十不二門指要鈔 1.32

1.32

Answer: 'Because of these words, scholars of our own school are deluded by terms and lose the purport, using that to evaluate this and plunging our school into ruin, all truly because they have not exhausted the meaning of the word "identical" (ji). One should know that our school's clarification of "identical" is eternally distinct from that of the other masters, because it is not two things joining together, nor is it the reverse side flipping over; only when the very entity is entirely it can it be called "identical." Why so? Since defilement and birth-and-death are cultivated evil, their entire entity is the dharma-gate of nature-inherent evil; hence there is no need to sever, eliminate, or overturn them. Because other schools do not understand nature-inherent evil, they must overturn evil into good, and sever evil to realize good; therefore, the most sudden among them still say there is originally no evil and fundamentally it is good. Since they cannot acknowledge that evil in its entirety is evil, in all of them the meaning of "identical" fails to be established. Therefore the seventh volume of the Commentary says: "If one has not even heard the name of nature-inherent evil, how could one believe in the practice of nature-inherent virtue?"'