起念斷然有愛 A Thought Begins, and Love Follows
卻說寺僧天明不見了三藏師徒，都道：「不曾留得，不曾別得，不曾求告得，清清的把個活菩薩放得走了。」正說處，只見南關廂有幾個大戶來請。眾僧撲掌道：「昨晚不曾防禦，今夜都駕雲去了。」眾人齊望空拜謝。此言一講，滿城中官員人等盡皆知之。却说寺僧天明不见了三藏师徒，都道：「不曾留得，不曾别得，不曾求告得，清清的把个活菩萨放得走了。」正说处，只见南关厢有几个大户来请。众僧扑掌道：「昨晚不曾防御，今夜都驾云去了。」众人齐望空拜谢。此言一讲，满城中官员人等尽皆知之。
逐句解 Line by line
Once a thought starts, love follows without fail; once feeling lingers, calamity is certain to breed.
The chapter opens on a lyric rather than on narration, which is the first thing to notice: the poem is arguing a case before the story has begun. Its case is that trouble starts one step earlier than we think — not with the deed but with 起念, a thought starting up. Everything after that is consequence. Readers who know what happens in this chapter will see the point of putting it first.
What business has the bright spirit with sorting out the Three Terraces?
The 三臺 are the Three Terraces, six stars beside the Dipper that Chinese astronomy paired with the three highest offices of state. To ask what business the bright spirit has sorting them out is to ask why an enlightened mind would bother ranking anything — the stars, the ministries, or the people under them.
Hold that thought. A king is about to rank a monk very highly indeed, and it will not go well.
When the practice is complete it returns of itself to the primal sea.
元海 — the primal sea — is inner-alchemy vocabulary for the source everything came out of and goes back into. The short closing clause of each stanza always lands like this, flat and final.
行滿 is the practice being complete, and it is the same word the pilgrims use for finishing the journey. The poem is quietly saying the two are the same thing.
Whether one becomes an immortal or becomes a Buddha, the arrangement must be made from within.
個裡 is Song and Ming shorthand for in here — inside yourself, as against out there in the world. The line is the standard inner-alchemy position, and the novel states it about once a chapter: no amount of travelling gets you anywhere unless the travelling itself changes you.
Note that it does not choose between immortal and Buddha. This book is cheerfully indifferent to that distinction and says so whenever it can.
Wash it clean, wash it clean, until not a mote of dust remains,
The doubled 清清淨淨 is a favourite trick of this verse form. Repeating a two-word phrase slows the line down and makes it sound like a scrubbing motion, which is what it describes.
塵埃 — dust — is the standard image for whatever clings to the mind. It is the same dust in the most famous verse contest in Chan history, where one monk said to keep wiping the mirror and another said there was no mirror to wipe.
and the fruit ripens true and rises to the upper realms.
果正 — the fruit ripens true — uses the ordinary word for fruit in its technical sense: the result of practice. English keeps the fruit because Buddhist English does too.
The metre here is the Xī Jiāng Yuè pattern, one of the tunes this book returns to often. Each stanza is four clauses long and runs six, six, seven, six characters, so the last clause always lands short, like a verdict.
We tell now how the monks of the temple, at daybreak, could not find Tripitaka and his disciples, and said to one another, "We did not manage to keep them, we did not manage to say goodbye, we did not even manage to beg them to stay — clean away we have let a living bodhisattva walk." Just as they were saying it, several great households from the south quarter arrived to invite them. The monks clapped their hands and said, "Last night we kept no watch, and tonight they have all ridden off on the clouds."
This picks up the end of the last chapter without pausing for breath. The monks are not grieving so much as kicking themselves — they had a saint on the premises and let him slip out before dawn.
The three 不曾 clauses in a row are doing comic work. Chinese vernacular loves to stack a verb three times with the same negative in front, and each repetition makes the speaker sound more flustered. English gets there with "we did not manage to" repeated, which is why the translation keeps the rhythm rather than tidying it into one sentence.
活菩薩 — a living bodhisattva — is still current Chinese for someone who turns up and fixes your life. The monks mean it literally and gratefully; the joke is that the living bodhisattva has left without collecting his thanks.
The crowd all bowed toward the empty sky and gave thanks. Once this had been said, every officer and commoner in the city came to know of it.
望空拜謝 — bowing at nothing — is the standard gesture when the recipient has already gone up. It is the same motion a family makes at a graveside, and the novel uses it whenever a deity departs mid-scene.
Note how fast the news travels: one sentence, and the whole city knows. The narrator is clearing the stage.
Chapter 92 ended with three rhinoceros demons dead and four horns sawn off them; this chapter opens with a poem about a thought. The jump is not a change of subject. The last chapter's monsters wanted the smell of incense and the taste of offerings, and it killed them. This chapter's trouble will be softer and much harder to see coming, and the poem is warning us that it has already started.
The lyric belongs to a tune-pattern the novel comes back to often, and its shape is worth knowing because it recurs: two balanced six-character clauses, then a seven-character line, then a six-character line that lands like a judge's ruling. Read aloud, the closing line always sounds final. The novel deploys this form the way a modern narrator might use a hard cut to black.
The scene that follows is pure housekeeping — the pilgrims have gone, the grateful city is left holding its offerings — but it is doing one quiet piece of work. It establishes that Tripitaka is now, in the eyes of ordinary people, a holy object rather than a man. Everyone who meets him from here on will want a piece of him. A king is about to want rather more than a piece.