靈根孕育 Born Of Heaven And Earth
你上來，站穩著，聽我道：你上来，站稳着，听我道：
逐句解 Line by line
Come up here, stand steady, and listen to me:
The tag that opens four hundred and forty-eight characters of autobiography, and it is nine characters long. 著 is zhe, the durative — keep standing while you listen. The line is a whole sentence of its own, neither tacked onto the speech before it nor swallowed by the poem after.
"Heaven and earth were the parents that bore me; sun and moon's pure essence knotted the holy embryo.
精華 is the refined essence of a thing, what is left when everything coarse is boiled off. 聖胎 is a term from inner alchemy — the immortal foetus a Daoist adept grows inside himself — and Wukong is claiming he was born as one.
"The immortal stone held me for years past counting; the numinous root conceived and bore me — how strange a thing!
數 is shù, a number, and 無歲數 is beyond counting in years. 甚 is shèn, the intensifier — how very. 靈根 is the numinous root, another alchemical term borrowed for a rock.
"In that year I was born under the Triple Yang at its height; today I return to the true, and the ten thousand meetings are in harmony.
三陽泰 reads the birth off the Book of Changes: 泰 is the eleventh hexagram, three unbroken yang lines below three broken yin, the moment when heaven and earth are in communication. It is the most auspicious possible horoscope.
"I once gathered the fiends and was hailed their chief; I could subdue the monsters and have them bow at my cinnabar cliff.
降 is xiáng here, to subdue or bring to heel — the same word that stands in this chapter's own title. Seventy characters on it takes the other reading, for sending something down from above.
This is the largest poem in the chapter and it scans without a single slip. Thirty-two lines of fourteen characters, and every one of the thirty-two closes on the same rhyme: 胎, 哉, 諧, 崖, 來, 懷, 階 and on through to 哉 again at the end. Twenty-seven of them still rhyme in modern Mandarin. The other five — 諧, 崖 twice, 階 twice — read differently today but belonged to the same rhyme in the language the poem was written in.
The opening four lines are a birth certificate written in alchemical language. 聖胎, the holy embryo, and 靈根, the numinous root, are both technical terms from inner alchemy for stages of the immortal body an adept grows through decades of practice. Wukong applies them to a rock on a mountain. He was born already finished, which is the boast the whole poem rests on.
三陽泰 is the neatest of them. 泰 is a hexagram of the Book of Changes — three solid yang lines under three broken yin, the configuration where heaven and earth are open to each other and everything prospers. Giving your own birth that reading is roughly the force of announcing that you were born under a perfect conjunction of every planet at once.