保神養氣 A Poem on Spirit and Breath
有詩為證。詩曰：有诗为证。诗曰：
逐句解 Line by line
There is a poem in witness of it. The poem says:
有詩為證 takes 為 at wéi, the copular reading fixed for this formula throughout the corpus. The tag sits at the very end of a 239-graph prose line, so it opens the showcase rather than dragging the whole block into it; the four couplets that follow are the verse-indented lines of the source.
To guard the spirit and nourish the breath — this is what is called the essence; disposition and nature were from the first one single endowment with form.
The poem is written in the vocabulary of internal alchemy. 精, 氣 and 神 — essence, breath and spirit — are the Three Treasures of that system, and the couplet states the doctrine that they are not three substances but one endowment, 稟, taking bodily form.
When the heart is disordered and the spirit darkened, the hundred ailments arise; when the form withers and the essence fails, the prime of the Way topples.
The two lines are strictly parallel and both run cause-then-consequence: 心亂神昏 against 形衰精敗, 諸病作 against 道元傾. 道元, the prime or origin of the Way, is the alchemical rather than the doctrinal term.
If the Three Flowers do not come together, the toil is spent for nothing; if the Four Great are left desolate, the striving is wasted.
三花 is 三花聚頂, the Three Flowers gathering at the crown — the alchemical goal in which essence, breath and spirit are refined into one. 四大 is the Buddhist four great elements. The couplet sets a Daoist term against a Buddhist one in the same parallel position, which is characteristic of this novel's verse.
Earth and Wood achieve nothing, Metal and Water are cut off — with sloth like this, when will the dharma-body ever be brought to completion!
土木金水 names four of the Five Phases and pointedly omits Fire. The novel's standing allegory assigns the phases to the pilgrims — Metal to Wukong, Wood to Bajie, Earth to Sha Monk, Water to the dragon-horse — so the line can be read as naming the company itself; the reading is invited by the allegory rather than stated by the text. 法身 is the dharmakāya.
The poem does not describe the scene it interrupts. Nobody in it is hungry or thirsty; it is a compact statement of internal-alchemy doctrine, moving from the unity of essence, breath and spirit, through what happens when they fail, to the question of whether the work can be completed at all. This is how the novel's verse usually behaves at a crisis: it lifts out of the narrative to supply the frame the narrative is an instance of.
The frame it supplies is diagnostic. Every couplet is about a system coming apart — the heart disordered, the form withering, the Three Flowers failing to gather, the phases cut off from one another. Read against the road it sits on, that is a description of the pilgrim band after the expulsion: not a group in danger from outside, but one whose internal arrangement has stopped working.
The last line makes the identification hard to avoid. 土木無功金水絕 names four of the Five Phases and leaves out Fire, and the four it names are exactly the four the novel assigns to Sha Monk, Bajie, Wukong and the dragon-horse. With Metal driven off, the remaining phases have nothing to complete. The reader is not told this — the allegory has to be brought to the line rather than found in it — but the poem is placed where the inference is very easy to make.