The causes and effects of this chapter urge men toward the good: on no account do evil.

Most chapters open with the storyteller clearing his throat. This one opens with a sermon — no 詩曰, no 正是, not a word of introduction — so the reader gets the moral before he gets the teller. 因果 is the Buddhist chain of cause and consequence, karma in its working clothes; calling it this chapter's causes and effects folds the sermon and the story into one thing before the story has begun.

Let a single thought arise and the bright spirits see straight through it, whatever a man goes on to do.

The line is about being seen. 照鑒 is a mirror-verb: the bright spirits do not merely watch, they reflect, and what comes back is you. 任 is rèn, the concessive — let him do as he likes — so the couplet turns on the gap between having the thought and doing the deed, and then says there is no gap at all.

Dull and stupid, or artful and able — which of them, sir, will you study? Either way the medicine is a mind without intent.

A question aimed at the reader: which of these will you be? 拙蠢 and 乖能 are opposed pairs, clumsy-and-stupid against clever-and-capable, and 兩般 gathers them up as both sorts alike — the answer comes out the same either way. 無心 is the Chan term for a mind that has stopped grasping, and calling it a yào, a drug, opens a medical thread the poem picks up again at 醍醐.

While you are alive and the Way is at hand, this is the very time to cultivate it — do not drift.

Do it now, while you are still alive to do it. 泊 reads bó, not the pō of a lake, and the Kāngxī dictionary is unusually tidy about the split: under the water radical it quotes the 廣韻 at 傍各切 and the 集韻 at 白各切, both coming out as bó, and glosses the character 止也, to halt, then 又漂泊，流寓也, to drift, to live unsettled. That is 浪泊 exactly. The pō reading sits in a separate entry and means a dense stand of bamboo.

Know the root and the source; shed the husk you were born in.

Shed the husk you were born in — and the picture behind it is a cicada. 金蟬脫殼, the golden cicada slipping its shell, is still what Chinese reaches for when somebody escapes a tight spot by leaving something behind, and Golden Cicada happens to be the name of Tripitaka's former life. 殼 reads qiào, the literary band. The Kāngxī entry under the 殳 radical gives the character no reading of its own at all — the whole entry is a cross-reference to a variant form, with no spelling and no gloss attached — so the ké of an eggshell is a later, colloquial development the dictionary never records.

Seek out long life; you must lay hold of it.

Let go of one thing, take hold of another. 把捉 is a Chan and alchemical verb for keeping a grip on what you are after, and it answers 脫 in the line before: shed the husk, seize the life. The middle of the poem runs in these clipped three-and-three units, like instructions read off a list.

See clearly hour by hour, and measure out the clarified butter.

醍醐 is the last and finest thing drawn out of milk by repeated refining, and Buddhist writing borrows it for the highest teaching — the distilled essence, as English might put it. 斟酌 keeps the vessel literal, to pour and to weigh out. So the instruction is not to gulp the teaching down but to take it in measured doses, hour by hour.

Pierce the three passes, fill the black sea, and the good man will surely ride the simurgh and the crane.

Two lines of inner-alchemy geography, which is to say a map of the inside of a body. 三關 are the three barriers along the spine that the circulating breath has to get past, and 黑海 is the dark water below them — plumbing, described by someone who has never seen a diagram. 管教 is the flat vernacular guarantee guǎn jiào, assuredly, it will happen; one word here, not two.

Then, pitying the old bonds and more merciful still, he climbs to Utmost Bliss.

極樂 is Sukhāvatī, the Pure Land — Utmost Bliss, taken literally — and the poem ends on it. Ninety-four characters that opened on cause and effect close on the destination. 更 is the adverb gèng, still more, not the gēng of a night-watch; hold that distinction, because the chapter's longest night is coming and it is counted in watches.