quarter Guardians, from Sanskrit jaya. But the phrase governing the whole arrangement is 慈悲心, a thought of compassion. On his way home the Buddha stops to make sure the prisoner will survive.
"But when he hungers, give him iron pellets to eat; when he thirsts, give him molten bronze to drink. When the days of his calamity are fulfilled, there will of itself be one to save him." It was just:
鐵丸子 and 銅汁 — iron pellets and molten bronze. As mercy goes it is bracing, but look at what it is: the body that swallowed the elixir is now being fed metal and fire, which is refining carried on by other means. 災愆滿日 is when the days of his calamity are full. And then the promise that quietly sets up the rest of the novel: 自有人救他, there will of itself be someone to save him. The lead-in 正是 closes the prose.
The fiendish monkey, bold of heart, rebelled against the Heavenly Palace; yet by the Tathāgata's hand he was subdued.
伏手降 keeps 降 as xiáng, to subdue. The couplet compresses the chapter's whole action into one balanced pair of lines — the monkey's boldness against the Buddha's effortlessness — and 卻被 is the hinge it turns over on.
Thirsty, he drinks molten bronze to bear out the years; hungry, he eats iron pellets to pass the hours.
捱 (ái) is to endure, to drag something out; 度時光 is to pass the time. Between them they turn the Buddha's grim provisions into five hundred years of daily routine. Molten bronze as a drink one gets used to.
Heaven's calamity, bitter and confining, brings grinding torment; human affairs grown desolate — yet he rejoices that his life endures.
喜命長 keeps 長 as cháng: glad that his life is long. Even in the middle of the torment the verse finds something to be glad about — he is alive. That is not a small point. Surviving under the mountain is the entire ground of the redemption to come.
If ever the hero should once more stir and struggle free, in some year to come he will serve the Buddha and go up to the West.
重展掙 keeps 重 as chóng, again, and 掙 as zhèng, to struggle. 奉佛 keeps 佛 as fó. Then the verse gives the whole game away: one day he will serve the Buddha and go up to the West. The remaining ninety-three chapters, announced from under a mountain.
Another poem says: He had unleashed his bravery, his great force flourishing; subduing dragons and taming tigers, plying his clever powers.
伏逞 is that formerly he displayed, unleashed. 降龍伏虎 keeps 降 as xiáng — subduing dragons and taming tigers, a fixed phrase for supreme mastery, the sort of thing normally said of an arhat and here applied to a monkey. The poem runs through his whole career of prowess before passing sentence on it.
He stole the peaches and stole the wine, roaming the heavenly mansions; received the register and enjoyed grace, dwelling in the Jade Capital.
受籙 keeps 籙 as lù, a celestial register or commission. The couplet lists what Heaven gave him — a post, a register, favour — and sets his thefts against it. Put that way, the charge is not really rebellion. It is ingratitude, and that is the moral centre of the indictment.
His cup of evil brim-full, his body falls captive; his root of goodness unbroken, his vital breath yet rises.
Here is the couplet the verdict turns on. 惡貫滿盈, the string of evils filled to the brim, is set against 善根不絕, the root of goodness unbroken; 還 is hái, still. His evil is paid for and his body bound, and the 善根 — Sanskrit kuśala-mūla, the root of merit — comes through intact. That is why this is a sentence and not a damnation.
If indeed he is to slip free of the Tathāgata's hand, then let him wait till the Tang dynasty brings forth its holy monk.
唐朝 keeps 朝 as cháo, the Tang dynasty. 聖僧 (shèng sēng) is the holy monk: Tripitaka, Xuanzang, who has not appeared in the book yet and whose arrival will unpin the mountain. The chapter's last line looks straight past the imprisonment to the journey. The captive is already waiting for the pilgrim.
The Buddha's last act before leaving is, remarkably, an act of compassion (慈悲心). He summons an Earth-god and the Five-Quarter Guardians to watch over the captive, and he arranges his food: iron pellets for hunger, molten bronze for thirst. The provision is grim to the edge of cruelty, and its purpose is preservation. The monkey is to be kept alive beneath the mountain, not destroyed. And the Buddha states the term plainly — when the days of his calamity are fulfilled, there will of itself be one to save him.
That sentence is the hinge of the entire novel. The five hundred years under the mountain are not an ending but a wait — a refining confinement, in the alchemical reading, in which the wild 心猿 is held fixed (定) until it can be released into disciplined service. The two closing poems spell out the trajectory: in some year to come he will serve the Buddha and go up to the West (他年奉佛上西方), and let him wait till the Tang dynasty brings forth its holy monk (且待唐朝出聖僧). The prisoner is already promised to the pilgrim.
The single most important line is 惡貫滿盈身受困, 善根不絕氣還昇: his evil is requited and his body bound, but his 善根 — the root of goodness, Sanskrit kuśala-mūla — remains unsevered. This is why the punishment is not damnation. As Anthony C. Yu and Plaks both stress, Journey to the West is fundamentally a story about cultivation, and the mountain is its first great discipline: the mind-monkey is not destroyed but stilled, its goodness kept safe, waiting for the deliverance that will turn a rebel into a guardian. A chapter that opened with Heaven helpless ends with the cosmos repaired, the captive secured, and the whole pilgrimage planted in a single promise.