一塵不染 Not One Speck Of Dust
逐句解 Line by line
Passion and desire, in root and in cause, are all of one kind; have the feeling and you have the craving, and it comes of itself.
Chapter seventy-four opens on a poem instead of a scene, which is this novel's way of posting the theme before the story has touched it. The subject is the pair 情 and 慾, fellow-feeling and appetite, and the first line refuses to let you keep them apart: 總一般, all of one kind, one root and one cause between them. The second line then concedes the obvious. Have the one and you will have the other, 自如然, of its own accord, with nobody deciding anything.
Of all the thronging men who train at the gate of the shramana, the one who cuts off craving and forgets passion — he is Chan.
Two borrowed words hold up this line. 沙門 is not Chinese at all: it carries the Sanskrit shramana, one who labours, the general word for a religious ascetic. 禪 does the same job on dhyana, meditative absorption, and it is the character that travelled to Japan and came back to English as Zen. 紛紛 is a doubling for milling about in numbers, so the line quietly sorts the crowd of practitioners from the one who actually manages the thing.
You must fasten the mind on it; you must hold the heart firm; not one speck of dust, and the moon at the top of the sky.
Here is the idiom everybody knows. 一塵不染 — not one speck of dust settling — is still what Chinese reaches for to call someone spotless, whether that means a clean floor or an incorruptible official. It began as a Buddhist figure for a mind that no worldly thing sticks to, which is exactly its sense here. 著 is zhuó, to apply or fasten, so 著意 is to fix the attention on something rather than let it drift. The two short lines are not a fragment: this is a 詞, sung to a set tune, and a pair of threes breaking up the sevens is what the tune requires.
Work the practice, advance by degrees, let nothing go astray; practice full and merit complete — the Greatly Awakened Immortal.
休教 is plain spoken do not let, and 教 is jiào, to cause or allow, not the jiāo of teaching somebody a lesson. 大覺 renders the Buddha's own title, the Greatly Awakened, on a character that means sleep when it is read the other way — a joke Chinese has never tired of. And then the poem hands the Buddhist prize to a Daoist 仙, an immortal. The novel shops in both stores at once and never once apologises for it.
The chapter begins before the story does. Fifty-five characters of verse arrive first, and only then does the storyteller clear his throat and pick the pilgrims up on the road. This is the novel's standard way of framing a chapter, and here the frame is doing real work: the last two chapters put the travellers through the Spider Cave and the Yellow Flower Abbey, which is to say through desire and then through poison, and this poem is the summing-up.
Its argument is tighter than it first looks. Feeling and craving share one root, so you cannot keep the tender half and discard the appetite; the only move available is to cut both. That is a harder doctrine than the usual moralising, and the poem knows it, which is why the middle lines turn practical — fasten the mind, hold the heart firm, keep the surface clean. The reward at the end is deliberately mixed: a Buddhist awakening collected by a Daoist immortal.
The form is a 詞, a lyric written to fit an existing tune rather than a free poem, and its shape is audible even in translation. Four seven-character lines, then two clipped threes, then sevens again to the close. The threes are where the tune tightens and the poem stops describing and starts instructing.