Canonical Classics ← 第七十九回
第七十九回
xúndòngqínyāofénglǎoshòu
dāngcháozhèngzhǔjiùyīngér

Seeking the Cave to Seize the Fiend He Meets the Old Man of Longevity · At Court the True Sovereign Rescues the Infants

邪正分明
模式 Mode Read Study
拼音 Pinyin Off
字體 Script
原文 Original text 繁體 Traditional Reader's edition 含詞賦 With rhapsody

邪正分明 Right And Wrong Made Plain

wénduōguānhúnfēipínfēixiùróngyángǎiwénduōguānhúnfēipínfēixiùróngyángǎi
xiàdeqiūhūnzhǔluànshēncángzhànzhànjīngjīngméibǎixiàdeqiūhūnzhǔluànshēncángzhànzhànjīngjīngméibǎi
bàngyóuchūshānguǎilūnquèlónghǎibàngyóuchūshānguǎilūnquèlónghǎi
jīnfānnàoqiūguózhìlìngxiézhèngfēnmíngbáijīnfānnàoqiūguózhìlìngxiézhèngfēnmíngbái

逐句解 Line by line

wénduōguānhúnfēipínfēixiùróngyángǎi wénduōguānhúnfēipínfēixiùróngyángǎi

The souls of the civil and military officers flew off, / and the complexions of the consorts and the embroidery girls changed.

魂魄飛 — souls flying — is not decoration. Chinese tradition gives a person two kinds of soul, the that is light and goes upward and the that is heavy and stays with the body, and fright was thought to loosen them. The phrase survives today as pure idiom, the way English says "scared out of my wits."

xiàdeqiūhūnzhǔluànshēncángzhànzhànjīngjīngméibǎi xiàdeqiūhūnzhǔluànshēncángzhànzhànjīngjīngméibǎi

The muddled king of Bhikṣu was so frightened he hid himself in confusion, / trembling and shaking with no way to arrange matters.

諕得, frightened to the point of — is xià, a variant of the commoner . 戰戰兢兢 is still in daily use for walking on eggshells, and it is the same phrase the prose used of this king twenty lines ago. The poem is quoting the narrative back at him.

bàngyóuchūshānguǎilūnquèlónghǎi bàngyóuchūshānguǎilūnquèlónghǎi

The rod rose like a tiger coming out of the hills, / the crutch swung round like a dragon leaving the sea.

The two similes are a matched pair by design: tiger and mountain, dragon and sea, the two great powers of Chinese imagery each shown at the moment it breaks out of its element. Pairing them like this is the ordinary furniture of a battle poem, and an audience would have expected it the way a listener expects a chorus.

jīnfānnàoqiūguózhìlìngxiézhèngfēnmíngbái jīnfānnàoqiūguózhìlìngxiézhèngfēnmíngbái

This time the great uproar was in the kingdom of Bhikṣu, / and it brought wrong and right out plain to see.

大鬧, the great uproar, is Wukong's signature word — the same one in the title of his rampage in heaven, 大鬧天宮. Using it here quietly measures the kingdom of Bhikṣu against the court of the Jade Emperor, which is either a compliment or a joke depending on how you read it.


總評 Commentary

The verse run ends where such poems always end, on a moral summary. But the particular claim is worth noticing: not that good has won, but that wrong and right can now be seen. The fight has not fixed anything yet. It has only stopped everyone pretending.

That is a fair description of what Wukong actually does in this whole episode. He does not heal the king or restore the children in the sky. He makes it impossible for the court to go on believing what it found comfortable. The repairs come later, and mostly from other people.