Neither Going Nor Coming

名：寂靜禪定樂普遊步 — named the Universal Roaming Step in the Joy of Tranquil Meditation. This name is worth setting beside the sūtra's own first fascicle, where the same night-spirit appears in the opening assembly and is recorded as having attained 寂靜禪定樂大勇健解脫門 — a liberation-gate of the great valor of the joy of tranquil meditative absorption. The first five characters are identical. The teacher Good-Wealth has now reached was introduced, with almost this same liberation, more than a thousand parts ago.

悉皆明覩而無取著 — all of them I behold clearly, and yet without grasping or attachment. 明覩, beholding clearly, and 無取著, not grasping, are placed in the same clause by 而, and yet. The detail is not reduced in order to achieve the non-attachment; she keeps the lifespans, the names, the voices and the bodily marks, and does not take hold of any of it.

非實，住如幻法故；非妄，利益眾生故 — they are not real, since they abide in dharmas that are like a conjuring; they are not false, since they benefit beings. This is the pivot of the whole series. The denial of reality is argued from emptiness; the denial of falsity is argued from usefulness. The sūtra does not resolve the pair into a higher term — it lets the two reasons stand side by side, one metaphysical and one entirely practical.

一相，言語悉離故；無相，性相本空故 — they are of one mark, since language is wholly left behind; they are without mark, since nature and mark are originally empty. The last two items contradict each other on their face, one asserting a single mark and the next asserting none. Read with their reasons, they are two different denials of plurality: the first removes the distinctions language makes, the second removes the ground for making them.

思惟一切眾生自性，厭離生死，修第三禪 — contemplating the self-nature of every being and growing weary of and detached from birth and death, I cultivate the third dhyāna. In the standard accounts the dhyānas are graded by the internal factors present at each level — applied thought, joy, pleasure, equanimity. This passage regrades them by what the meditator is attending to, and in three of the four cases it is beings. The fourth, 悉能息滅一切眾生眾苦熱惱, able to still and extinguish the manifold suffering and feverish distress of every being, replaces the classical equanimity with someone else's relief.

遊戲一切神通 — play freely in every spiritual power. 遊戲, play, recurs through this whole stretch of the sūtra as the word for a bodhisattva's exercise of power, and it sits here immediately after four dhyānas and before 以清淨智普入法界, entering the dharma-realm with pure wisdom. The sequence runs from stillness through play into universality without marking any of the transitions as difficult.

羅剎想 — the notion of a rākṣasa. Among twelve otherwise doctrinal notions — impermanence, suffering, no-self, emptiness — sits one that is simply a monster. It is the same device the city spirit Great God used in Part 1071, showing the angry 如羅剎等飲血噉肉; here the rākṣasa is not displayed but planted as a way of seeing what one is already attached to.

出離於家，入於非家 — to leave the home behind and enter the homeless state. 非家, non-home, is a rare formation, and the parallelism is exact: 家 and 非家, home and not-home. What she urges is not a different dwelling but the negation of the one they have — and she prefaces it by saying she takes no pleasure in the five desires herself.