禪性遭魔 The Chan Nature Meets the Demon
那師父丟了馬，脫了鐙，被妖精一陣風徑攝去了。可憐！這正是：那师父丢了马，脱了镫，被妖精一阵风径摄去了。可怜！这正是：
逐句解 Line by line
The master lost the horse, came out of the stirrups, and was carried straight off by the fiend on a gust of wind.
Three verbs of losing in nineteen characters: the horse gone, the stirrups gone, the man gone. 鐙 is the stirrup. 攝 is to take up and carry off by force, the word this novel keeps for abductions by air.
The pity of it! This is just the case:
A bare exclamation with its own mark, standing in front of the verse cue and set here as one segment with it, because the two belong to the same breath. 可憐 is the narrator, not a character — the storyteller letting the audience know how to feel before the two lines land.
The Chan nature meets the demon and the true fruit is hard to win; the River Float runs again upon a bitter star of calamity.
禪性, the Chan nature, is the master in the language of the chapter title — the same 禪 the fiend lord plots to swallow. 江流, River Float, is Tripitaka's own childhood name: he was set adrift on a river as an infant and named for it. 正果 is the true fruit, the attainment the whole journey is for. 災星, a star of calamity, puts the disaster down to fate in the old astrological sense.
The two closing lines name him twice and neither name is Tripitaka. He is the Chan nature and he is the River Float — the doctrine and the orphan, the thing the journey is about and the child who was put in the water.
It also frames the abduction as recurrence rather than accident. Again, says the second line. This has happened before and the pattern is older than the plan that caught him.