圓悟佛果禪師語錄 15.56

15.56

Of the shortcut road straightly pulling up and transcending from above, none surpasses directly pointing to the human mind, seeing one's nature and achieving Buddhahood. Yet this mind is profound and abstruse, casting off the gradations of sage and ordinary. It values only sharp faculties and superior wisdom, not moving a single hair within the nest of ignorance and full fetters, straightaway suddenly tallying with open and thorough spiritual luminescence, being of the same substance with sentient and insentient, with nature and without nature, according with the Great Dharma and giving rise to its functioning, penetrating antiquity and surpassing the present, riding on sound and covering form, empty yet spiritual, tranquil yet illumining, an immeasurable and boundless inconceivable great liberation, completely piercing through every which way without obstruction, and thus recognizing where it settles. Therefore, for the Buddhas and ancestral teachers it is called a single transmission and secret entrustment, like an imprint stamped on space, like an imprint stamped on water, like an imprint stamped on clay: the myriad virtues are clearly manifest, the ten directions are cut off, independently realizing and independently transcending, completely without reliance from the beginning. If you give rise to views and formulate marks, there is no connection whatsoever. In these times, there are many people of spiritual stock who are able to see through illusory conditions and illusory realms from beginning to end, courageously rousing their resolve to come to this side; there are also those who have long harbored sincerity to probe the abstruse. Yet they suffer from a lack of expedient power, and merely take intellectual views and conceptual understanding to be clarity. They completely fail to realize that to sit wholly in this is merely the discriminating mind; even if one understands to the side of the Buddha and exhausts it to the ultimate limit of cultivation and realization, it does not go beyond pointing at tracks. For this reason, adept lineage masters from of old do not value people making conceptual understandings; they only allow people to cast away intellectual views, so that not a hair's breadth is retained in their breasts, clear and boundless like great empty space, nurtured for a long time until thoroughly ripe—this is precisely the original ground's scenery, the original face. Arriving at this ground that spans all antiquity and all modernity, what difficulty is there in escaping birth and death? Like Minister Pei and Layman Pang, simply because their faith was thorough, they gained power, and their enjoyment was sovereign. Could worldly conditions and illusory realms arise from anywhere else? If you are genuine and solid underfoot, able to turn all things throughout the twenty-four hours without the marks of subject, casually vacant and solid without giving rise to mind or stirring thoughts, following your own authentic nature, with a balanced heart always solid and true—then even when serving in official travel and handling affairs, all is thoroughly illumined. Receiving that grace and power, once you recognize it, it is just like a boat going downstream: with just a little attention to the left and right, steering and guiding it along, naturally you will swiftly accord with prajñā. This is what the followers of Chan call 'doing one's own work.' At all points there is no time that is wasted; continuously maintaining a mind of long endurance that does not backslide, you need not completely cast away worldly, defiled, and conditioned things before entering the unconditioned and effortless—you must know they were never two different things. If you harbor rejection and grasping, you split it into two halves. At all times and in all places, take only this as the truth; apply yourself vigorously to practice it, and you will sever all currents and attain great peace and bliss.