女王慚愧 The Queen’s Shame
慌得那西梁國君臣女輩，跪在塵埃，都道：「是白日飛昇的羅漢，我主不必驚疑。唐御弟也是個有道的禪僧，我們都有眼無珠，錯認了中華男子，枉費了這場神思。請主公上輦回朝也。」女王自覺慚愧，多官都一齊回國不題。慌得那西梁国君臣女辈，跪在尘埃，都道：「是白日飞升的罗汉，我主不必惊疑。唐御弟也是个有道的禅僧，我们都有眼无珠，错认了中华男子，枉费了这场神思。请主公上辇回朝也。」女王自觉惭愧，多官都一齐回国不题。
逐句解 Line by line
So alarmed were the sovereign and the women officials of the Kingdom of Western Liang that they knelt down in the dust, saying together, “These are arhats ascending in the light of day. Our sovereign need feel no alarm or misgiving.
慌得 takes 得 as the complement particle de, against the attainment dé of 聞得 above. 白日飛昇 is a Daoist term for bodily ascension in broad daylight, applied here — inaccurately but reverently — to Buddhist arhats.
“The Tang emperor’s sworn brother too is a monk of Chan possessed of the Way. We had eyes but no pupils in them: we mistook him for an ordinary man of the Middle Flowery Land, and squandered all this contriving for nothing.
中華 reads zhōng huá. 男子 takes 子 as the noun-morpheme zǐ; pypinyin defaults to the neutral suffix zi here, which would be wrong. 枉 is invariant wǎng. The two 了 are both aspectual le and take positional specs.
“Let our sovereign mount her palanquin and return to court.”
朝 is cháo, the court, against the zhāo of morning. 輦 is the imperial hand-drawn carriage, reserved to a ruler.
The queen felt shame in herself, and her many officers went back together to the capital — of which we say no more.
自覺 takes 覺 as jué, awareness, not the jiào of sleep. 不題 is the storyteller’s formula for dropping a thread, not a statement about the characters.
The court of Western Liang reads the pilgrims' departure as 白日飛昇, ascension in broad daylight — a Daoist formula for the adept who rises bodily into heaven without dying. Applied to a party of Buddhist pilgrims it is a theological muddle, but the novel lets it stand without comment. The women of the court have no vocabulary for what they have seen except the one their own world supplies, and the mistake is treated as piety rather than error.
Their self-reproach turns on 有眼無珠, to have eyes without pupils in them, and on 錯認了中華男子 — they had taken a holy man for an ordinary man of China. The phrasing is generous to them. It converts what was, in the previous chapter, a state attempt to detain a traveller into a simple failure of recognition, and so allows the marriage plot to close without anyone being blamed.
The queen's 慚愧 is the last we hear of her. That the novel gives her shame rather than anger, and gives it in four graphs before dismissing the whole court with 不題, is a fair measure of how little interest it has in her once the trial she represented is over. The thread is cut cleanly so that the scorpion's may begin.