今日榮華 Today Comes the Glory
逐句解 Line by line
Treasure-flames and golden light dazzle the eye; / strange fragrances and rare dishes, finer still and more subtle.
映目明 — strikes the eye bright. The verse opens on light before it gets to food, which is how the Thunderclap set-piece opened too. ⚠ 更微精 — finer still. The first character is gèng, the comparative even more, and not the gēng of a night-watch or of altering something — both of which this chapter also uses.
A thousand tiers of golden pavilion, lovely past all end; / one strain of immortal music, clear as it enters the ear.
⚠ 一派仙音 — one strain of immortal music. And this is the first sound in the scene. The great set-piece on Thunderclap was entirely visual — light, tiles, colours — and the banquet poem adds hearing. 千層 — a thousand tiers. The verse keeps using the same big round numbers the catalogue is about to use in earnest.
Plain flavours and immortal flowers that men have seldom seen; / fragrant tea and strange food that win one long life.
⚠ 素味 — plain flavours, meaning food with no meat in it. The banquet is vegetarian, which is worth saying out loud: the reward at the end of the road is monastery food, and the poem is calling it the finest thing anybody ever ate. ⚠ 得長生 — win long life. cháng, length, and the same phrase the Daoist immortal's portrait used of himself two thousand characters ago. It is a Daoist promise, made about a Buddhist lunch.
All this while they have borne a thousand kinds of hardship; / today comes glory, and the joy of the Way accomplished.
⚠ The last line is the poem's whole point and it is about the account being settled. 受盡千般苦 on one side, 今日榮華 on the other, and the pivot is the word for TODAY. ⚠ 喜道成 — the joy of the Way accomplished. And 道 is the Daoist word, in the last line of a poem about a Buddhist banquet, three characters from the end. The chapter will not stop doing this. 榮華 — glory and flowering, the standing phrase for worldly splendour. It is an odd word to reach for at the top of the Spirit Mountain, and the poem reaches for it anyway.
Four lines about a meal, and they are the only lines in the chapter that describe a reward rather than a place. Light, then music, then food, then the reckoning: a thousand kinds of hardship borne, and today, glory.
The food is vegetarian and the poem says so — plain flavours — while calling it the finest thing men have ever seen. That is not a contradiction in a Buddhist text; it is the point. The greatest banquet in the novel has no meat in it, and a pig is eating it.
And the vocabulary is Daoist again in two places out of four: the food wins long life, and the joy is the joy of the Way accomplished. The novel has been mixing the two houses all chapter, and here it does it inside a single four-line poem about lunch.