靈山勝境 The Marvel of Vulture Peak
好行者，說聲去，就縱觔斗雲，早至靈山。落下祥光，四方觀看，好去處：好行者，说声去，就纵觔斗云，早至灵山。落下祥光，四方观看，好去处：
逐句解 Line by line
The fine Pilgrim said the word and was gone: he loosed his somersault cloud and was at Spirit Mountain in no time.
觔斗雲: 觔 = jīn (for 筋), 斗 = dǒu — never dòu. 靈山 is Vulture Peak, Gṛdhrakūṭa, where the Tathāgata sits; the pilgrims will not arrive there on foot for another forty-eight chapters.
He brought his auspicious light down, looked about him on all four sides, and found a fine place indeed:
落下: 落 = luò — pypinyin gives the colloquial là here, and the reading is guarded as an invariant. 觀看: 觀 = guān, 看 = kàn; 好去處: 處 = chù. The tag closes the prose and is hand-sliced from the first line of the rhapsody.
Numinous peaks, spare and commanding; / ranged escarpments, clear and fair; / the crown of the immortal height brushing the blue empyrean.
The rhapsody opens in two four-syllable lines and a seven, then moves through five, seven and six-syllable measures — the mixed metre that marks a 賦 rather than a regulated poem. 碧漢 = the blue river of heaven, the Milky Way.
In the Western Heaven one beholds a mighty bulwark, / whose bearing overtops the Middle Land.
壓中華: 中 = zhōng, 華 = huá. 巨鎮 is a term from geomancy — a great mountain that anchors and guards a region.
The primal breath flows freely through it, and heaven and earth stretch far; / a majestic wind blows clean across, and flowers fill the terrace.
元氣 is the primal pneuma of cosmology, not a Buddhist term; the rhapsody describes the Buddha's mountain in the vocabulary of Chinese cosmography throughout, and only arrives at Buddhist matter in its last line.
At times one hears the bell and the chiming-stone, their note long drawn; / at every turn one hears the sound of sūtras, clear and bright.
音長: 長 = cháng ("long drawn"), not zhǎng. 鐘磬 are the bell and the L-shaped stone chime, the two instruments that mark the offices in a monastery.
And one sees, beneath the green pines, lay brethren expounding; / among the kingfisher cypresses, arhats walking.
Deictic 那青松: 那 = nà; 之間: 間 = jiān. 優婆 is 優婆塞, Sanskrit upāsaka, the lay disciple.
White cranes come with feeling to the Vulture Ridge; / blue simurghs alight of set purpose at the quiet pavilion.
著意: 著 = zhuó in this lexicalized adverb ("of set purpose, deliberately"). 鷲嶺 ("Vulture Ridge") translates Gṛdhrakūṭa directly, and answers 靈山 in the prose above.
Dark monkeys, pair by pair, hold up immortal fruit; / longevity deer, two by two, offer purple blossoms.
The couplet is a courtesy to the visitor: of all the creatures the rhapsody might have put in the foreground on the Buddha's mountain, it chooses monkeys, and gives them fruit to present.
Hidden birds cry again and again, as though telling something over; / strange flowers burn with colour, and no one knows their names.
如訴語 — "as if putting a case, as if pleading"; the figure returns the reader to the cricket of the earlier passage, whose cry was also 如同人話, like human speech.
Winding ridges coil around, fold upon fold, and look back on themselves; / the ancient road bends and returns, and everywhere is level.
Both 重 = chóng ("layered") and both 處 = chù, each specified positionally. The distributive reduplications 重重 and 處處 carry the couplet.
This is in truth a place pure, void, numinous and fair, / solemn with the Great Enlightenment — the manner of the Buddha's house.
大覺: 覺 = jué — 大覺 is the Great Awakening, and a title of the Buddha himself. 佛 = fó (GLOBAL_PY). The rhapsody has taken eleven lines of Chinese landscape to arrive at one line of Buddhism.
The rhapsody is a set-piece of the kind the novel keeps for arrivals at holy places, and its construction repays a moment. Ten lines describe Vulture Peak almost entirely in the vocabulary of Chinese cosmography and landscape verse — the primal breath, a geomantic bulwark overtopping the Middle Land, bell and chime, pines and cypresses, cranes and simurghs, coiling ridges, an ancient road — and only the last line names the Great Awakening and the manner of the Buddha's house. The holiest mountain in the book is introduced as a Chinese landscape that happens to be Buddhist.
Two details sit oddly and well. The birds cry 如訴語, as though telling something over, which is the same figure the narrator used for the cricket a thousand graphs ago — and Wukong was the cricket. And of all the creatures available on the Buddha's mountain, the couplet in the foreground gives dark monkeys in pairs, holding up immortal fruit. The visitor is a monkey who once stole the fruit of immortality and has come to ask the Buddha for help. The rhapsody does not comment; it simply puts the image where he will walk past it.