佛果圜悟禪師碧巖錄 2.8

2.8

How many people have misunderstood this gong'an! It is truly difficult to chew on; there is nowhere for you to sink your teeth in. Why? Because it is insipid and without flavor. How many answers did the ancients give to questions about the Buddha! One said, 'The one inside the hall.' Another said, 'The thirty-two marks.' Another said, 'A staff of bamboo shoots from Mount Zhanglin.' But when it came to Dongshan, he said instead, 'Three pounds of hemp.' This indeed cuts off the tongues of the ancients! Many people take it as an ordinary conversational remark, saying, 'Dongshan was in the storehouse weighing hemp at that time, and when a monk asked him, he answered like that.' Some say, 'Dongshan was asked about the east and answered about the west.' Some say, 'You are the Buddha, yet you go seeking a Buddha, so Dongshan gave a roundabout answer.' Even worse, there is a brand of corpses who say, 'Just these three pounds of hemp are the Buddha!' This has no connection at all! If you go searching under Dongshan's words in this way, even if you investigate until Maitreya Buddha's descent, you will not have even dreamed of it. Why? Words are merely vessels to carry the Way. Not knowing the ancient's intention, you just seek within the phrasing—what hold is there in that? Have you not seen the ancient who said: 'The Way is fundamentally wordless; through words the Way is revealed. When the Way is perceived, words are forgotten.' If you reach this realm, you must return the foremost dynamic function to me before you can succeed! Just these three pounds of hemp are just like the great road to Chang'an: lifting a foot or setting down a foot, nowhere is it not [the road]. This case is the same as Yunmen's 'sesame cake' case; it is indeed hard to understand. My late teacher Wuzu said in verse:
'Selling cheap the fellow carrying a board,
Throwing in three pounds of hemp on the scale.
Dead stock for a thousand or a hundred years,
Nowhere to place his whole body.'
If only you can sweep away feelings, defilements, thoughts, and concepts, along with calculations of gain and loss, right and wrong, making them utterly clean all at once, you will naturally come to understand.