少室六門 1.84

1.84

Question: As the Buddha said, 'Only after countless hardships over three great asaṃkhyeya kalpas did I accomplish the Buddha path.' How can you now say that merely contemplating the mind and restraining the three poisons is called vimokṣa? Answer: The words spoken by the Buddha are not false. The asaṃkhyeya kalpas are the mind of the three poisons. 'Asaṃkhyeya' is the foreign word; in Chinese it means 'innumerable'. Within this mind of the three poisons, there are evil thoughts as numerous as the sands of the Ganges, and within each single thought there is a kalpa. Thus they are innumerable as the sands of the Ganges; therefore it is said, 'three great asaṃkhyeyas'. Since the nature of tathatā is covered by the three poisons, if one does not transcend those three great poisonous and evil minds as numerous as the sands of the Ganges, how can it be called vimokṣa? Now if one can transform the minds of the three poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion into the three liberations, this is called crossing over the three great asaṃkhyeya kalpas. Sentient beings of the end times are foolish and of dull faculties; not understanding the Tathāgata's esoteric teaching of the three great asaṃkhyeyas, they then say that accomplishing buddhahood takes dust-kalpas. How could this not mistakenly cause practitioners to doubt and retreat from the path of bodhi?