五風十雨 Five Winds and Ten Rains
逐句解 Line by line
Long-parched farmland has met with sweet rain; the watercourses carry trade, and everywhere is open.
久旱逢甘雨, meeting sweet rain after a long drought, is one of the four traditional great joys of life — the others being a candle-lit wedding night, meeting an old friend far from home, and seeing your name on the examination list. Every reader would have recognised it instantly.
Deep thanks that holy monks came within our bounds; much obliged that the Great Sage went up to the Palace of Heaven.
多蒙 is much indebted to — the register of a formal thank-you note. The poem is written from the prefecture's point of view and reads like an address of thanks.
The three things undone, and with them the wrong done before; one thought of taking refuge, and the fruit of goodness is vast.
一念 — a single thought, for the fourth and last time in this chapter. It has been the unit the whole story is measured in.
From now on may it be as in the age of Yao and Shun — a wind every fifth day, a rain every tenth, and rich harvests for ten thousand years.
堯舜 are Yao and Shun, the two legendary sage-emperors of high antiquity whose reigns are the Chinese byword for perfect government. The poem ends by wishing Fengxian the weather of the golden age — and repeating the very formula Pilgrim used when he sent the gods home.
The poem opens on one of the four great joys — sweet rain after long drought — and any Ming reader would have felt the phrase land before they finished the line.
What it does with the rest of its space is quietly generous. It thanks the monks, thanks Pilgrim for going up to heaven, notes that the three conditions are undone, and credits it all to one thought of taking refuge. Nobody is blamed. The prefect's offence is referred to once, obliquely, as the wrong done before, and then folded into the same line as its undoing.
And it closes on the wish for the age of Yao and Shun, using the exact formula Pilgrim gave the weather gods a few passages ago. The chapter has arranged for its own moral to be quoted back by the people it was about.