朱明時節 The Season of Vermilion Brightness
話說唐三藏咬釘嚼鐵，以死命留得一個不壞之身，感蒙行者等打死蝎子精，救出琵琶洞。一路無詞，又早是朱明時節。但見那：话说唐三藏咬钉嚼铁，以死命留得一个不坏之身，感蒙行者等打死蝎子精，救出琵琶洞。一路无词，又早是朱明时节。但见那：
逐句解 Line by line
The story tells how the Tang Priest, biting nails and chewing iron, by sheer resolve held on to a body that would not be broken; and how, by the grace of Pilgrim and the others, the Scorpion Spirit was beaten to death and he was delivered out of the Cave of the Lute.
咬釘嚼鐵 is a set expression for unyielding endurance; 嚼 takes the colloquial jiáo, pairing with 咬, not the literary jué of 咀嚼. 不壞之身 is the Buddhist term for the indestructible body, used here of Tripitaka’s chastity kept intact.
The road passed without a word, and soon it was the season of Vermilion Brightness.
朱明 is the summer, the season governed by the vermilion of the south in five-phase correlative cosmology. 一路無詞 is the narrator’s formula for compressing untold travelling time.
Behold now:
但見那 is one of the seven tag-formulae in this chapter that introduce a set-piece descriptive passage. The 世德堂本 sets the lines that follow with a verse indent, so the passage is presented here as a rhapsody showcase.
The warm south wind sends up the scent of wild orchid; the washing rain has just cleared, and the new bamboo is cool.
熏風 is the southerly summer wind of the 南風歌 attributed to Shun. 濯雨 is rain that has washed the world rather than merely fallen on it.
Mugwort leaves fill the hills, with none to gather them; calamus flowers crowd the gully, vying in fragrance alone.
艾 and 蒲 are the two plants hung at the door at the Double Fifth to turn away pestilence. That nobody is gathering them is the point: the pilgrims are far from any household keeping the festival.
The pomegranate is tender and bright, and the roving bees rejoice; the streamside willows are deep in shade, and the yellow finches run wild.
海榴 is the pomegranate, whose flowering is the emblem of the fifth month. The couplet turns on 喜 and 狂 — the creatures keep the festival that the travellers cannot.
On this long road, how should one wrap the horned millet-cakes? The dragon boats must be mourning now on the Miluo River.
角黍 are 粽子, the wrapped millet-cakes of the Double Fifth. 汨 (U+6C68) is mì, the river, and must not be confused with 汩 (U+6C69) gǔ; the Miluo is where Qu Yuan drowned, and the dragon boats commemorate the search for his body. 那 is the rhetorical nǎ — how could one? — not the deictic nà.
The prose sentence that opens the chapter proper is a recapitulation, and a notably one-sided one. 咬釘嚼鐵 credits Tripitaka with the endurance, 感蒙行者等 credits the disciples with the rescue, and between them the two clauses divide the chapter’s moral accounts before any new event has occurred. The reader is reminded that the master suffers and the disciples act — which is precisely the division that will break down.
The rhapsody is a Duanwu poem, and its argument is absence. Every image names something the festival requires and then withholds the human being who would perform it: mugwort with nobody to pick it, calamus competing in fragrance 自 — of itself, unwitnessed. Only in the last couplet does the withholding become explicit, when the rhetorical 那能 admits that on this road there will be no wrapped cakes at all.
The closing line is the sharpest thing in the passage. 龍舟應弔汨羅江 places, somewhere far off, a whole civilisation rowing in memory of a man who drowned himself; 應 concedes that the pilgrims can only infer it. The chapter that will shortly turn on Wukong’s killing of men thus opens with a glance at the most famous virtuous death in the Chinese tradition, observed at a distance and by supposition only.