假做孝婦 She Played The Mourning Widow
行者急擡頭看處，原是黎山老姆。趕至空中謝道：「老姆從何來指教我也？」老姆道：「我才自龍華會上回來，見你師父有難，假做孝婦，借夫喪之名，免他一死。行者急抬头看处，原是黎山老姆。赶至空中谢道：「老姆从何来指教我也？」老姆道：「我才自龙华会上回来，见你师父有难，假做孝妇，借夫丧之名，免他一死。
逐句解 Line by line
Pilgrim looked up quickly, and it was the Old Mother of Mount Li.
黎山老姆 is a divinity who turns up repeatedly in this novel to test or help the pilgrims, usually in disguise and usually as an ordinary woman. The 姆 of her name is a matron or nurse; other editions write the mountain 驪 instead of 黎, and the 世德堂本 reading is what stands above. 擡 is the fuller old form of 抬, which the pipeline folds in the simplified view.
He flew up into the air to thank her. "Old Mother, where have you come from to instruct me?"
指教 again, with 教 as jiào — one of fifteen in the chapter and every one this reading. Note that he does not ask why she disguised herself. He asks where she has come from, which in a celestial bureaucracy is the more useful question.
"I was just on my way back from the Dragon Flower Assembly," said the Old Mother, "and seeing your master in peril I played a mourning wife, borrowing the pretext of a husband's death, to spare him from dying."
And the widow was a fiction. 假做孝婦, played a mourning wife; 借夫喪之名, borrowed the name of a husband's death. There was no husband, no quarrel over bamboo poles, no funeral offering — the gruel and the paper money were props. 龍華會 is the Dragon Flower Assembly, the great gathering under the dragon-flower tree where Maitreya will preach when he comes; she has been at a conference. 難 is nàn, a peril, the third and last of the chapter's noun ones.
Everything she said was true except everything about herself. The Daoist really is a Hundred-Eyed Demon Lord; the poison really does rot the marrow in three days; Vairambha really does live on Purple Cloud Mountain and really can beat him. The husband, the quarrel over bamboo, the bowl of cold gruel and the string of paper money were all stage dressing for a briefing.
It is worth going back to what that fiction achieved. Pilgrim would not take directions from a passing deity; he was in no state to be helped and had not asked. What he did do, at the very bottom of his afternoon, was stop for somebody crying harder than he was. She built a person he could not walk past.
And she has come from a conference. 龍華會 is the assembly at which the future Buddha will preach, and she was on her way home from it when she noticed the situation and improvised a widow. The novel's gods are always doing this — grand appointments, and errands on the way back.