杯斝飛傳玉液清 The Jade Liquor Goes Round
一行君王幾位，觀之良久。早有儀制司官邀請行者三人入留春亭，國王攜唐僧上華夷閣，各自飲宴。那歌舞吹彈，鋪張陳設，真是：一行君王几位，观之良久。早有仪制司官邀请行者三人入留春亭，国王携唐僧上华夷阁，各自饮宴。那歌舞吹弹，铺张陈设，真是：
逐句解 Line by line
The royal party, several of them, looked at it a long while. Presently an officer of the Bureau of Ceremonies invited Pilgrim and the other two into the Spring-Keeping Pavilion, while the king took the Tang Monk up to the Pavilion of Eternal Peace, and each party fell to its own feasting. With the singing and dancing, the piping and the plucking, and everything set out and displayed, it was truly:
一行 is a trap the sound sets and the sense springs. Read as a group travelling together it is yì xíng, which is what it means here; the same two characters read as a row or a rank take a different second syllable, and the chapter does use that reading once, in a poem about two ranks of courtiers. 吹彈 is piping and plucking — wind and strings, the standard pair for a full band. 彈 is tán, to pluck a string, and not the dàn of the iron pellets Pilgrim ate under the mountain. And the seating has happened. The king has his monk; the monk's protectors are at the other table.
The heights of the gate of heaven, and the light of dawn is born; on phoenix hall and dragon tower the auspicious haze lies level.
A banquet poem, and it starts as far away as it possibly can — at 閶闔, the gate of heaven itself — before coming down, line by line, to the roofs, the garden and finally the clothes of the men at the table.
Spring's colour lays its fine embroidery of flower and grass; the light of the sky strikes far and the brocade robes shine.
鋪 turns up here doing the same work it did all through the garden rhapsody: spring spreads its embroidery. The poem is quietly reusing the last poem's own verb, two hundred and seventy-six characters later.
The pipes and the singing wind about as at an immortals' feast; the winged cups fly from hand to hand and the jade liquor runs clear.
The 斝 is a real object and a very old one: a bronze wine vessel with a handle and two little posts on the rim, of a kind buried with kings a thousand years before this novel was written. Using its name for a cup at a banquet is like calling a wine glass a chalice.
Lord and subject take their pleasure together in the sight of it: peace over Chinese and barbarian for ever, an age of calm and quiet.
The closing line puts the name of the pavilion they are sitting in — 華夷永鎮 — straight into the verse. A poem written for the occasion is supposed to end by reading the building back to itself. The batch ends here, on the fourth line, with no prose after it. This block is the one shape the chapter has that Chapter 93 did not: it closes on verse.
A second showcase poem six hundred characters after the dawn one, and the pair of them do the same job: they say that everything is exactly as it should be. Heaven's gate is bright, the haze is auspicious, the cups are going round, lord and subject are enjoying themselves together, and the peace will last for ever.
Every word of that is the official version. The actual arrangement in the garden is that a king who will not let his monk leave is entertaining him at a table set well apart from the three companions who could get him out — and the bride the whole feast is for is not who she says she is.
This is the chapter's method in miniature, and it is why the poetry matters. The verse gives us the surface as the court sees it, in the court's own language, at full volume. The prose around it tells us what is underneath. Neither one comments on the other, and the reader is left holding both.