西方合論 2.8

2.8

First, regarding 'the one great cause': Sentient beings live in the world of five defilements, like criminals residing in prison, receiving unequal punishments merely according to the gravity of their crimes. Some violate minor laws, others run afoul of the supreme net; though their offenses differ, as for the suffering of bonds and fetters and the punishment of bastinado and caning, not a single person escapes. Why is this? Because those who enter prison are all criminals, and those who abide as humans and devas all have karmic retribution, bodies of fragmented limitation. Yet once criminals enter prison, there is not a moment they do not seek escape, for they know the burning torments of prison are unbearable and agonizing, and that outside the thorny wall there is a vast and immensely delightful world. Now sentient beings take defilement as their home and saṃsāra as their park; they fasten their hearts on being chief prisoners in caps and robes, and find comfort in pillories and cangues made of gold and jade. How could they know that the Great Iron Ring Mountains are our thorny wall, and that outside the execution grounds of the traidhātuka, each and every one has their own native home and land? The buddhas pity this with aching hearts and pained bones; therefore they distinguish purity and defilement, pointing out the route to escape and return. Yet for people who have abandoned it for long years, there is no place to return; the buddhas also build great mansions to settle them. On the one hand, they go to and fro at the prison gates to clear the road; on the other hand, they wait continuously outside the prison to adorn the guest houses. For such grace, with what body could one repay it? Alas! Illuminating the long night of the traidhātuka and overturning the overturned basin of billions of births, since the buddhas do not begrudge extending their hands, why alone do sentient beings cling so bitterly? The sūtra says: 'The Tathāgata appears in the world for one great cause.' The great cause is precisely this matter. Sentient beings, on the contrary, cling in various ways to this mere hair's-tip of affairs, exchanging the great for the small, content to starve to death—why?