This chapter, in sum, tells how the way of fetching the scriptures departs not from the way of tending, within one's own body, to the root.

Before a word of story, the narrator leans in to tell you what the chapter means. 蓋言 is "speaks, broadly, of"; 務本, attending to the root, is lifted from the Analects — 君子務本, the gentleman works at the root — and it points straight at the chapter title, 三藏不忘本, Sanzang does not forget the root. The claim being made is that fetching scriptures and cultivating yourself are not two jobs but one.

Now, the master and his three disciples, having fully awakened to Suchness and suddenly loosed the dusty locks, leapt free of the sea of nature and the Flowing-Sands, and — wholly unencumbered — struck straight onto the great road, coming west.

The pilgrims are four now, and the sentence celebrates it in scripture. 真如 is tathātā, Suchness, things exactly as they are. 性海流沙 is a pun: they have just waded out of the 流沙河, the Flowing-Sands River of the previous chapter, and the same words name the 性海, the sea of one's own nature. And 渾無罣礙, wholly unhindered, takes 罣礙 from the Heart Sūtra, which the novel had Tripitaka recite only a few chapters back. Three scriptural terms in one breath: the road west is the road inward.

They passed through green hills and jade streams beyond number, gazing on wild grasses and idle blossoms without end.

A balanced pair of prose clauses, green hills against wild flowers. In 看不盡 the 不 shifts to bú, because 盡 is fixed at jìn throughout this project and a falling tone pulls the tone of 不 up in front of it.

Truly, time sped swiftly on; once more it was deep autumn — and they beheld this scene:

九秋 is literally the nine ten-day stretches of autumn, so the whole season — here its late, frost-bitten end. Then 但見了些, and they saw only this: the standard cue that a set-piece description is coming. Whenever you meet that phrase, expect the prose to stop and the scenery to be sung.

Maple leaves fill the hills with red; the yellow chrysanthemum braves the evening wind.

The autumn poem opens in five-character lines. 黃花, the yellow flower, is by long convention the chrysanthemum — the badge of autumn, and of the hermit who keeps flowering after the cold arrives.

The aged cicada's drone grows languid; the grieving cricket's brooding knows no end.

Two failing voices, matched line for line: the cicada whose summer song is running down, and the cricket — 蟋 (xī), short for 蟋蟀 — whose chirping Chinese poetry has always heard as 愁, the sorrow of a dying year.

The lotus, tattered, is a fan of green silk torn; the oranges, fragrant, a cluster of golden pellets.

Decline and ripeness, held in one pair of scales. The lotus leaf, gone to rags, becomes a torn 青紈扇, a fan of fine blue-white silk; the 橙, oranges coming ripe, become 金彈, golden shot-pellets. 彈 is dàn here, a pellet you fire, not tán, to pluck a string.

How touching — the wild geese in their several rows, dot upon dot, ranging far across the empty sky.

可憐 looks like pity and is not: in verse it means how moving, how affecting. The measure word in 數行雁 is read háng — a row, a file, a skein of geese in formation — and not the verbal xíng. Migrating geese are the oldest figure in Chinese poetry for the traveller far from home, and they close the tableau on exactly that note.