大慧普覺禪師語錄 23.17

23.17

The Way is awakened to by the mind; it does not lie in verbal transmission. In recent years, those who study this Way mostly abandon the root to pursue the branches, turn their backs on the correct and throw themselves into the heterodox. Unwilling to investigate thoroughly at the base of their own feet, they focus entirely on the places where ancestral masters have spoken. Even if they speak so well that not a drop of water leaks, they have no connection whatsoever with their fundamental affair. The ancients, having no other choice when seeing students bewildered by heads and mistaking shadows, established skillful means to guide them, simply causing them to recognise their own original scenery and clearly see their original face; fundamentally they had no real Dharma to give people. For instance, when Mazu of Jiangxi first took pleasure in seated meditation, Master Rang of Nanyue later ground a brick where he was meditating. Mazu rose from his meditative concentration and asked, 'What are you doing grinding a brick?' Rang said, 'I wish to make a mirror.' Mazu laughed and said, 'How can grinding a brick make a mirror?' Rang said, 'If grinding a brick cannot make a mirror, how can seated meditation make a buddha?' For Master Rang had once asked Mazu, 'What do you seek by seated meditation?' Mazu had replied that he sought to become a buddha; this is what the teachings call first shaking with concentration and then uprooting with wisdom. Hearing the words, 'How can seated meditation make a buddha?', Mazu only then became flustered. He then rose, bowed with reverence, and asked, 'How then should it be?' Rang knew that the time and conditions had arrived, and only then said to him, 'Take the analogy of an ox yoked to a cart: if the cart does not move, is hitting the ox right, or is hitting the cart right?' He also said, 'Are you learning seated meditation, or are you learning to be a seated buddha? If you are learning seated meditation, meditation is neither sitting nor lying down. If you are learning to be a seated buddha, the Buddha has no fixed form. Toward the Dharma of non-abiding, you should not give rise to grasping or rejection. If you sit as a buddha, this is killing the buddha. If you cling to the form of sitting, you do not penetrate its principle.' At these words, Mazu suddenly grasped the purport, and then asked, 'How should one apply the mind to accord with the formless samādhi?' Rang said, 'Your learning the Dharma gate of the mind ground is like sowing seeds; my expounding the essentials of the Dharma is like rain from heaven. Because your conditions join together, you shall see its Way.' He further asked, 'The Way is without physical form; how can it be seen?' Rang said, 'The Dharma eye of the mind ground can see the Way; the formless samādhi is also like this.' He asked, 'Is there creation and destruction?' Rang said, 'If one sees the Way through creation and destruction, aggregation and dispersal, that is not it.' The aforementioned skillful guidance is the first model from the ancestral vehicle of old. May Layman Miaoming please investigate according to this.