人天眼目 6.140

6.140

The Single Dharma branched into the Five Houses. Each house has its tenets. If one penetrates the destination of those tenets, then neither the Single Dharma nor the Five Houses can escape. Today, however, it is not so: people chase the shadows and traces of the Five Houses and pick up the leftover scraps of former words. Can the essential tenets truly reside in these? The phrases of the ancients are dead phrases, yet they suffice as instruments for enlivening people. Phrases are neither dead nor alive; otherwise, the person dies and the phrase dies. During the Chunxi era, there was Zhao Huiyan of Yuanshan, who gathered and categorized the essentials of the dynamic words of the Five Houses, calling it Rentian yanmu. Patch-robed monks have copied and transmitted it to this day, and every person has the book. They vainly cherish and preserve it like a contract. The minute differences like those between 'fish' and 'Lu' go uncorrected, and there are mutual additions, omissions, and corrupt mixtures; only the original edition as it first appeared remains truly unknown. Distressed by this state of affairs, I set aside my cumbersome social obligations to search out, weigh, and correct it, capturing somewhat of its essentials, so that later learners may know that the claws and teeth of the ancestral school from of old served people in just such a way. Soon after, I laughed to myself, saying: 'Cliches of words and phrases are the great illness of students nowadays. Secretly, I consider that in instructing disciples, not attacking what they are bogged down in, but conversely increasing it, is to choke the root of their illness. Yet since they are already ill, using this very thing to medicate them—look at how it is applied! Moreover, can the essential tenets truly not reside in this? If our peers, by means of this, make the ancestral principles ever more brilliant and yield nothing to the ancients, would this not indeed be serving as eyes for humans and gods?' For this reason I wrote this afterword. Five days after the end of the summer retreat in the wuwu year of the Baoyou era. Inhabitant of the mountain of Ciyun.