蘇武慢詞 Lyric to “Su Wu Slow”
逐句解 Line by line
Let me ask of the gate of Chan: seekers past counting, yet again and again they grow old in vain at the road's end.
禪關 — the “barrier” or gate of Chan practice. 參求 (cānqiú) is meditative seeking; 參 here is cān, not shēn. The line opens the lyric as a warning that mere effort, untouched by insight, comes to nothing.
Grinding a brick to make a mirror, hoarding snow for grain — how many of the young have these delusions led astray!
磨磚作鏡 alludes to the Nanyue Huairang–Mazu kōan: a brick can never be polished into a mirror, just as sitting alone can never be ground into buddhahood. With 積雪為糧 it names two images of misdirected austerity. 年少 = niánshào, the young.
A single hair swallows the vast ocean; a mustard seed holds Mount Sumeru — at this the golden-hued ascetic faintly smiles.
The paradox is the Huayan figure of mutual containment: the boundlessly large nested in the boundlessly small. 須彌 (Sumeru) is the world-axis mountain. The 金色頭陀 (“golden ascetic”) is Mahākāśyapa, master of dhūta discipline and heir to the wordless transmission — his smile is the smile that received the Flower Sermon.
In the instant of waking one leaps past the ten stages and three vehicles; in stagnation one stays mired in the four births and six paths.
The contrast is awakening versus arrest. 十地 are the ten bodhisattva bhūmi; 三乘 (sān shèng) the three vehicles. 四生 (womb, egg, moisture, transformation) and 六道 (the six destinies of rebirth) together name the whole round of saṃsāra.
Who has heard, before the Cliff of Severed Thought, beneath the Shadowless Tree, the cuckoo's one cry at the dawn of spring?
絕想崖 and 無陰樹 are Chan place-names for the condition past all conceptual shadow. 杜宇 is the cuckoo, whose call traditionally heralds spring; here it is the sudden note of awakening breaking a long night.
The road to Caoxi is steep, the clouds over Vulture Peak are deep; here the voices of old companions fade and are lost.
曹溪 is the seat of the Sixth Patriarch Huineng; 鷲嶺 (Gṛdhrakūṭa, Vulture Peak) is where Śākyamuni preached the Lotus. The two toponyms set the southern Chan lineage beside its Indian source, both now far and hard of access.
On the thousand-zhàng cliff of ice the five-petalled lotus opens; in the ancient hall the curtain hangs and incense curls.
五葉蓮 recalls Bodhidharma's prophecy 一花開五葉, the one flower whose five petals are the five houses of Chan. 千丈 = a thousand zhàng, an immense height. The closing images turn from austerity to a serene, flowering attainment.
At that moment, seeing through to the very source, you shall behold the Dragon King and the Three Treasures.
識破源流 — to penetrate to the origin of mind. 三寶 are the Three Jewels (Buddha, Dharma, Saṅgha); the 龍王 stands as their guardian. The line resolves the lyric: the goal the whole chapter sets in motion is realization, not exertion.
This opening lyric, set to the tune 蘇武慢 (“Su Wu Slow”), is the doctrinal keynote of the chapter. The narrative has just turned from Sun Wukong's defeat to the Buddha's resolve to send the scriptures east, and the lyric supplies the soteriology behind that turn: the goal is sudden insight into the nature of mind, and the great danger is mistaking strenuous practice (磨磚作鏡) for the thing itself.
Read against the allegory of the xīnyuán, the “mind-monkey” just pinned beneath the Mountain of Five Phases, the lyric reframes his imprisonment. Andrew Plaks reads such interpolated verse as the novel's way of holding a contemplative mirror up to its own slapstick action; the cosmic mischief of the previous chapters is here recast as the soul's arrest in 四生六道, awaiting the awakening the pilgrimage will stage.
The closing couplet — 識破源流，便見龍王三寶 — promises that to see through to the source is already to behold the Three Treasures. Following Anthony C. Yu, the diction here is deliberately Chan: 禪關, 曹溪, 鷲嶺 braid the Indian and Chinese transmissions into a single line of descent that the coming quest will trace in reverse, from Chang'an back toward the West.