禪心不亂 The Chan Mind Unmoved
好和尚，真是：好和尚，真是：
逐句解 Line by line
A fine monk indeed! Truly:
好和尚 is the storyteller's formula of admiring exclamation, as 好獃子 was earlier. The tag is stage-setting and rides with the verse it introduces.
His eyes would not look upon unwholesome forms; his ears would not listen to lewd sounds.
惡色 is not ugliness but the unwholesome object of sight, in the technical Buddhist sense of 色 as form. The opening couplet states the discipline the whole piece then dramatises.
He held that brocaded, delicate beauty to be so much dung and soil, that gold-and-pearl loveliness to be so much dust and ashes.
如糞土 and 若灰塵 are the two halves of one figure; the parallelism is exact down to the comparative particles 如 and 若.
All his life he has loved only the practice of Chan; not half a step will he stray from the ground of the Buddha.
參禪 takes 參 as cān, to practise or investigate — not the shēn of 人參 nor the cēn of 參差. 一生 takes the mechanical yì before the first tone of 生.
How should he know to cherish jade and pity fragrance? He understands only the refining of the true and the nurture of the nature.
那裡 is rhetorical here, so 那 is nǎ. 惜玉憐香 is the fixed expression for tenderness shown to women. 修真養性 is the standing formula of inner-alchemical practice.
That woman fiend, all quick and quivering, her spring-thoughts without bound;
活潑潑 is a reduplicative descriptive and keeps its default reading. 春意 is the conventional figure for sexual feeling.
this elder, stiff as a driven nail, his Chan-mind still in its place.
死丁丁 — dead-still as a nail — answers 活潑潑 across the semicolon, and the two reduplications are built to be read against each other.
The one like soft jade and warm fragrance; the other like dead ash and withered wood.
槁木死灰 comes from the 齊物論 chapter of the 莊子, where the body is likened to withered wood and the mind to dead ashes. Here the Daoist figure is put to Buddhist work.
That one spreads the mandarin-duck coverlet, her lewd humour thick upon her;
淫興 takes 興 as the nominal xìng, a mood or appetite — against the verbal xīng of 氣概興 in the battle rhapsody earlier in this chapter. 鴛衾 is the coverlet figured with mandarin ducks, the emblem of a married pair.
this one draws tight his monk's robe, his cinnabar heart steadfast and bright.
褊衫 is the monastic upper garment. 丹心 — the cinnabar heart — is the standing figure for undivided loyalty, here transferred from the political to the religious.
That one would press breast to breast and thigh to thigh, and pair as luan and phoenix; this one would face the wall, return to the mountain, and seek out Bodhidharma.
面壁 recalls the nine years Bodhidharma is said to have sat facing a wall at Shaolin. The couplet is the widest the piece opens: one appetite set against one patriarch.
The woman fiend loosens her clothes, making display of her fragrant flesh and sleek skin;
解衣 takes 解 as jiě. 賣弄 is to show off deliberately, not merely to reveal.
the Tang Monk gathers his lapels, keeping close hidden his coarse flesh and rough hide.
緊藏 takes 藏 as cáng, to conceal, not the zàng of 三藏 — the one place in this chapter where the graph carries its other reading. 糙肉粗皮 is deliberately unlovely against her 肌香膚膩.
Says the woman fiend: “My pillow is to spare and my quilt lies idle — why should we not sleep?”
枕剩衾閑 is four graphs holding two parallel subject-predicate pairs. From here the piece turns into matched question and answer, eight exchanges in all.
Says the Tang Monk: “My head is shaven and my habit strange — how should I keep you company?”
相陪 takes the mutual xiāng. His answer declines on grounds of costume rather than of doctrine, which is characteristic of him.
Says that one: “I would gladly be the Liu Cuicui of a former reign.”
前朝 takes 朝 as cháo, a dynasty. 柳翠翠 is the courtesan of the 月明和尚度柳翠 story, in which a monk is brought down by a woman and a second monk delivers her.
Says this one: “This poor monk is no Moon Ācārya.”
闍黎 is the shortened form of 阿闍黎, transcribing the Sanskrit ācārya, a preceptor; the pair reads shé lí. pypinyin gives 闍 as dū, the graph in its sense of a city gate-tower, which would be wrong. The reading is fixed corpus-wide as a fixed phrase and needs no per-instance fixspec. 月闍黎 is the monk of the same story, and Tripitaka refuses the part she has cast him in.
Says the woman fiend: “I am fair as Xi Shi, and more willowy still.”
娜 is invariant nuó; pypinyin gives nà. 嬝娜 is slender and swaying. 西施 is the byword for beauty.
Says the Tang Monk: “And for her sake the King of Yue was long at burying the dead.”
The text prints 越王, the King of Yue. In the received story it is 吳王夫差, the King of Wu, whom Xi Shi was sent to ruin, while Yue was the kingdom that sent her. The 世德堂本 reading is encoded as printed; 埋屍 is taken here as the burying of war-dead that the stratagem brought on, which makes Yue the agent rather than the victim. See the commentary.
Says the woman fiend: “Royal brother, do you not recall the saying — better to die beneath the flowers, for even as a ghost one is a gallant?”
寧 is nìng, 'would rather', not the níng of tranquillity that pypinyin supplies; the graph is in no guard roster and this too was caught only by the probe. 教 is jiào. The couplet she quotes is a well-worn tag of the romantic drama.
Says the Tang Monk: “My true yang is my most precious thing — how should I lightly give it to you, a painted skeleton……”
真陽 is the primal yang whose retention the battle rhapsody named 元精. 粉骷髏 — the powdered skull — is the standard contemplative figure for the body beneath its cosmetics. The 「……」 is two × U+2026 and is the chapter's only ellipsis; it is genuine 維基文庫 punctuation and is encoded as printed. 真陽為至寶 takes 為 as the copular wéi; pypinyin gives wèi.
The piece begins as a descriptive rhapsody and turns, halfway through, into something the novel attempts only rarely: a sustained dialogue in verse. The first ten units set the two figures against each other in the usual antithetical frame — 那個 and 這個, that one and this one — she quick and quivering, he stiff as a driven nail; she soft jade and warm fragrance, he dead ash and withered wood. Then, at the pillow and the idle quilt, the frame breaks open and the two of them begin to answer each other line for line, eight exchanges of matched sevens, each capped with an allusion.
The allusions are the argument. She offers herself as 柳翠翠, the courtesan of the 月明和尚度柳翠 story, in which a monk is undone by a woman; he replies that he is no 月闍黎, refusing the part she has cast him in. She claims the beauty of Xi Shi; he answers with what Xi Shi's beauty cost. She quotes the old tag about dying beneath the flowers and being a gallant even as a ghost; he answers with 真陽, the primal yang, and 粉骷髏, the painted skeleton — the contemplative commonplace that beneath the cosmetics is a skull. Neither of them argues doctrine. They fence with stories, and he wins each exchange by refusing the story she offers.
One line will not settle. Against her Xi Shi he sets 我越王因此久埋屍 — and in the received account it was Fuchai, King of Wu, whom Xi Shi was sent to destroy, Yue being the kingdom that sent her. The 世德堂本 prints 越王 and it is encoded as printed. It may be a slip; it may equally be read as making Yue the agent, so that the king who employed the stratagem was long occupied in burying the dead it produced. The translation here follows the second reading because it requires no emendation, but the couplet remains the one place in this rhapsody where the sense is not secure.
The last thing in the passage is a mark of punctuation. Tripitaka's final answer does not finish: 怎肯輕與你這粉骷髏…… and then nothing, the only ellipsis in the chapter. What the novel is representing is not that he was interrupted — the prose that follows tells us they went on wrangling until past midnight — but that this exchange has no end and no winner within itself. The verse simply stops holding, and the plain narrative takes over to report that the demon eventually gave up and sent for rope.