臣僧稽首 Your Servant Monk Bows Thrice
長老滴淚道：「我寫著：长老滴泪道：「我写着：
逐句解 Line by line
The Elder let fall his tears and said, "I would write:
著 is zhe, holding the act of writing open — I am writing as follows. The tears come before the first word.
Your servant monk bows his head, three times to the ground, And with shouts of Ten Thousand Years does reverence to his sage lord;
稽首 is qǐ shǒu, the deepest of the formal bows, forehead to the floor. 山呼, the mountain shout, is the ritual cry of Ten Thousand Years raised by assembled officials — named for an occasion when a mountain was said to have echoed it back at a Han emperor.
Let the two ranks, civil and military, set eyes on this alike, And the four hundred lords and ministers hear it and know:
文武兩班 are the civil and military officials, who stood in two files facing each other at court. The whole opening is court protocol, which is the point — a dying man on a straw mat is dictating a memorial to the throne in perfect official form.
In that year I took the decree and departed the Eastern Land, Hoping upon Spirit Mountain to look upon the World-Honoured One.
靈山, Spirit Mountain, is Vulture Peak, where the Buddha preaches. 世尊, World-Honoured One, renders the Sanskrit bhagavat, a standard title of the Buddha.
The letter is a memorial to the throne, in the correct verse form, with the correct salutations. Tripitaka is too weak to sit up unaided and he is still observing court protocol to the letter.
That is not a joke at his expense. It is who he is. He was a court cleric before he was a pilgrim, and under the fever the training holds. There is something moving about a man composing a formal document in his head while crying.
The tears in the first line are the only thing here that is not protocol, and the narrator puts them before he opens his mouth. We know how the letter ends before we have heard a word of it.