重漫苔蘚 A Stone Path Under Moss
長老欣然,遂不騎馬,與樵子並四眾同行,向西南迤𨓦前來,不多路,果見那:长老欣然,遂不骑马,与樵子并四众同行,向西南迤𨓦前来,不多路,果见那:
逐句解 Line by line
The elder was glad to go, and so did not ride, but walked along with the woodcutter and the four of them, winding away to the south-west; and after no great distance they saw indeed:
Tripitaka getting off the horse to walk beside the man he saved is the whole courtesy of the scene in one clause. The character 迤𨓦 ends with a rare one that many fonts will not carry, so a reader may see a box in its place — the pair means winding along a slanting way. And 同行 here is travelling together, so 行 keeps xíng; the machinery reads it as the trade-guild sense instead, which is the one place in this chapter it takes that reading wrongly.
A stone path deep under moss and lichen; a brushwood gate all tangled with flowering vine.
The scene-setting turns domestic. 柴扉, a brushwood gate, is the same image the ant poem closed on many passages back, where the point was a creature slipping through one unnoticed — and here it is a real gate with a real woman about to be standing at it.
The description that follows is built exactly like the one for the fiend's cave: matched pairs, four characters then eight, scenery doing the work. The difference is what it is describing.
Every element here is poor and none of it is grim. A path nobody has swept, a gate made of sticks, a vine that has been left to grow over it. The cave got rare flowers and jasper grass; the good house gets moss.