有經無命 Scriptures Without The Life To Fetch Them
逐句解 Line by line
I did not reckon on the hardships met upon the way, Nor look for the disasters that waited at the road's midpoint.
迍 is a rare character for stumbling, going with difficulty; paired with 災 it makes a word for calamity that is almost entirely literary. The parallel is exact — not reckoning against not looking for, the way, the midpoint.
This monk lies sick of a deep sickness and cannot go a step further; The gate of Buddha is deep and far, and reaches to the gate of heaven.
痾 is a settled illness, the same word as in the prose six passages back. The second line puts 佛門 against 天門, the Buddha's gate against heaven's gate, and the joke buried in it is bleak: both are equally out of reach from a sickbed.
With scriptures there and no life left, all this toil comes to nothing; I report it to Your Majesty: send another man instead."
空 is emptiness in the Buddhist sense and uselessly in the everyday one, and the line takes both. 別遣人, send a different person, is the last thing in the letter and the whole point of it.
The last line is the resignation, and it is devastating in its flatness. No self-pity, no theology, just an administrative recommendation: this appointee has failed, appoint another.
The middle couplet holds the real despair. Having scriptures and no life is a formulation only a Buddhist pilgrim could arrive at — the goal exists, it is real, and the person sent to get it will not last long enough. Everything already suffered becomes toil for nothing.
It is worth remembering what is actually wrong with him: a fever from going out at night without a hat. The gap between the illness and the despair is the joke Pilgrim is about to make, and it is also, seriously, the novel's diagnosis of its own hero. He does not lack courage. He lacks proportion.