跳出情牢 Out Of The Prison Of Passion
話表三藏師徒們打開慾網，跳出情牢，放馬西行。走不多時，又是夏盡秋初，新涼透體。话表三藏师徒们打开欲网，跳出情牢，放马西行。走不多时，又是夏尽秋初，新凉透体。
逐句解 Line by line
Our story tells how Tripitaka and his disciples tore open the net of desire, leapt clear of the prison of passion, and gave the horse its head westward.
話表 is the storyteller clearing his throat — our tale relates — and it is the seam where the poem stops and the chapter starts. The two images are built to match, a net you tear open and a gaol you jump out of: 慾網 and 情牢, craving and feeling again, the very pair the poem has just spent fifty-five characters on. It doubles as a summary of the last two chapters, where the spider women and then the Daoist very nearly kept them. 藏 in 三藏 is zàng, a storehouse or basket — the Three Baskets of the canon, which is what Tripitaka's name means and why he answers to it.
They had not gone far when summer was spent and autumn beginning, and a new coolness went through them.
Time in this novel is kept by weather rather than by dates. 盡 is jìn, used up, so the summer is not merely over but exhausted. 新涼透體, the new cool soaking through the body, is the line that earns the poem coming next — the chapter answers a change in the air with eight lines of scenery rather than with a road.
Two sentences of housekeeping, and they are doing three jobs at once. They close the previous adventure, they restate the poem's theme in the plainest possible words, and they move the season on. Nothing is wasted.
The pairing of net and prison is worth pausing on. Both are traps you are already inside, not dangers ahead, and both require an active break — tearing, jumping — rather than avoidance. That is the poem's argument again, translated out of verse and into the vocabulary of an escape.
Then the temperature drops and the chapter changes register entirely. The pilgrims will not reach anything resembling a plot for another forty-three characters; what comes instead is autumn, described at length and for its own sake.