原文 Original text
繁體 Traditional
Reader's edition
含詞賦 With rhapsody
心狂道難 The Mind-Monkey Set Loose
咦！這正是：咦！这正是：
心有兇狂丹不熟，神無定位道難成。心有凶狂丹不熟，神无定位道难成。
逐句解 Line by line
咦！這正是：
咦！这正是：
Ah! This was indeed a case of:
咦 is a bare interjection carrying its own terminal, joined forward to the tag it stands before. 這正是 is the seventh and last of the chapter’s tag-formulae, and the only one that introduces a moral rather than a description; the 世德堂本 sets the line that follows with a verse indent, so the invariant makes this a showcase.
心有兇狂丹不熟，神無定位道難成。
心有凶狂丹不熟，神无定位道难成。
While the heart holds ferocity and madness, the cinnabar will not ripen; while the spirit has no fixed place, the Way cannot be achieved.
丹 is the inner cinnabar of internal alchemy, which must be refined and brought to maturity; 神無定位 is the spirit unfixed in its station. 難成 gives 難 as nán. The couplet reads the whole chapter as an alchemical failure rather than a moral one.
The closing couplet returns to the register of the opening poem and answers it point for point. 靈臺無物謂之清 asked for a mind holding nothing; 心有兇狂 reports a heart holding ferocity and madness. 猿馬牢收 asked that the ape be penned fast; 神無定位 reports the spirit unfixed. The chapter is framed at both ends by the same doctrine, and the frame is a verdict.
What is striking is where the verdict falls. 丹不熟 and 道難成 are statements about the adept’s own cultivation, not about the two robbers, the household, or the boy whose head went into the ditch. Read strictly, the couplet says that the killings matter because they have spoiled the elixir — that the moral catastrophe is legible chiefly as a technical setback on the road west. The novel has spent the whole chapter making that reading feel insufficient, and then closes on it anyway.
The 咦 is worth its one graph. It is a storyteller’s noise, a small sound of dismay or recognition made aloud, and it stands between the disappearance of the Great Sage and the moral that explains it. Whatever else the couplet does, it does not do the work of that syllable.