The perfected person penetrates infinity with a wonderful mind, and the finite world can't stand in the way. He absolutely dedicates his ears to listening and his eyes to seeing, and neither sound nor color can hold him back. Is this not because he leaves the emptiness of things in ordinary reality, so these things can't affect his innermost mind?

Thus, the sage uses his true mind. He is in agreement with li (principle or propriety), and there's no obstacle he can't overcome. He sees the transformation of all things and clearly understands that they're all part of one material force - so he is in accord with everything he encounters.

There are no obstacles he can't overcome, thus he can mingle with the impure and still become pure. He's in accord with everything he encounters, so he sees the unity of all things as he comes into contact with them. Although the 10,000 forms of things might appear different, they're not different in their innermost selves. And if they're not different in their innermost selves, that means these forms aren't the true forms.

^{--tr. me, after Wing-Tsit Chan}

Sengzhao (also known as Seng Chao) was a monk from Jingzhao who translated Buddhist scriptures from India at around the same time Emperor Constantine got a bunch of bishops to agree that they all believed basically the same stuff, then to write it down in the Nicene Creed and create the one holy, apostolic and small-c catholic church. He (Sengzhao, not Constantine) was already intimately familiar with Laozi and Zhuangzi, having copied out all the classics during his early years as a scribe, and as a result, became a kind of bridge between Daoism and Buddhism - specifically, a kind of Buddhism known as Madhyamaka, which concerned itself with the interdependence of everything we see, feel or know. In other words, this world is all a vale of illusions, but one lying between mountains of causes. If you want to see through the illusions, you have to ruthlessly follow that web of relationships and cut through your mind's natural tendency to create a false distinctions between the things we see and the act of us seeing them. Erase that division between subject (me, the person who looks) and object (it, the thing being looked at) and you begin to get at the true nature of reality - as something that creates our minds and is created by our minds.

OK, that's pretty heavy stuff. Basically, Sengzhao was carving out a philosophical middle path between Daoism and Buddhism... or, really, using Daoism (which was all about everything around us being a seamless part of one cosmic process) to reconcile different schools of Buddhism (which were about, among other things, the world being filled with illusions, constantly changing, and hiding a great, peaceful Void at the heart of everything). And the mental tool he used was a clear, logical process of questioning everything he saw or understood. Is this true? Is it false? Is it both? Is it neither? How?

That's how his thinking became one of the cornerstones of Chinese Buddhist philosophy.