圓悟佛果禪師語錄 15.52

15.52

When old Bodhidharma came from India, did he ever bring a single thing? When he traveled through Liang and passed through Wei, facing the wall at Shaolin, no one recognized him. Only when the Ancestral Teacher Huike exerted himself, standing in the snow and severing his arm, did he first slightly extend compassion, and from this the mind was sealed. If you say there were no words, from where did he enter? If you say there were words, what did he say to him? One should know that one must be such a person before one fully comprehends it without any leakage. Therefore, entering this gate requires sharp and fierce spiritual capacity, able swiftly to abandon former intellectual understandings and paths of interpretation, leaving the mind wide open and empty, not retaining a hair's breadth; clearly and hollowly coalesced, where the paths of words and thought are cut off, straightaway tallying with the fundamental source, merging without boundary, spontaneously attaining the original, unattainable wondrous wisdom—only then is it called having reached full faith and thorough insight. There still remains an immeasurable and boundless, unfathomable and unquantifiable great potential and great function. If you retain the slightest subject and object, falling into conditioned dust, you will not immediately accord with it in an instant. For this reason, the virtuous ones of old urged people to rest right now and desist. This matter is like a swift hawk or a fast falcon, grazing the clouds and piercing the sun, confounding the wind and penetrating the azure, soaring and straightly cutting through without brooking deliberation; if you hesitate in the slightest, you miss it. That it is a separate transmission outside the teachings can thus be known. Since you have the resolve for this, put it down; take it upon yourself in direct presence, where everything is already complete, and then the First Patriarch never came, and you yourself have gained nothing.