修仙者 One Who Cultivates Immortality
俗語云：『坐坐坐，你的屁股破。火熬煎，反成禍。』更不知我這：俗语云：『坐坐坐，你的屁股破。火熬煎，反成祸。』更不知我这：
逐句解 Line by line
"As the common saying has it: sit, sit, sit — your backside splits; the fire boils away and turns to disaster instead.
Two lines of a street rhyme, quoted inside the quotation, and they are the only crude thing anybody says in the chapter. The second line is a joke a Daoist can make and a Buddhist cannot: 火熬煎 is furnace language, and he is saying that sitting still cooks you without producing anything.
"What is more, you do not know about this of mine:
更 is gèng, what is more. The tag for the second set-piece, and it stays with its verse.
"One who cultivates immortality — his bones are firm and fine;
The answering set-piece begins, and it is built to the same measure as Tripitaka's: one who becomes a monk, one who has completed his nature; one who cultivates immortality, one who attains the Way. He is matching him line for line.
"one who attains the Way — his spirit is most numinous.
達道, to reach the Way, against Tripitaka's 了性, to complete the nature. And note what each side puts first: the monk began with what is laid down, the Daoist begins with bones and spirit — with the body.
The structural joke is that both speeches have the same shape. The Royal Father-in-Law is not answering Tripitaka's argument so much as performing the same piece with the words changed, and a Ming audience would have enjoyed the mirroring as a set piece in itself.
But the first two lines already show where the two differ. Tripitaka's opening pair was about letting go and emptiness. This one is about bones and spirit. Every claim in the sixteen lines that follow will be about doing something to a body, which is exactly what the king wants to hear.