大慧普覺禪師宗門武庫 1.42

1.42

During the Zhenghe era, there was an accomplished scholar named Xiong, a man of Poyang. Wandering in the Western Mountains of Hongzhou, he passed Cuiyan. The elder Siwen, a dharma heir of Chan Master Foyin Yuan, was also a man of Poyang; he dispatched two laborers to carry a bamboo litter to send Xiong to Jingxiang. Through the dense shade of the woods and ravines along the way, he chanced upon a monk: his appearance was ancient and his spirit clear, with shaggy eyebrows and a snow-white head, wearing clothes plaited of leaves, sitting on a flat boulder, just like the painted image of Fotudeng on temple walls. Xiong said to himself, "In these times there are no such monks! I have heard that Lecturer Liang hid away in the Western Mountains; I suspect he is still alive." Stepping out of the litter, he moved forward respectfully and asked, "Might you be Lecturer Liang?" The monk pointed to the east with his hand. Just as Xiong and the two laborers looked in the direction of his hand and turned back, they lost sight of where the monk was. At that time a light rain had just stopped; Xiong climbed the boulder himself to look: the place where the monk sat was still dry. Lingering and looking around in all four directions, he sighed deeply and said, "My past karma is not rich: though I met him, it is as if I did not meet him."