西方極樂境 The Paradise of the West
謝罷，各分班而退，各執乃事，共樂天真。果然是：谢罢，各分班而退，各执乃事，共乐天真。果然是：
逐句解 Line by line
Their thanks rendered, they parted into ranks and withdrew, each to his own charge, sharing the joy of the unspoiled nature. Truly it was:
天真 is the nature you were born with, before anyone set about improving it. The same two characters are still in daily use, where they now mean naive. 果然是 is the storyteller's cue that a set-piece description is about to start.
Auspicious haze drifts over India's sky; rainbow light enfolds the World-Honored One.
天竺 is the old Chinese name for India. 世尊, World-Honoured One, translates bhagavat, one of the Buddha's standing titles.
The Western land is named the foremost — the gate of the formless Dharma-King.
無相 (animitta, without marks or form) and 法王, Dharma-King, are titles for the Buddha's country and its ruler; 相 is again xiàng.
Ever are dark apes seen offering fruit, and elaphure bearing flowers in their mouths;
玄猿獻果 and 麋鹿啣花: dark gibbons holding out fruit, elk with flowers in their mouths. Animals making offerings is the standard shorthand for holy ground — even the wildlife has taken orders.
blue simurghs dance, gaudy phoenixes call;
鸞 and 鳳 are the two lucky phoenix-birds that appear wherever a paradise is being described.
numinous tortoises proffer long life, immortal cranes hold magic fungus in their bills.
芝 is the líng zhī, the bracket fungus that confers long life and still sits in jars in Chinese medicine shops.
They dwell at ease in the Pure Land's Jeta Grove, and enjoy the Dharma-realm of the Dragon Palace.
祗園 is the Jetavana, the park where the Buddha taught for years; 法界 is the dharmadhātu, the whole realm of things as the teaching sees it.
Day upon day the flowers bloom; hour upon hour the fruits grow ripe.
日日 against 時時: flowering and ripening happen at once instead of taking turns. The farming year has been switched off, which is the point of the place.
Cultivating stillness, they return to the real; investigating Chan, their fruit comes to perfection.
歸真 is Daoist vocabulary and 果正 is Buddhist, and they sit in the same four-beat line without a seam. The novel does this constantly, treating the two traditions as one shop with two counters.
Neither perishing nor arising, neither waxing nor waning.
Straight out of the Heart Sūtra, which runs 不生不滅，不增不減 — the novel swaps the first two characters and keeps the rest.
Mist and rose-cloud, faint and far, drift to and fro; heat and cold cannot intrude, and the years go unreckoned. A poem says:
The last couplet of the set-piece; 詩曰 then hands over to the quatrain.
Coming and going as they please, they roam at leisure,
優游 is unhurried ease, going where you like at the pace you like. The description ends on freedom of movement — exactly what the monkey pinned under the mountain no longer has.
with neither dread nor any sorrow.
恐怖 is fear, and the line echoes the Heart Sūtra's 無有恐怖. The same two characters are the modern Chinese word for terror, which gives the line an accidental jolt for a reader today.
In the field of Ultimate Bliss all is open and serene,
極樂 (jí lè) is Sukhāvatī, the Land of Ultimate Bliss, and still the everyday Chinese word for paradise.
and in the Great-Thousand worlds there is no spring or autumn.
大千 is short for the three-thousandfold great-thousand world, Buddhism's name for the entire cosmos. No spring and no autumn: where there is no season there is no clock.
The assembly breaks up and the story stops dead for a 賦, a descriptive set-piece in loose parallel lines, on the Western Paradise, finished off with a quatrain. Nothing happens in it. It is a still, bright tableau of a place where the flowers and the fruit are both always out and the seasons never turn.
The verse is soaked in Heart Sūtra language — 不滅不生，不增不減 and 也無恐怖 — so that the paradise gets defined by what is absent from it: no arising, no ceasing, no fear. Yu notes that the novel's paradises are always lessons as well as scenery. The timelessness of 沒春秋 is a picture of nirvāṇa quite as much as of a garden.
The passage also sits on a hinge. Everything before it is the Buddha coming home; everything after is the great commission. The calm conjured here is precisely what the eastward transmission is meant to extend to 南贍部洲, the violent human continent named a few scenes later — and that contrast is what the whole chapter is built on.