靈山塔下修 Seek the Buddha Not Afar
行者道：「你雖記得，這有四句頌子，你卻忘了哩。」三藏道：「那四句？」行者道：行者道：「你虽记得，这有四句颂子，你却忘了哩。」三藏道：「那四句？」行者道：
逐句解 Line by line
Pilgrim said, "You may remember the sutra, but there are four lines of verse that go with it, and those you have forgotten."
頌子 is a gāthā — the verse that gets attached to a sutra for chanting, summing it up in a form you can carry in your head. Pilgrim is distinguishing the text from the tag that comes with it, which is a finer point of practice than his master expected from him.
Tripitaka said, "Which four lines?"
那 is nǎ here, which — the question word, not the nà that points. He has been caught out and is asking to be told.
Pilgrim said:
Three characters, and then the verse. The colon is the novel's own mark for setting off what follows.
The Buddha is on Vulture Peak; do not go seeking him far off. Vulture Peak stands nowhere but in your own heart.
靈山 is Vulture Peak, the mountain in India where the Buddha preached, and the whole point of a journey west is to get there. Pilgrim has just told his master the destination is inside him. 汝 is the literary you, which raises the register for the verse.
Every man has a Vulture Peak pagoda of his own; better to do your cultivating at the foot of that one.
The rhyme falls on 求, 頭 and 修 — three of the four lines, with the third left free, which is how a four-line poem in this form is built. 修 is to cultivate in the religious sense: the practice, the work, the years of it.
The verse says the journey is unnecessary, which is an awkward thing to be told at the halfway point of a hundred-chapter journey. The novel has been living with that tension since the Crow's Nest handed the sutra over, and has never resolved it.
Pilgrim is the one saying it, which is the joke and also not a joke. The character who cannot sit still, who solves everything by going somewhere at speed, is explaining that the destination was never in the west.
Vulture Peak is a real place and the pagoda is a figure, and the verse slides from one to the other inside four lines without marking the change. That slide is the argument.