金身沒色 The Gold Body Lost Its Colour
逐句解 Line by line
The bell tower collapsed and the drum without its skin, / the glazed lamps for the incense broken and spoiled.
A drum with no skin makes no sound; a bell tower on the ground cannot be rung. The line is quietly listing the instruments by which a monastery announces that it exists.
The Buddha's golden body without its colour, / the arhats lying toppled east and west.
倒 is dǎo, fallen — the statues are on the floor. The 金身 is the gilt on a clay image; when the gold goes the figure is mud again.
Guanyin rained on until she has gone entirely to clay, / the willow spray and the pure vase dropped to the ground.
Here 觀 keeps guān — Guanyin, the one who observes the sounds of the world — against the guàn of a Daoist house two passages back. The willow spray and the vase of pure water are her two invariable attributes, which is how you know a statue is hers even after the rain has taken the face off it.
This is the heart of the rhapsody and it is genuinely shocking in a way the earlier wreckage is not. Bricks and beams are property. These are the images that a Buddhist reader would bow to.
Guanyin is the worst of it, and the book knows exactly what it is doing by putting her last. She is the bodhisattva of compassion, the one who hears every cry for help, and she is a heap of wet clay with her water-vase on the floor beside her.
Sixty-three passages back, a monk who could not refuse a cry for help went to look, and he is now walking a demon down a mountain because of it. The narrator never draws the line between that and this ruined statue. It simply sets them twenty-five passages apart and says nothing.