整整挨排 Five Hundred Years In A Row
逐句解 Line by line
The Golden-Gate Heavenly Emperor saw how fierce the rod was, and expressly invited the Tathagata to come and meet me.
如來 is the Tathagata, one of the Buddha's titles — the Thus-Come One. The Jade Emperor's solution to a monkey was to send for a Buddha, and the recitation is about to skip lightly over what happened next.
For a soldier, winning and losing come as they will; hardship and calamity are beyond arguing with.
This is the whole defeat, compressed into fourteen characters of stoic proverb. The Buddha trapped him under a mountain with a wager about a hand and a somersault; the poem says only that soldiers win some and lose some.
Ranged out in a row, five hundred whole years — and I owe it to the Southern Sea Bodhisattva's urging.
挨排 is to be lined up in order, one after another, and applied to years it means enduring them in unbroken sequence. The Southern Sea Bodhisattva is Guanyin, whose three hairs got him out of the bottle a few hundred characters ago.
In great Tang there was a monk who had left the household life, and he made a vast vow before heaven.
出家, to leave the household, is the standard term for taking monastic orders — the vow that ends a family line. 洪誓願 is the great vow, the formal Buddhist term for a bodhisattva's undertaking.
In the City of the Unjustly Dead he ferried the ghost-souls over; at the assembly on Vulture Peak he was to seek the scripture rolls.
枉死城 is a real district of the Chinese underworld, holding those who died before their time or by injustice. 度 is dù, to ferry across — the Buddhist term for delivering beings from suffering, and the image is a boat. 靈山 is Vulture Peak, the destination of the entire journey.
The poem's centre of gravity shifts here without announcing it. Twelve lines of boasting about wrecking heaven, and then in one couplet the defeat, the five hundred years, and the Bodhisattva who talked him into the road he is on. He does not dwell. It is the closest thing to modesty the recitation contains.
虧了 — I owe it to — is the phrase that turns the poem. Everything before it happened to him; everything after it he chose. And what he credits is not his own strength but somebody else's persuasion, which is the same admission he declined to make when he listed three reasons for surviving the bottle and left Guanyin's hairs off the list.