佛果圜悟禪師碧巖錄 9.19

9.19

Xuedou said, "Bah! This old Vimalakīrti." Why does he first cast a "Bah!" on top of his head? Using the precious sword of the Vajra King, he cuts directly overhead; only three thousand blows in the morning and eight hundred in the evening would suffice. In Sanskrit it is called Vimalakīrti; here it is translated as Undefiled Fame, or also Pure Name; he was an ancient Tathāgata Golden Grain of the past. Have you not seen a monk ask Reverend Jian of Yunju: "Since he was the Tathāgata Golden Grain, why did he listen to the Dharma in the assembly of the Tathāgata Śākyamuni?" Jian said, "He does not contend over self and other. A person of great liberation is not constrained by becoming a Buddha or not becoming a Buddha." If you say that his cultivation aimed at accomplishing the Buddha Way, it has even less to do with it. For example, the *Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment* says: "With a mind of transmigration, giving rise to views of transmigration, trying to enter the Tathāgata's great ocean of total extinction—in the end one can never reach it." Yongjia said, "Whether right or wrong, people do not know; / Whether moving against or with the grain, even the gods cannot fathom." If one moves with the grain, one heads toward the stage of the fruit of buddhahood; if one moves against the grain, one enters the realms of sentient beings. Chan Master [Yongming Yan]shou said, "Even if your tempering reaches this territory, you still may not follow your own wishes; only when you have realized the undefiled noble body can you move against or with the grain." Therefore Xuedou said, "Out of compassion, emptily gives rise to grief." The *Vimalakīrti Sūtra* says, "Because sentient beings are sick, I too am sick." Grief means overwhelming sorrow. "He lies ill in Vaiśālī": Vimalakīrti manifested illness in the city of Vaiśālī. In the Tang dynasty, Wang Xuance went as an envoy to the Western Regions and passed by his residence, whereupon he measured his room horizontally and vertically with an笏 tablet, obtaining ten笏; hence it was named "ten cubits square" [fangzhang]. "His whole body utterly emaciated": because of the bodily illness, he widely preached the Dharma for them, saying, "This body is impermanent, without strength, without power, without firmness; a phenomenon that quickly decays, it cannot be trusted. It is suffering, it is affliction, the gathering of all illnesses, and even compounded together by the aggregates, realms, and entrances." "When the ancestral master of the seven Buddhas came": Mañjuśrī was the ancestral master of the seven Buddhas; receiving the Bhagavat's order, he went there to inquire after his illness. "The single room was swept again and again": inside the ten-cubit-square room, everything was removed, leaving only a single couch to await Mañjuśrī's arrival to ask about the Dharma-gate of non-duality. Therefore Xuedou said, "When asked about the non-dual gate, / At that moment he was leaned against and knocked down." Vimalakīrti's mouth was like a shoulder-pole. Nowadays Chan students say that being wordless is being leaned against and knocked down; do not mistakenly recognize the zero mark on the steelyard! Xuedou pressed to the cliff of ten thousand fathoms, but then said, "Not leaned against and knocked down." Raising with one hand and pressing down with the other, he had this kind of maneuver, truly employing it with complete transparency. This eulogizes his earlier citation: "What did Vimalakīrti say?" "Nowhere to search for the golden-haired lion": not only back then, right now it is also like this. Do you still see old Vimalakīrti? Even if the entire mountains, rivers, the great earth, grasses, trees, and dense forests were all to transform into golden-haired lions, they still could not be groped for.