姓名高 Her Name Stands High
逐句解 Line by line
Her face like autumn's look, aged after the frost; her voice like a spring swallow before the festival, soft and sweet.
Two similes, one old and one young, in one couplet. 社 is the spring sacrifice to the god of the soil, held just as the swallows return — so 社前 dates the bird precisely. An old face and a young voice is the standard signature of a being who has been alive a very long time.
In her belly long conversant with the Three Vehicles, in her heart forever cultivating the abundance of the Four Truths.
And with that she is Buddhist, whatever her clothes said. 三乘 takes 乘 as shèng, a vehicle — the Three Vehicles by which beings are carried to liberation. 四諦 are the Four Noble Truths: suffering, its cause, its cessation, and the path. 腹中 and 心上, belly and heart, are where Chinese puts learning and practice respectively.
She has woken to the true fruit of emptiness upon emptiness, refined to a clear clarity and roams at ease.
空空 is emptiness doubled, the Buddhist śūnyatā pressed twice, and 了了 — liǎo liǎo — is complete comprehension, everything seen through. But 煉 is the alchemist's verb, to refine in a furnace, and 逍遙 is the title of the first chapter of the 莊子. Buddhist content in Daoist vocabulary, in one line.
This is indeed the Buddha within the Thousand Flower Cave — Bodhisattva Vairambha, whose name stands high.
And the verse names her twice over: 佛, a Buddha, and 菩薩, a bodhisattva. 毘藍 is a Sanskrit name carried over syllable by syllable, and the pipeline reads it straight, because a transcribed syllable keeps its full tone. She appears eighteen times in this chapter and this is the first time she has been in the room.
The portrait began as the Daoist's twin and ends somewhere else entirely. His four costume lines were followed by a face like iron, a foreign nose, and thunder held in — power described from the outside. Hers are followed by the Three Vehicles, the Four Noble Truths and emptiness upon emptiness. The clothes matched. The contents do not.
The mixing of vocabularies is not sloppiness. She wears Daoist dress, she is 煉-ed like an elixir, she 逍遙s in Zhuangzi's own word — and everything she has actually learned is Buddhist doctrine. By the Ming the two traditions had been borrowing each other's furniture for a thousand years, and this novel is the single greatest monument to the borrowing.
And the rhyme holds all the way: 袍, 絛, 嬌, 饒, 遙, 高, every one in 蕭豪. That makes two exact set-pieces in this scene alone, and by the count of the whole chapter, five exact against four loose. There is no rule about which are which. Each one has to be checked.