枯木回生 Dead Wood Comes Back to Life
逐句解 Line by line
At ten thousand doors and a thousand gates the people chant the Buddha's name; through six streets and three markets the water runs in flood.
六街三市 is a set phrase for the whole of a city's public space — the streets and the market quarters. It is paired here against ten thousand doors, so the two lines covers everything private and everything public in one breath.
East and west the watercourses are full, every one; north and south the creeks and bends run clear, everywhere.
The four directions, and two more doubled words. 條條 is every single channel and 處處 every single place. The proclamation at the start of the chapter said the watercourses were shallow and the ditches empty; this is that sentence answered, clause for clause.
Withered seedlings get their moisture; dead wood comes back to life.
得 is dé, the attainment reading. 枯木回生, dead wood returning to life, is a phrase with a Buddhist flavour to it — the image is standard for something beyond hope reviving.
In the fields hemp and wheat stand thick; in the villages beans and grain rise up.
田疇 is farmland laid out in strips, and 村堡 is a walled village. The rhapsody has moved from weather to agriculture without a break, which for a farming society is the same subject.
The rhapsody works methodically outward: doors and streets, then watercourses in all four directions, then the seedlings, then the crops.
And it is systematically undoing the proclamation from the start of the chapter. That document said the watercourses were shallow and the ditches empty, the fields blighted and the garrison land thin. Every one of those clauses gets answered here in the same order. The novel has built the recovery as a line-by-line reversal of the disaster.
The line about dead wood coming back to life is the one that carries the weight. Two thirds of the people of Fengxian are dead, and nothing in this rain brings them back. The verse reaches for a phrase about resurrection and applies it, carefully, to a tree.