福祿壽三詩 The Poems of Blessing, Emolument, and Long Life
大眾感激，各獻詩伸謝。福詩曰：大众感激，各献诗伸谢。福诗曰：
逐句解 Line by line
The whole assembly, moved with gratitude, each presented a poem to voice their thanks. The Poem of Blessing says:
Three thank-you poems follow, one each for 福祿壽 — Blessing, Emolument, Longevity, the three star-gods whose figures still stand on shop counters and New Year decorations. Each poem plays the same trick: every line opens on its own title-character.
Blessing's star shines radiant before the World-Honored One,
Every line of this set opens on 福, and the two sets after it do the same with 祿 and 壽. Eight lines apiece, twenty-four in all, and not one allowed to begin on anything else.
blessing received runs ever deeper, distant and unbroken.
更 is gèng, still more. 彌深遠 stretches the blessing in depth and 更綿 in duration, which the rest of the set will keep doing by other means.
Blessing's virtue knows no bound, enduring as the earth,
無疆 is without borders. Joined to 同地久 it borrows the old formula that pairs the endurance of earth with that of heaven.
blessing's affinity brings rejoicing, joined fast to Heaven.
And here is the other half of it — 與天連. The two lines are a single stock wish, cut down the middle and served as a couplet.
Blessing's field, broadly sown, flourishes year on year,
福田, the field of blessing, is the Buddhist image for giving: sow generosity now, harvest merit later. 種 is the verb, to sow, read zhòng.
blessing's sea, vast and deep, holds firm age upon age.
福海洪深 answers the 福星 of the opening line. The blessing arrives first as starlight, then as an ocean, then as years that hold.
Blessing fills heaven and earth, its sheltering shade abundant,
乾 is qián in 乾坤, heaven-and-earth, the first of the trigrams — not the gān that means dry. 福蔭 is blessing pictured as shade: a tree you plant and your grandchildren sit under.
blessing grows beyond measure, forever whole and entire. The Poem of Emolument says:
無量, beyond measure, is a Buddhist word doing duty in a good-luck poem. 祿詩曰 then rides the last line of the first poem straight into the second.
Emolument weighty as a mountain, the bright phoenix sings,
祿 is the salary of an official — the pay that came with a government post — and so, by extension, worldly prosperity. 重 is zhòng, heavy.
emolument attends the peaceful hour, hailing the Evening Star.
長庚 is Venus seen in the evening, a lucky sight; 長 is read cháng.
Emolument heaped in myriad measures, the body hale and sound,
萬斛 is ten thousand hú, the hú being a large dry measure for grain. Wealth counted by the granary.
emolument enjoyed by the thousandfold, the age at peace.
千鍾 is a thousand zhōng, another grain measure and another way of saying more than anyone could eat.
Emolument's stipend, high as Heaven, stands yet forever firm,
還 is the adverb hái here — yet, still — not the huán that means give back.
emolument's renown, like the sea, grows ever more clear.
更 again gèng. The set turns from how much to how clear: a sea that is not merely vast but see-through.
Emolument's grace, continued afar, draws many a reverent gaze,
遠繼 is passing down the generations, 瞻仰 the looking-up done by everyone underneath. Emolument is being described as something you inherit and are watched enjoying, rather than something you earn.
emolument's rank, without bound, brings glory to ten thousand realms. The Poem of Longevity says:
壽詩曰 rides the close of the second poem into the third, the same hinge used eight lines earlier.
Longevity's star offers its splendour before the Tathāgata,
壽星 is the god of long life — the bald, high-domed old man with the peach and the staff, whose star is Canopus and whose face still appears on birthday cakes.
the realm of long life, in radiant glory, opens from this place.
華 is huá, splendour, not the huà of the mountain name. 壽域, the realm of long life, means an age in which nobody dies young.
Longevity's fruits, heaped on the tray, breathe an auspicious haze,
The longevity set hands over its wishes as objects on a table: fruit piled on a dish, and the lucky vapour steaming off it.
longevity's flowers, freshly plucked, are set upon the lotus throne.
蓮臺 is the lotus throne, so the flower just cut goes straight in front of the Buddha himself. Gift and recipient named in one line.
The longevity poems, pure and refined, abound in wondrous art,
The poem starts praising itself. Among the gifts of long life is the longevity poem — the one you are reading.
the longevity songs, their melodies and tones, are set by consummate skill.
調音 is tune and pitch; 調 is the noun diào, a melody or mode, not the tiáo that means adjust.
The span of life, long prolonged, endures with sun and moon,
延長 is to draw out; 長 is cháng.
long life, like mountain and sea, is more lasting still!
更 a third time gèng. Mountain and sea are the standard pair for things that outlast you, and 悠哉 ends all twenty-four lines on an exclamation rather than a picture.
The grateful assembly answers the Ullambana feast with three poems on the standard triad 福祿壽 — Blessing, Emolument, Longevity. Each is eight lines long, and each is built on one exacting constraint: every line has to begin with the poem's own title-character. The translation keeps the constraint by starting every line with Blessing, Emolument, or Long life.
The idiom is worldly to the point of cheek: stars, stipends, grain-measures, birthday emblems, the sort of thing painted on a shop calendar — all offered up in a Buddhist paradise before the Tathāgata himself. Andrew Plaks reads such insertions as deliberate counterpoint, the everyday and the transcendent allowed to share a page without apology.
As Anthony C. Yu observes, these are gift-poems, and they get the plain reader's-edition treatment rather than the rhapsody chip: they are strict eight-line regulated poems, 律詩, not the loose parallel lines of a 賦. Their job is decoration — a courtly flourish to round off the feast before the chapter gets down to its real business, which is commissioning the quest.