圓悟佛果禪師語錄 12.7

12.7

The Master said: "Before your parents gave birth to you, you were utterly naked and unencumbered, without a single thread established; and after entering the womb and being born, you are also utterly naked and unencumbered, without a single thread established. Yet, being born into the world and falling into the four elements and five aggregates, for the most part sentiments arise to form cataracts and obstructions, taking the body as an impediment and deluding one's own mind. If one is a person with clear eyes, who clearly understands that the four elements are empty and still and the five aggregates are fundamentally void, they know that within the four elements and five aggregates there is an affair that radiates through past and present and completely transcends intellectual views. If you can reverse the light to illumine inward, there is no second person: beneath your feet it is utterly naked and unencumbered, at the gates of the six sense faculties it is also utterly naked and unencumbered, and extending to the mountains, rivers, and the great earth, to the ends of the realms of empty space and the boundless oceans of fragrant water, it is likewise utterly naked and unencumbered. Speaking in this way, is it not perhaps setting aside existence to return to nothingness? Fortunately, it has no relation [to that]! If one sets aside existence to return to nothingness, dim and obscure, falling into the realm of wide-open emptiness that denies cause and effect, then for eternal kalpas one cannot escape the causes and effects of hell and the three wretched realms. If one truly and thoroughly realizes and arrives at the true, pure, bright, and wondrous ground of the ultimate reality, then the four sages, the six types of ordinary beings, the Buddhas of the three periods, the ancestral masters across the world, and both sentient and insentient beings all flow forth and manifest within it. Therefore Senior Monk Fu asked State Preceptor Yan of Gushan, 'Before your parents gave birth to you, where was your nostril?' Shan said, 'Right now, when you are already born, where is it?' Senior Monk Fu did not agree, and said, 'You ask me.' Shan asked as before, and Fu merely waved his fan. In general, when inquiring into the Way, the inquiry must be real inquiry, the seeing must be real seeing, and the application must be real application. Before your parents gave birth to you, where was your nostril? Senior Monk Fu merely waved his fan—was he not perhaps playing with the spirit? You must know there is an extraordinary affair before you can attain it. Just take Mañjuśrī at birth seeing the ten auspicious extraordinary signs, Subhūti's room manifesting the sign of emptiness at his birth, and Sudhana at birth having ten thousand jewel treasuries well up—all of these flow forth, utterly naked and unencumbered, within this one great jewel light. If one were merely in the dim and obscure, falling into the empty and still, how could there be such extraordinary things? Therefore the ancients saw the great extraordinary in the place of birth, just as the World-Honoured One pointed one hand to heaven and one to earth, saying himself, 'Above heaven and below heaven, I alone am revered.' If he had met Master Yunmen, [Yunmen] still would not have considered it extraordinary, but would have directly executed the patched-robed monk's correct order. Later, a venerable elder said: 'Yunmen knew gratitude, only then did he know how to repay gratitude.' Having known it, he then took the patched-robed monk's fundamental lot and walked amid adverse and favorable circumstances. Now tell me: can this still pass muster? If it is a level discussion, then there is the transcendent affair; if it is based upon the patched-robed monk's fundamental lot, it is not worth half a penny. Why so? His house naturally has a road that reaches the heavens."