大慧普覺禪師語錄 23.23

23.23

Originally, because birth and death is a great matter and impermanence is swift, and one's own affair is not yet clear, one calls upon and pays respects to ancestral masters to seek untying from the bonds of birth and death. Yet one is instead saddled with more ropes and cords by heretical teachers: before the old bonds are untied, new bonds are added. They pay no attention to the bonds of birth and death, but solely attend to idle chatter and lengthy disquisitions, calling it the essential tenet. What pressing urgency is that? It is what the teaching calls the fault and error of heretical teachers, not the fault of sentient beings. If you wish not to be bound by birth and death, merely keep the mind constantly open and vast. Merely take this mind that does not know where birth comes from and does not know where death goes, and constantly bring it up and examine it amidst your responses to conditions. When your examination matures, after a long time it will naturally become boundless. When you feel that you are saving effort in daily activities, that is precisely where you gain strength in practicing this Way. Where you gain strength, you save boundless effort; where you save effort, you instead gain boundless strength. These principles cannot be spoken to others, nor displayed to others. The point of saving effort and gaining strength is like a person drinking water, knowing for oneself whether it is cold or warm. Throughout my life, Miaoxi has only pointed people toward where effort is saved; I do not teach people to make riddles and speculate, and I also cultivate practice only like this—apart from this, there are no other sorceries or fabrications. Where I gain strength others do not know, and where I save effort others do not know either; that the mind of birth and death is extinguished others do not know, and that the mind of birth and death is not yet forgotten others do not know either. I only bestow this dharma-gate upon all people; there is no other profound, wondrous, or extraordinary thing that can be transmitted. Layman Miaoming, if you are determined to cultivate practice like Miaoxi, just rely on this explanation; you need not seek principles outside. Wherever a true dragon goes, clouds naturally follow along, not to mention that supernormal powers and radiance are fundamentally innate. Have you not seen what Master Deshan said: 'If you only have no business in mind and no mind in business, then it is empty yet numinous, void yet wondrous'? If even by a hair's breadth one speaks of its root and branches, that is all self-deception. This is the seventh model of the shortcut for studying this Way.