佛果圜悟禪師碧巖錄 4.16

4.16

"Round and round, pearls encircle and jades tinkle, / Loaded onto horses and carried by donkeys onto an iron boat." Xuedou eulogizes it directly at the head, eulogizing only this circle. If you can understand it, it is like a tiger bearing horns. For this matter, the bottom of the bucket must fall out, and all mechanisms must be exhausted; gain and loss, right and wrong must be cast away all at once. Furthermore, do not understand it through rational principles, nor understand it through mysterious subtlety. Ultimately, how to understand it? For this, one must load it onto horses and carry it by donkeys onto an iron boat; only by observing it here can it be attained. In another place it cannot be entrusted; it must be taken and entrusted to the idle guest of the ocean mountain. If you have the slightest matter in your belly, you cannot undertake it. Here, it must be someone whom neither matters nor no-matters, neither adverse circumstances nor favorable realms, neither Buddhas nor ancestral masters can do anything with, before they can undertake it. If one has Chan to practice and thoughts and measures of the mundane and holy, one definitely cannot undertake his [teaching]. Having undertaken it, how to understand it? He says, "When angling for the giant turtle, down goes a hoop." For angling for the giant turtle, one must have a hoop to begin with. Therefore Fengxue said: "Accustomed to angling for whales and dolphins in the cleared expanse of the vast ocean, / I lament the frog-step grinding in the mud and sand." Again he said: "Let the giant turtle not carry off the three mountains, / I wish to walk atop Mount Penglai." Xuedou further said: "Patch-robed monks throughout the world cannot leap out." If one is a giant turtle, one never holds the view of a patch-robed monk; if one is a patch-robed monk, one never holds the view of a giant turtle.