鎮州臨濟慧照禪師語錄 1.45

1.45

"Virtuous ones, what this mountain monk has cited here is all to discern demons, to pick out abnormalities, and to know what is false and what is correct. Followers of the Way, the real truth is extremely difficult; the Buddha-Dharma is profound and subtle, understood only by a rare few. This mountain monk explains it thoroughly to them all day long, yet students pay no attention at all. Trodden underfoot a thousand times, ten thousand times, it is pitch-black, without a single shape or form, yet distinctly, solitarily luminous. Students cannot believe it deeply enough, and so they give rise to interpretations based on names and phrases; reaching the age of fifty, they merely carry a corpse about from neighbor to neighbor, shoulder their carrying poles, and rush around all under heaven, but the day will come when they must pay for their straw sandals! Virtuous ones, this mountain monk says that outside there is no Dharma. When students do not understand, they immediately produce interpretations inwardly, sitting leaning against a wall with tongue pressed against the palate, serenely motionless, taking this to be the Buddha-Dharma of the ancestral school! What a great mistake! If you take an unmoving, pure sphere to be it, you are recognizing ignorance as your master! An ancient said: 'A fathomless pit of pitch darkness is truly terrifying'—this is precisely what is meant. If you take the moving one to be it, all plants and trees know how to move; should they be the Way? Therefore, that which moves is the wind element, and that which is motionless is the earth element; both the moving and the motionless are without self-nature. If you grasp him in movement, he stands in the motionless; if you grasp him in the motionless, he stands in movement. It is like a fish hidden in a spring stirring the waves and leaping of itself. Virtuous ones, movement and motionlessness are two kinds of objective spheres; it is rather the person of the Way who relies on nothing who uses movement and uses motionlessness. When students come from various quarters, this mountain monk judges them here according to three kinds of capacity: if someone of medium or inferior capacity comes, I snatch away his sphere, but do not remove his Dharma; or if someone of medium or superior capacity comes, I snatch away both sphere and Dharma; if someone of supreme capacity comes, I snatch away neither sphere, nor Dharma, nor person; if someone of extraordinary insight comes, this mountain monk here acts with the entire substance, disregarding the levels of capacity."