鎮州臨濟慧照禪師語錄 1.49

1.49

“Whenever someone comes seeking, I immediately go out to observe them. If they do not recognise me, I then put on various robes. The student generates an intellectual understanding and plunges straight into my words and phrases: ‘Alas! The blind baldhead, a sightless man, taking the robes I wear to be blue, yellow, red, or white!’ When I strip them off and enter a pure environment, the student sees this and at once produces delight and desire. When I strip that off again, the student loses his mind and runs about wildly in confusion, saying: ‘I have no robes!’ Then I say to him: ‘Do you recognise the person wearing the robes?’ Suddenly he turns his head and recognises me. ‘Virtuous monks! Do not recognise the robes! Robes cannot move; it is the person who can wear the robes. There is a pure robe, an unborn robe, a bodhi robe, a nirvāṇa robe, a patriarch robe, and a Buddha robe. Virtuous monks! All that has sound, name, words, and phrases are all changes of robes, stirred up from the ocean of qi at the navel-wheel, their phrases and meanings formed by the clicking of teeth. Know clearly that they are illusions and transformations! Virtuous monks! Outwardly emitting the karma of voice and speech, inwardly expressing the dharmas of mental factors—with thinking and having thoughts, these are all robes. If you merely recognise the robes he wears as real understanding, even after dust-like kalpas you will only have mastered robes, revolving in the three realms and transmigrating through birth and death. It is better to have nothing to do: meeting one another without recognising each other, speaking together without knowing names. Students these days fail to attain because they recognise names and words as understanding. In huge notebooks they copy down the words of dead old men, wrap them in three or five layers of cloth, and will not let others see them, declaring them to be the mystical purport and treasuring them. What a great mistake, you blind bald fools! What juice are you looking for on dry bones? There is a type that does not know good from bad: they take intellectual speculations from the teachings, discuss them, and form phrases and meanings—like taking a lump of shit, holding it in their mouth, spitting it out, and giving it to someone else! It is just like worldly people passing on passwords, wasting an entire life in vain. They claim, ‘I have left home,’ but when asked about the Buddha’s Dharma, they seal their mouths without a word, their eyes like pitch pots and their mouths like shoulder-poles. When people of this sort encounter Maitreya appearing in the world, they will be transferred to another world and deposited in hell to undergo suffering! Virtuous monks! Rushing about like that, what are you seeking in the various directions? You wear your soles flat, yet there is no Buddha to be sought, no Way to be realized, no Dharma to be attained. To seek an outward Buddha with marks bears no resemblance to you; if you wish to know your original mind, it is neither united nor separated.’