剖開他脊背 Out Through The Back
我欲從他便門而出，恐污真身。是我剖開他脊背，跨上靈山。欲傷他命，當被諸佛勸解：傷孔雀如傷我母。我欲从他便门而出，恐污真身。是我剖开他脊背，跨上灵山。欲伤他命，当被诸佛劝解：伤孔雀如伤我母。
逐句解 Line by line
I wished to go out by her back passage, but feared to defile my true body.
便門 is a side door or postern, used here as the polite word for the obvious exit. Twelve characters, and they are as delicate as the subject allows.
So I cut open her spine and climbed out onto the Spirit Mountain.
脊 is jǐ, the spine — a character the machine reaches for in the wrong tone. Eleven characters for an escape that is also a caesarean performed from the inside.
I would have taken her life, but the assembled Buddhas dissuaded me: to harm the peacock, they said, would be to harm my own mother.
勸解 is to talk somebody down from doing something. The argument they make is the hinge of the whole genealogy: being born out of a body makes that body your mother, however you got out of it.
The escape is grotesque and the novel gives it eleven characters. He considered the ordinary exit, rejected it on grounds of purity, and cut his way out through the spine instead.
Then he wanted to kill her, and the other Buddhas stopped him with a piece of reasoning that is either beautiful or sophistical depending on your mood. You came out of her body; that makes her your mother; you cannot kill your mother.
It is a genuinely strange doctrine and the book states it without comment. Being swallowed and cutting your way free counts as being born. The peacock did not consent, did not intend it and was mutilated by it, and she is his mother all the same.