The Buddha is nothing but mind, and mind is nothing but Buddha; yet mind and Buddha, from of old, have each been taken for a thing.

Most chapters open with scenery. This one opens with a riddle, and the riddle turns out to be the chapter's subject. Mind and Buddha are one and the same thing — 即心即佛, a slogan traced to the Tang teacher Mazu Daoyi and one of the great catchphrases of Chan (Zen) Buddhism. Then the second line pulls the rug out. The moment you hold that identity as a truth you own, it has become one more thing to grip: 要物 is literally 'to require a thing', and requiring is the whole trouble.

If you know there is no thing, and no mind either, that is the true mind — the Buddha of the Dharma-body.

After all that denying, the payoff. See through 'thing', see through 'mind', and what is left is not blankness but the true mind. 法身 (fǎ shēn) is the Chinese for the Sanskrit dharmakāya, the truth-body of a Buddha: no shape, no conditions, the same thing as reality itself — as against the flesh-and-blood 色身.

The Dharma-body Buddha has no shape or likeness: a single orb of perfect light that holds the myriad images within.

沒模樣, 'no shape, no likeness', forbids you to picture the truth-body at all. Then the poem hands you a picture anyway: one round lamp of 圓光, whole undivided light, holding 萬象, the ten thousand things, inside it. The trick is the ordinary one of white light, which has no colour of its own and contains every colour. Emptiness and fullness are not rivals here; they are the same fact looked at twice.

The substance of what has no substance is the true substance; the form of what has no form is the very Real Form.

Each half of the line folds a word back on itself — 體, substance, without substance; 相, form, without form. 實相 (shí xiàng), the Real Form, translates the Sanskrit dharmatā: the true character of things, which turns out to be that they have no fixed character. 相 is doing Buddhist work here and takes xiàng.

Neither matter nor emptiness, nor yet not-empty; neither coming nor going forth, nor turning-back-in-merit.

A string of denials in the manner of the 《心經》, the Heart Sutra: reality is 非色非空, catchable neither by 'form' nor by 'emptiness'. 回向 (huí xiàng) is the technical term for dedicating merit — signing the spiritual credit of a good deed over to someone else, or to all beings at once. To be past even that is to be off the ledger entirely, out of the whole business of banking and transferring merit.

No difference, no sameness, neither being nor non-being; hard to let go, hard to take hold of, hard to hear or to behold.

The denials climb until being and non-being are both refused — the four-cornered move of Indian logic, in which a thing is neither so, nor not so, nor both, nor neither. Then the poem admits how awkward this is to use. What cannot be held as an object cannot be let go of either, cannot be picked up, and cannot be heard or seen in the ordinary way.

The numinous light, within and without, is everywhere the same; one whole Buddha-land lies within a single grain of sand.

靈光, the strange inner light of a woken mind, does not change when you turn it outward: it is one light, and the same one, in both directions. Then the famous image of a whole Buddha-land inside a single grain of sand, which comes out of the 《華嚴經》, the Avataṃsaka Sutra, whose great theme is mutual containment — the enormous sitting comfortably inside the tiny.

A single grain of sand holds the Great Thousandfold World; one body-and-mind is one with all ten thousand dharmas.

大千界 is shorthand for 三千大千世界, the whole immense span that a single Buddha's teaching reaches. Packing it into one grain restates the Huayan school's 事事無礙: thing and thing do not obstruct each other, so everything can be inside everything else at once without anything being crowded.

To know this you must master the secret of no-mind: unstained, unhindered — this is the pure work of enlightenment.

Here the poem stops denying and gives instructions. 無心訣 is the knack of no-mind: a mind that takes hold of nothing. 淨業 (jìng yè), pure work or pure karma, is what you do when nothing sticks to you while you are doing it — action that leaves no smear behind it, and so no debt to be settled later.

With good and evil in their thousand forms, cling to nothing done — and this is to say: Homage to Śākyamuni.

Ten lines of denial, and the poem ends by kneeling. 南無 is the Chinese for the Sanskrit namo — homage, I take refuge in — and in chanted use it is read ná mó, not the everyday nán wú. The last character of 釋迦葉 is read shè. The name points at Śākyamuni and at the same time rings against 迦葉, Kāśyapa, the disciple who received the Buddha's teaching without a word being spoken — which is precisely the no-mind this whole poem has been circling.