維摩經略疏 3.96

3.96

Question: If exhorting them to seek the eternal fruit, why explain expedient approaches? Answer: As in the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra, where the Buddha answered a brahmacārin's question: 'In your teaching, the cause is eternal and the fruit is impermanent. Why, in my teaching, could the cause not be impermanent and the fruit eternal?' However, since members of prominent clans and ordinary people alike are fully bound, if they do not first rely on expedient contemplation approaches to sever delusions and enter emptiness, how could they enter the provisional and disport in supernormal powers? Nor could they open the Buddha's knowledge and vision through the single mind of emptiness and the provisional. Therefore the Lotus Sūtra says: 'These sentient beings have not yet escaped birth, old age, sickness, and death; how could they understand the wisdom of the Buddha?'