圓悟佛果禪師語錄 13.12

13.12

At an announced incense general discourse, the Master instructed the assembly, saying: “If you can directly undertake just this, it is like heaven covering all and earth upholding all, lacking not a single hairsbreadth, nor is there any second view. Even if all the boundless oceans of fragrant water and every land in every dust mote were threaded through the nostrils at once, it would never fall elsewhere. But if you deliberate and hesitate, you have no connection to it at all. Therefore it is said: ‘When not a single thought arises and the limits of before and after are severed, that is named Buddha.’ If you involve yourself in deliberation and calculate, distinguishing subject and object and forming intellectual understanding, then you are thousands and tens of thousands of miles away. In the school of the ancestral masters, seeing must be real seeing, awakening must be real awakening, and realization must be real realization. Each of you possesses a luminous, wondrous nature. Speaking truly, the moment you are pressed you fall into a panic. How can you see it intimately, trust it thoroughly, and have the bottom of the tub fall out? It is only because your delusive thoughts have been heavy from beginningless eons, lingering only in the realms of the sense dusts, never once stepping upon your original home-ground scenery or clearly seeing your original face. If you are a genuine person, you directly undertake it, fully knowing that birth is fundamentally unarisen and that death is fundamentally without dying. Facing this place of no-birth and no-death, a thousand sages fix their eyes but cannot glimpse it, and a thousand-armed Great Compassionate One cannot lift it up. Now, if you brothers can reverse the light, there is no second person; then you need not wait for this mountain monk to enter the mud and water two or three times without sparing his eyebrows, much less toss sand and scatter dirt, speaking of mind and nature, which inevitably falls into confusion and deceives you to your face. Have you not seen the Venerable Master Pozhaoduo (‘Broken Stove Fallen’)? Hearing that an ancient shrine was causing mischief, he led eighteen disciples into the mountain to view it. There was no divine image at all, only a three-room vacant hut and an earthen stove. Striking it with his staff, he said: ‘You are compounded originally of mud and earth—from where does your numinous efficacy come? From where does your holiness arise?’ The stove then collapsed with a swoosh. Pozhaoduo said: ‘Broken, broken! Fallen, fallen! Without needing paper money.’ Later, a spirit came forth and said: ‘I was the stove god. Thanks to your preaching the Dharma of no-birth, I have already attained rebirth in heaven.’ He bowed in gratitude and departed. The eighteen disciples then addressed the master: ‘We have served and attended upon you for a long time, but have never received your instruction on the Dharma of no-birth. What good fortune had the stove god today that you preached it for him?’ Pozhaoduo said: ‘I only said to him: “You are compounded originally of bricks, tiles, mud, and earth—from where does your numinous efficacy come? From where does your holiness arise?”’ His disciples all bowed, and Pozhaoduo said: ‘Broken, broken! Fallen, fallen!’ The eighteen disciples all attained awakening. Now, as this mountain monk raises the whisk right here, tell me: is this the same as or different from Pozhaoduo?” He then said: “Broken, broken! Fallen, fallen! If you see it, you will not only not fail the Venerable Master Pozhaoduo, but also not fail the ancestral masters of the lineage. If you do not see it, you will not only fail the Venerable Master Pozhaoduo, but also fail yourself. Knowing that this matter exists, it is not obtained from another. Therefore it is said: ‘From where does your numinous efficacy come? From where does your holiness arise?’ Take all of you: your present bodies are formed from the blood and qi of your parents. If within them you recognize the luminous, wondrous nature, then whether ordinary or sage, your faculty of mind cannot be found at all. Within there is no seeing, hearing, perceiving, or knowing; outside there are no mountains, rivers, or great earth. In ordinary times you wear clothes and eat food, without anything extraordinary. Therefore it is said: ‘If I turn toward the mountain of knives, the mountain of knives collapses of itself; if I turn toward hell, hell is of itself annihilated.’ Only then do you know that there is such spiritual penetration and such sovereignty. Why do present-day Chan monks not reverse the light to illumine inward and clearly realize it through and through? If you have not yet realized it clearly, then under the three eaves and before the seven-foot mat, investigate it silently! Have you not seen Master Yunmen say: ‘You divine here and divine there; perhaps suddenly you will divine it right!’ If you open your own treasury, bring out your own family wealth to relieve all beings, and make beginningless delusive thoughts instantly empty and devoid of a trace, how delightful that would be! In the past, this old monk suffered from a burning fever and died for a whole day; looking ahead, the road was pitch black and I did not know where I was going. Gaining revival, I was terrified by the matter of birth and death, and so aroused the mind to travel on foot, seeking out teachers of the Way to investigate this matter thoroughly. First I arrived at Dagui to study with Venerable Zhenru. All day long I sat silently facing the wall, turning the ancient masters’ gong'ans over and over. After about a year, I suddenly had a place of awakening; however, it was only recognizing a clear and numinous functioning before the donkey and behind the horse, merely making an activity within the four-element body. When pressed by someone, it was just as if I had no insight at all, simply because I was buried in the pit of liberation, with a belly full of Chan teachings: when looking at it from the Buddha-Dharma it was there, but when looking at it from worldly phenomena it was not. Later I went to Old Master Baiyun, who told me: ‘You have no insight at all.’ From then on, I had nothing to chew on whatsoever; troubled and distressed, I took my leave, yet the doubt in my heart gave me no peace. Later I went back up Mount Baiyun to study once more with my late teacher, who had me serve as his attendant. One day, an official was asking about the Way, and my late teacher said: ‘Sir! Have you not seen the line in the love poem: “She calls repeatedly for Xiaoyu though there is nothing to do; she only wants her lover to recognize her voice”?’ The official had not yet understood, but when this old monk heard it, the lacquered bucket suddenly broke open. Under my feet I intimately realized it; it fundamentally did not depend on anyone else. Only then did I trust that within heaven and earth, in the midst of the cosmos, there is a treasure hidden in the mountain of the form body, and that all the Buddhas appearing in the world and the ancestral masters coming from the west were only to make people realize this one matter. If you do not yet know it, and merely keep formulating concepts and views, glaring with open eyes and raised brows, you fundamentally do not know that this is just pressing on the eyes to produce flowers or wearing a cangue and carrying a deposition. How could you ever attain sovereign ease and peace, like a flake of snow on a red-hot furnace? If you break through, then whether shouting or slapping, everything is acceptable; yet ultimately you do not hold to such an understanding. Only then can you lay down the burden of self and others, cease and desist thousands of times, and only then can birth and death do nothing to you. You must truly arrive at this ground for it to count. If you truly arrive here, you can then expound the great cause and condition, establish the Dharma banner, extract nails and pull out pegs for everyone, and untie bonds and dissolve attachments. Rescuing thousands and tens of thousands in this way, you are like the golden-winged bird plunging into the sea to snatch the dragon directly and swallow it, or like the bodhisattvas entering the ocean of birth and death to fish out sentient beings and place them on the shore of bodhi. Only then does one lift all things, and one resolve all things. Sometimes a single shout is like the Vajra King jewel sword; sometimes a single shout is like a crouching lion; sometimes a single shout is like the sounding pole and shadow grass; sometimes a single shout does not function as a shout. Only then can you kill or bring to life with freedom, deploying them as the occasion demands, which is called: ‘I am the Dharma King, sovereign over the Dharmas.’ Since you have carried your bags and shouldered your bowls to visit good teachers everywhere, you already possess an invaluable treasure in your bosom; only toward this should you direct your study. My late teacher used to say: ‘Do not practice glass-bottle Chan, which shatters into a hundred pieces the moment someone gently touches it. In your practice, you must practice leather-skin Chan: even if hurled down from the top of a high peak, it suffers no damage; when the kalpa fire blazes, this of mine is not destroyed.’ If you are an adept of the fundamental lot and encounter one who bites pigs and dogs, let your hands and feet drop, lean your pack against the wall, and in ten or twenty years you are guaranteed to become a seamless whole. But how do you attain independent liberation? You must be a person who enters the stream to know such a matter.”