色空禪 The Chan Of Form And Emptiness
逐句解 Line by line
Form is emptiness — so it has stood from of old; and to call emptiness form is just as true.
The lyric opens by quoting the best-known line in Buddhist scripture and then turning it around. The Heart Sutra says form is emptiness and emptiness is form; this says both halves at once and treats the whole thing as old news. 兮 is a sigh-word out of very ancient poetry, kept here to mark the pause in mid-line. 古 is gǔ, and it does not rhyme — the tune lets the opening line off.
Could a man wake clean through to this Chan of form and emptiness, what need would he have of cinnabar fired in the crucible?
Cinnabar and a crucible belong to the outward alchemist — the man trying to cook up immortality in a furnace. Get the insight, says the line, and you can sell the equipment. The automatic reading offers the cannon sound; the character is 炮 páo. 康熙 火部五畫 opens at 薄交切 · 蒲交切, 音庖, glossing it 毛炙肉也 and 一曰裹物燒也 — wrap a thing up and put it in the fire, which is precisely what an alchemist does to cinnabar. The cannon band comes later, 披敎切, 音砲, and its own gloss admits the sound was borrowed off 砲, the siege engine.
Let the practice of virtue be cultivated whole and never slacken; let the effort be spent bitterly, as a thing long simmered and seared.
Having thrown out the furnace, the poem quietly keeps the fire. 熬煎 is what you do to medicine — long simmering, hard boiling — and the line hands that word straight to moral effort. 行 is xíng, conduct.
One day, the practice standing complete, only then does he go to court in Heaven, his immortal face fixed for ever and never altering.
The payoff. Finish the practice and you get your audience at the celestial court, with a face that stops ageing. 朝 is cháo, to attend court; read another way the same character means morning, but not here. 不 softens to bú before the falling tone of 變.
Chapters in this novel like to open with a poem, and this one is a song lyric rather than a poem proper. The line lengths give it away — six, six, seven, six, then the same again — fifty characters in the shape of the tune 西江月. A Ming reader would have known that pattern on sight, the way we know a limerick by its bounce. The source prints it as two long lines rather than eight short ones.
The rhyme is spotless. Six of the eight positions chime, all on -an: 然 rán, 禪 chán and 煉 liàn in the first half, 煎 jiān, 天 tiān and 變 biàn in the second. The two that close each half fall in tone while the other four stay level, and that is the tune asking for it, not the poet slipping. The two positions left out of the scheme, 古 gǔ and 懈 xiè, are exactly the two it excuses.
The argument is sharper than the doctrine sitting on top of it. If form and emptiness were never two things to begin with, the alchemist's furnace has nothing left to do, and 何用丹砂炮煉 asks that as a question expecting no answer. Then comes the sly part. The poem gives up the cinnabar but keeps the heat: two measures on, twelve characters after 炮, the fire comes back as 熬煎 and is handed to moral effort instead. You are still being cooked. Only the ingredients change.
Whoever put this lyric here had read the chapter. The story ahead turns on three golden bells, and when the text finally says where they came from, it says they were 摶煉 — worked and fired — in the furnace of the Tushita Palace, the Daoist patriarch's own elixir kitchen. The poem dismisses that furnace on the way in. The gadget that decides everything came out of it.