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.

The narrator breaks in with a doctrinal gloss. 蓋言 = “in general speaks of”; 務本 (“to attend to the root”) echoes the Analects, 君子務本, and keys the whole chapter to its title, 三藏不忘本. The “way of the scriptures” and the “way of self-cultivation” are declared one and the same.

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.

真如 is tathātā, Suchness. 性海流沙 puns the just-crossed 流沙河 (Flowing-Sands River, ch. 22) against the 性海, the “sea of one's true nature.” 渾無罣礙 (“wholly without hindrance”) lifts 罣礙 straight from the Heart Sūtra, recited only four chapters earlier.

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

A balanced prose couplet. 看不盡 requires the sandhi override 不 (bú): 盡 is fixed at jìn across the corpus, and 不 before a fourth tone rises to bú.

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

九秋 is “the nine [ten-day periods of] autumn,” i.e. the whole of autumn, here its later, frost-touched depth. 但見了些 (“they saw only this”) is the standard formula cueing a descriptive set-piece — the autumn verse that follows.

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

A regulated 詩 in five-character lines opens the seasonal tableau. 黃花, the “yellow flower,” is by convention the chrysanthemum, emblem of autumn and of the recluse who endures the cold.

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

The parallelism pairs two failing autumn voices: the cicada, whose summer song now falters, and the cricket (蟋 (xī), short for 蟋蟀), whose chirr the tradition hears as 愁 — sorrow, the melancholy of the dying year.

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

Two similes of decline and ripeness held in balance. The withered lotus-leaf is likened to a rent 青紈扇 (a fan of fine blue-white silk); the ripening 橙 (oranges) to 金彈, golden shot-pellets — 彈 here dàn, a pellet, not tán, to pluck.

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

可憐 here is aesthetic pathos, “how moving,” not pity. In 數行雁 the measure-word 行 is read háng — a “row, file, skein” of geese in formation — not the verbal xíng. The migrating geese, classic figures of the traveller, close the tableau on a note of distance and departure.