勸世詞 The Opening Poem
逐句解 Line by line
Rank, wealth, fame and merit are fixed by bonds formed long before; as a man, never deceive your own heart.
The chapter-head lyric opens on the moral law of the whole episode: 前緣分定 — one's lot is settled by prior karmic yuán (affinity). 欺心 (qī xīn), "to cheat one's own heart," is the precise charge laid against the monkey: self-deception that breeds overreach.
Upright, grand, bright and clear — loyalty and goodness ripen into ever-deeper fruit.
善果 (shàn guǒ) is the Buddhist "good fruit" of karma; 彌深, "deeper still." The logic of reward and retribution frames the coming punishment as cosmic bookkeeping, not divine temper.
A little arrogance, and Heaven adds its censure; what is not met now awaits its appointed hour.
狂妄 (kuáng wàng) — reckless presumption — is the monkey's signature flaw. 待時臨, "await the moment's coming," foreshadows the long delay before deliverance: the sentence under the mountain this chapter imposes.
Ask the Lord of the East: why is it that calamity now comes to assail?
東君 (Dōng Jūn) is the solar deity, Lord of the East. 甚 is read shén ("what / why"), the interrogative, not shèn ("very").
Only because the heart, soaring high, schemed without limit, refusing high and low — and so threw rule and precept into chaos.
The diagnosis lands: 心高, the over-lofty heart-mind, is the 心猿 unrestrained. 罔極, "without bound"; 不分上下, refusing all hierarchy. The lyric names, before the action begins, exactly what the Buddha's mountain will hold down.
Chapter 7 opens, like every chapter, with a head-verse — here an admonitory cí-style lyric (勸世詞) rather than a regular shi. Its irregular lines deliver a single moral thesis: presumption (狂妄) and self-deception (欺心) draw down Heaven's censure, while one's true lot is karmically fixed in advance. It reads as a verdict pronounced before the trial.
The allegory is explicit in the close. 心高圖罔極 — "the heart soaring high, scheming without limit" — is the inner-alchemical reading of Sun Wukong as the 心猿, the mind-monkey: brilliant, boundless, ungoverned. To "refuse high and low" is to deny the 禮-order of the cosmos. In the 易經 frame that dominates this chapter — the Eight Trigrams of the brazier, the Five Phases of the mountain — the monkey is precisely the force that must be returned to its place within the pattern.