三界空而 The Three Realms And Six Roots
逐句解 Line by line
"The three realms being empty, a hundred troubles are governed; the six roots being pure, a thousand kinds come to an end.
三界, the three realms of desire, form and formlessness, is the whole of conditioned existence. The 六根, six roots, are the sense faculties — eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind — counted as six because Buddhist analysis treats thinking as a sense like any other.
"If you would hold firm to sincerity and know awareness, you must recognise the mind: mind pure, and a lone brightness shines by itself; mind present, and the ten thousand conditions are all clear.
The longest line in the set-piece, twenty-four characters, and it is the pivot of the argument. 孤明獨照 — a solitary brightness shining alone — is the standard image in Chan for a mind with nothing in it. Everything Tripitaka is claiming rests here: the work is done on the mind, not on the body.
"The true face has nothing wanting and nothing over, and may be seen before you are born;
真容, the true countenance, is one's original nature. The claim that it can be seen 生前 — before birth — is a Chan commonplace and it is deliberately paradoxical.
"the illusory form has shape, and so must in the end decay — what is there to seek beyond it?
相 is xiàng here, form or appearance, as it was in 體相 earlier in the chapter. The couplet is the hinge of Tripitaka's whole answer: what has shape decays, and the king is spending children on keeping a shape.
Two couplets, and between them they answer the king's question without ever addressing it. The true face cannot die because it was never born; the body has a shape and therefore will decay; nothing done to the second reaches the first.
The technical vocabulary is doing real work rather than decorating. The three realms, the six roots, the unborn, the true countenance — these are the standing furniture of Chinese Buddhist argument, and a Ming reader would have recognised every one. Tripitaka is not improvising; he is reciting a position.
And the last line lands on the king personally, though it names nobody. What has shape must decay, so what is there to seek beyond it — addressed to a man who has been seeking exactly that, at a price the room has not yet mentioned aloud.