原文 Original text
繁體 Traditional
Reader's edition
含詞賦 With rhapsody
行似阿羅 Walking Like An Arhat Come Down
通關文牒緊隨身，包裹袋中纏錦套。通关文牒紧随身，包裹袋中缠锦套。
行似阿羅降世間，誠如活佛真容貌。行似阿罗降世间，诚如活佛真容貌。
逐句解 Line by line
通關文牒緊隨身，包裹袋中纏錦套。
通关文牒紧随身，包裹袋中缠锦套。
The rescript for passing the barriers went close upon his person; in his bundle-bag a brocade cover was wound about it.
Even in a portrait poem the paperwork gets a line. The rescript is the physical object the whole journey turns on, and Tripitaka keeps it wrapped in brocade against his body.
行似阿羅降世間，誠如活佛真容貌。
行似阿罗降世间，诚如活佛真容貌。
He walked like an arhat come down into the world; in truth he had the very look of a living Buddha.
阿羅 ā luó is short for 阿羅漢, the arhat, one who has completed the path and will not be reborn. 降 is jiàng here — to come down, to descend — not the xiáng the same character takes when it means to subdue a demon. Both readings are live in this novel and the chapter uses only this one.
The portrait ends on a comparison the chapter is going to test. Tripitaka looks like a living Buddha, and he is about to be taken for exactly that — a ten-times-reincarnated body of perfect merit, worth more as medicine than eleven hundred and eleven children.
The novel is being careful here. Everything the poem admires about him is real: the vestments were given by a Bodhisattva, the merit is genuine, the resemblance is not flattery. And within a few hundred characters the Royal Father-in-Law will look at the same man and see the same qualities, and want them boiled.