禪源諸詮集都序 1.16.2

1.16.2

[This is] in order to distinguish the heterodox from the orthodox, to discern the ordinary person from the sage, to differentiate aversion from delight, and to clarify cause and effect. It explains that the sentient beings' five aggregates entirely lack a self as master, being merely the physical matter of bodily form and the mind of thought and deliberation. From beginningless time, due to the power of causes and conditions, they arise and cease from moment to moment in unending succession, like trickling water or flickering lamp flames. The body and mind form a provisional combination that resembles oneness and resembles permanence. Fools do not realize this and cling to it as a self. Because they treasure this self, they immediately give rise to the three poisons of greed (coveting fame and profit to aggrandize oneself), anger (hating adverse circumstances for fear of being harmed), and ignorance (confused understanding of situations, calculating against reason). The three poisons assail the mental consciousness, setting body and speech in motion to create all karmas. Once karma is accomplished, it cannot be escaped (like a shadow following form, or an echo answering sound); thus they receive bodies of suffering and pleasure in the five destinies (this is induced by individual karma) and superior or inferior places in the three realms (the places where they reside; this is induced by collective karma). Toward the bodies they receive, they still cling to them as a self; they still give rise to greed and so forth, creating karma and receiving retribution. The body undergoes birth, old age, sickness, and death; having died, it is born again. The realm undergoes formation, abiding, destruction, and voidness; having become void, it is formed again. Kalpa after kalpa, life after life, rebirth continues without cessation, without beginning or end, like a well pulley. All of this stems from failing to understand that this body is fundamentally not oneself. (All the above refers to the causes and effects of the world in the previously mentioned teaching of humans and gods. Previously it only made one loathe the lower and delight in the higher, without explaining that all three realms are to be loathed, nor did it refute the self. Now it fully explains them, which constitutes the two noble truths of suffering and its arising. Below, it refutes the grasping at a self and causes one to cultivate the two noble truths of cessation and the path, clarifying supramundane cause and effect; hence it is named the teaching of the four noble truths.) As for its not being oneself: this body originally takes its characteristic mark from the harmony of form and mind. If one now investigates and analyzes it, form has four classes: earth, water, fire, and wind; mind has four classes: feeling (receiving pleasant and unpleasant events), conception (grasping marks), volitional formations (creating everything), and consciousness (discerning each and every one). (These four together with form are called the five aggregates.) If all are oneself, there would be eight selves. Furthermore, within form there are three hundred and sixty bones, each bone distinct; skin, hair, muscles, flesh, liver, heart, lungs, and kidneys are each not the other (skin is not hair, etc.). The various mental factors are also distinct from one another: seeing is not hearing; joy is not anger. Since there are so many of these things, one does not know which one is definitely to be taken as the self. If all are the self, the self would be hundreds of thousands, with multiple masters in conflict within a single body. Apart from these, there are no other phenomena. Inquiring back and forth into the self, none can be found at all. One then awakens to the fact that these bodily and mental phenomena are all mere marks of a semblance of harmony produced by myriad conditions, originally not a single entity; they resemble the marks of a self and a person, but originally are neither self nor person. For whose sake would there be greed and anger? For whose sake would there be killing and stealing? Who cultivates the precepts and gives alms? Who is born in the realms of humans and gods? (This is knowing suffering and its arising.) One thus ceases clinging in mind to the defiled good and bad of the three realms (this is abandoning the truth of arising), and solely cultivates the contemplative wisdom of selflessness (the truth of the path), thereby severing greed and so forth, putting an end to all karmas, realizing the true suchness of the emptiness of self, attaining the fruit of stream-enterer, and up to completely extinguishing all afflictions and burdens to attain the fruit of an arhat (the truth of cessation), reducing the body to ashes and extinguishing wisdom to permanently depart from all suffering. (The various Āgamas and other sūtras in six hundred and eighteen fascicles, as well as the Vibhāṣā, Kośa, and other treatises in six hundred and ninety-eight fascicles, all exclusively expound this Hīnayāna and the previously mentioned cause and effect of humans and gods. Although the volumes are numerous, their principle does not go beyond this.) Third is the teaching of using consciousness to refute external objects (which explains that the marks of objects described previously, whether arising or ceasing, not only lack a self, but also lack phenomena such as those above; they are merely the illusory transformations of sensory consciousness; hence it is called using consciousness to refute external objects). It explains that the aforementioned phenomena of arising and ceasing have no bearing on true suchness; they are merely the eight consciousnesses inherently possessed by sentient beings from beginningless time by the nature of things. Among them, the eighth, the ālayavijñāna, is their root, instantaneously transforming into the sense faculties and body, the container world, and seeds. In turn, it gives rise to the seven consciousnesses, each able to transform and manifest its own allotted cognitive object (the eye has form as object, and so forth up to the seventh having the eighth's subjective aspect as object, and the eighth having the sense faculties, seeds, and container world as object). Outside of these eight consciousnesses, there are absolutely no real phenomena. Question: How do they transform? Answer: Due to the perfuming power of discriminating self and dharmas, when the various consciousnesses arise, they transform into semblances of self and dharmas. Because the sixth and seventh consciousnesses are covered by ignorance, they take these as cognitive objects and cling to them as a real self and real dharmas. It is like one who is afflicted with an illness (when illness is severe, the mind is confused and sees strangely colored figures) or dreaming (what is seen in dream marks can be known): due to the power of the illness or dream, the mind appears in the likeness of various external object marks; while dreaming, one clings to them as really existent external objects, but upon waking, one finally knows they were merely transformed by the dream. The marks of this body of ours as well as external objects are also just like this: they are transformed merely by consciousness; because of delusion, one clings to there being a self and various objects. Once awakened to the fact that there are fundamentally no self and dharmas, but only mind and consciousness, one then relies on this wisdom of the two emptinesses to cultivate the contemplation of consciousness-only and practices such as the six pāramitās and the four means of embracing, gradually subduing and severing the two hindrances of affliction and the knowable, realizing the true suchness revealed by the two emptinesses, perfecting the ten stages, and transforming the eight consciousnesses into the bodhi of the four wisdoms; when the hindrances to true suchness are exhausted, one accomplishes the dharmakāya of the nature of phenomena and great nirvāṇa. The principle expounded in the several dozen sūtras such as the Saṃdhinirmocana and the several hundred fascicles of treatises such as the Yogācārabhūmi and Vijñaptimātratā does not go beyond this. The above three classes collectively constitute the first, the teaching that relies on the nature to explain phenomenal marks through implicit intent. However, only the third, the teaching of using consciousness to refute external objects, accords and coincides with the Chan school's school of pacifying delusion and cultivating the mind. Because it knows that external objects are all empty, it does not cultivate the phenomenal marks of external objects; it solely pacifies delusion and cultivates the mind. Pacifying delusion means pacifying the delusion of self and dharmas; cultivating the mind means cultivating the mind of consciousness-only. Therefore, it is identical with the teaching of consciousness-only. Since it is identical with the Buddha, why disparage others' gradual gate of pacifying delusion, contemplating purity, sweeping away dust from time to time, concentrating the mind, stabilizing the mind, focusing single-mindedly on one object, sitting cross-legged, and regulating the body and regulating the breath? These various upāyas were all encouraged and praised by the Buddha. The Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa says: It is not necessary to sit, nor is it necessary not to sit; sitting or not sitting depends on the suitability for the capacity. Concentrating the mind or exercising the mind is each measured according to one's habitual nature. In the reigns of the Great Emperor Gaozong down to Xuanzong, the original school of sudden perfection was not yet practiced in the northern lands; only Chan Master Shenxiu widely propagated the gradual teaching, becoming the master of the Dharma in the two capitals and the imperial teacher of three emperors, fully claiming it to be the school of Bodhidharma without explicitly revealing the purport that [this mind] is itself the Buddha. Caoxi and Heze, fearing that the perfect school would be extinguished, thereupon reproached and condemned things such as stabilizing the mind and subduing the mind; but this was merely removing the sickness, not removing the Dharma. What is more, these upāyas were originally taught by the Great Master the Fifth Patriarch, who certified each of them as masters of a region. Bodhidharma used wall-contemplation to teach people how to pacify the mind: externally halting all conditions, internally the mind has no panting.