How much more so the Way of the Buddha, which soars in emptiness, riding the dark, void and still.

And there he is, twenty-two lines in. 況乎 — how much more so — is the hinge the whole opening was built for: if the invisible defeats the wise, then this, which is more invisible still. 乘幽 — riding the dark. Its first character is the verb here, read chéng, to mount or ride; it is not the shèng of the Buddhist vehicles, which will turn up seventeen lines later and be a different word. The received text of this preface reads 控寂, reining in the still, where this edition prints 空寂, void and still. The 世德堂本 differs from the transmitted document at several points, and this edition follows its own printers.

It succours the ten thousand kinds on a great scale, and holds authority over the ten directions.

萬品 — the ten thousand categories, meaning every kind of living thing. 十方, the ten directions — the eight compass points plus up and down, which is the Buddhist way of saying everywhere. 典御 is an administrative word: to have charge of, to govern. Even praising a religion, this emperor reaches for the vocabulary of office.

Raise up its awful power and there is nothing above; press down its divine strength and there is nothing below.

A matched pair built on opposites — raise against press down, nothing above against nothing below — and the effect is to describe something with no boundary in either direction. 威靈 and 神力 are both words for numinous power, paired so the two halves balance exactly.

Make it great and it fills the whole of space and time; make it fine and it gathers into a hair's breadth.

宇宙 — the standard modern word for the universe, and its two characters originally meant something more precise: 宇 is all space, 宙 is all time. 毫釐 — a hair and a thousandth, the smallest measures the language has. The pair is still current for the tiniest possible margin. So the sentence runs from everything to almost nothing in twelve characters, and it does it with two units of measurement.