把真陽喪了 If I Lose the True Yang
今被這妖精拿住，要求配偶，我若把真陽喪了，我就身墮輪迴，打在那陰山背後，永世不得翻身。」行者笑道：「莫發誓。既有真心往西天取經，老孫帶你去罷。」今被这妖精拿住，要求配偶，我若把真阳丧了，我就身堕轮回，打在那阴山背后，永世不得翻身。」行者笑道：「莫发誓。既有真心往西天取经，老孙带你去罢。」
逐句解 Line by line
"Now I am taken by this fiend and pressed to take a wife. If I let the true yang be lost, my body will fall into the wheel of rebirth and be flung down behind the dark mountain, never in all the ages to turn over again."
This is the chapter's doctrinal centre and every term is technical. 真陽, the true yang, is the vital masculine essence that inner-alchemy practice conserves and refines; losing it is the one irreversible failure. 輪迴 is samsara, the wheel of rebirth. 陰山 is the dark mountain of the underworld, where the worst of the dead are penned. And 翻身, to turn one's body over, is the vernacular for ever getting up again — the same phrase people still use for a change of fortune.
Pilgrim laughed. "Do not swear oaths."
Seven characters that deflate a page of theology. Pilgrim has heard what he needed to hear and has no interest in the metaphysics.
"Since your heart is truly set on fetching the scriptures from the west, this old Monkey will take you along."
The offer is made only now, and the sequence is the point: he asked, he provoked, he got his answer, and then he agreed to help. The closing 罷 is ba, the light suggestion particle, which keeps a rescue sounding like a favour.
The chapter's title is now fully legible. The fair girl seeks the yang and the primal spirit guards the way: the fiend wants the thing Tripitaka has just named, and Pilgrim is the guard. What looked like a wedding plot is being restated as an alchemical robbery.
The inner-alchemy tradition took the older, outward alchemy of furnaces and cinnabar and turned it inward — the body as the crucible, the vital essences as the ingredients, an immortal embryo as the product. In that scheme the true yang is capital, and spending it is not a sin so much as a bankruptcy. Tripitaka is not talking about chastity in a moral sense; he is talking about losing the whole working substance of the journey.
And then Pilgrim tells him to stop swearing and offers to take him home. The novel almost never lets a passage of doctrine stand without puncturing it, and the puncture is usually affectionate.