萬松老人評唱天童覺和尚頌古從容庵錄 4.7

4.7

The Master said: Li Ao asked Ehu, 'What does Great Compassion use a thousand hands and eyes for?' Ehu said, 'What does the present Emperor use you for, sir?' In the past, there was a blind hermit who sold fortunes. After rain, when the road was muddy, he put on fresh white shoes and entered the marketplace. People asked, 'Hermit, you have lost your sight; how is it that the mud does not soil your shoes?' The hermit raised his staff and said, 'There is an eye on the head of my staff.' Taking the hermit as verification: reaching for a pillow in the night, there is an eye on the hand; when eating, there is an eye on the tongue; when listening to words to recognize a person, there is an eye in the ear. Su Zizhan spoke with a deaf person only by writing characters. He laughed again and said, 'He and I are both extraordinary people: I use my hand as a mouth, and he uses his eyes as ears.' The Buddha taught the mutual functioning of the six sense faculties; truly there is no doubt of it! Layman Wujin's record of the Great Compassion Hall at Ziyan in Luzhou cites the Great Compassion Sūtra and the Śūraṅgama-sūtra most exhaustively. I have once seen an account that Great Compassion was formerly Princess Miaoshan, which was related by a deva to Vinaya Master Xuan. Yet the thirty-two responses and hundred billion transformation bodies also vary according to different perspectives, each relying on its own account. Tianjue said: 'The thousand hands show the multitude of guiding the deluded and receiving beings; the thousand eyes show the vastness of emitting light to illuminate darkness. If there were no sentient beings and no defiling toils, then not even a single finger would remain, let alone ten million arms? Not even a single wink would be complete, let alone ten million eyes?