指河為姓 He Took the River for a Surname
沙和尚合掌道：沙和尚合掌道：
逐句解 Line by line
Sha Monk pressed his palms together and said:
The third cue, and the shortest. Where Pilgrim stepped forward and Eight Rules arranged his snout, Sha Monk simply puts his hands together — the ordinary gesture of Buddhist respect. The novel characterises all three men in the way they get to their feet.
"Old Sha was originally an ordinary mortal, and it was fear of the wheel of rebirth that sent me looking for the Way. I drifted like cloud to the corners of the sea and wandered loose to the ends of the sky.
His motive is different from the other two, and he says so in the first sentence. Pilgrim went looking for the Way out of restlessness and Eight Rules fell into it by accident; Sha Monk went because he was afraid of dying and coming back. 輪迴 is the turning wheel of birth and death — the Sanskrit saṃsāra. 雲遊, cloud-roaming, is still the ordinary Chinese word for a monk's wandering life.
"I kept robe and bowl about me always, and refined heart and spirit within my own dwelling. And so, through that devotion, I came to meet with immortal companions.
The two halves are a monk's whole discipline: the outward part he carries and the inward part he works on. 衣缽, robe and bowl, are the only two things a monk is supposed to own, and the phrase has come to mean an inheritance or a tradition handed on — much the way English says a mantle. 舍 is shè here, a dwelling, and it is worth pointing out because the same character in a different reading means to give something up. This edition writes that other word 捨, with a hand added on the left, so the two stay apart on the page even when they merge in the ear.
"I nursed the child to ripeness and paired it in union with the fair maid. When the labour was complete at three thousand, I brought the four marks into harmony.
More inner alchemy, and denser than Eight Rules's. 孩兒 and 姹女 — the child and the fair maid — are the standing code names for the two forces that have to be married inside the practitioner's body. In the furnace metaphor they are lead and mercury; in the body they are the paired energies whose union produces the immortal embryo. It is the same trick advertising plays when it calls a moisturiser a serum: the vocabulary is borrowed wholesale from a laboratory, and everyone in the know reads straight through it. 四相, the four marks, are the four phases the work passes through, matched to the four directions and the four seasons — a season cycle we will meet again in this chapter, on a set of painted screens.
"I rose above the heavenly realms, made my bow at the dark vault, and was appointed Great Curtain-Raising General, attending upon the phoenix carriage and the dragon coach, with the title of General.
His old post, and a grander one than it sounds: the officer who lifted the curtain of the Jade Emperor's carriage stood closer to the throne than almost anyone. 將 is jiàng here, a general, not the jiāng that does duty as an ordinary connecting word — the same character, two quite different jobs, and this chapter uses it both ways within nine sites. 玄穹, the dark vault, is the sky as a place of audience, the way English writing says the court of heaven.
"It was also over the Peach Banquet that I let a crystal cup slip and shatter, and I was banished to the River of Flowing Sand, where I changed my head and swapped my face, working sin and doing harm to living things.
The third 只因 variation, and by now the pattern is unmistakable: every one of these three men fell out of Heaven at the same party. And note the proportions. Pilgrim overturned the banquet and fought the armies of Heaven. Eight Rules got drunk and pestered a goddess. Sha Monk 失手打破玻璃盞 — dropped a cup. The punishments were the same. The novel has never once commented on this, and has never needed to.
"Happily the Bodhisattva came roaming far into the Land of the East and urged me to take refuge, and to wait for the Tang court's son of Buddha and go west with him to seek the scriptures and win the true fruit.
The same rescue, in the same position in the speech, for the third time. All three disciples were left lying where they fell until Guanyin came through on her recruiting trip in Chapter 8. 果正 inverts the usual 正果, the true fruit — the attainment at the end of the road. The inversion is for the sake of the matched phrasing, and the pilgrimage is, in the plainest sense, a job with a pension.
"From then I set myself to begin again and took up the great awakening once more. I pointed at the river and made it my surname; my religious name is Wujing, and I am called Monk."
The closing move of all three speeches, and the prettiest version of it. 指河為姓 — he pointed at the river and made it his surname — because the river was the River of Flowing Sand, and so he is Sha, which means sand. 悟淨 means awakened to purity. Set the three names side by side and the scheme shows: Wukong awakened to emptiness, Wuneng awakened to ability, Wujing awakened to purity. Guanyin named all three, and she was making a set.
The third panel, and the one that shows what the other two were for. Told once, a life story is a life story. Told three times in the same shape, it becomes an argument: these are three versions of one career. Each man rose by his own effort, each held office in Heaven, each fell at the same banquet, each was left where he fell until the same Bodhisattva came by with the same offer.
What the repetition exposes is the arbitrariness. Sha Monk broke a cup. That is the sum of his crime, and he says so plainly, and he was thrown down to a river to eat travellers for centuries. Put beside Pilgrim's war on Heaven it is absurd, and the novel lets the absurdity sit there without a word of comment, which is far more effective than saying it.
The alchemical passages in the middle of this speech and Eight Rules's are not decoration. This novel keeps two accounts at once: a comic adventure story on the surface, and beneath it a sustained reading of the journey as the refining of a single person, in which the pilgrim's body is the furnace and his companions are the ingredients. When Sha Monk says he married the child to the fair maid, he is describing the same work the whole book is about.
One thing the king in the room cannot know, and the reader does: none of this is what he asked. He wanted to be sure his daughter had married into something respectable. He has been told, at length and with pride, that his new sons-in-law are three convicted felons from the court of Heaven.