宗鏡錄 41.3

41.3

Answer: To face toward it is to turn your back on it; to approach it is to depart from it. Grasp it and it is lost again; rush toward it and it is all the more delayed. A thousand sages clasp their hands, having no scheme or calculation; entering deeply through the one gate, they forget awareness and knowing. This is the Dharma gate of personal realization within the mind; it is not attained through questions and answers. As the Lotus Sūtra verse says: "My intention is difficult to measure, / and there is none who can question it. / Unasked, I preach it of myself, / praising the path I have walked." Therefore, the ancient virtuous ones said: "The patriarchs together transmitted the pure, self-awakened, noble wisdom, and the tathatā wondrous mind of all buddhas; it is not something attained through worldly written words." If one awakens to this real Dharma-nature, this person can then fully know that the buddhas of the three times and all sentient beings share the same single dharmadhātu, originally equal, constant, and unchanging. The former reverend Caoshan said in a verse: "Recognizing it in accord with conditions, integration is swift; / dwelling upon the substance to extinguish mental activity, the path is delayed. / Suddenly arising, originally without location; / my master temporarily spoke of the inconceivable." Therefore we know that the thousand sages all point to this single thought at its arising as completely unobtainable; this is truly the inconceivable. Apart from this, there is definitely no other superiority. For one who understands like this, how could it not be swift? Why wait for melting away before being able to see the path? If one does not see the matter directly and wishes to seek it through conceptual understanding and emotional calculation, it is like taking a bow of rabbit horns, mounting an arrow of turtle hairs, and having a person without hands intend to shoot and shatter Mount Sumeru; or like pouring out oil pressed from sand, lighting a smokeless fire, storing it within a leaking vessel, and wishing to illuminate and shatter the darkness of the Iron Encircling Mountains—one merely expends the wild mind in vain, and there is no truth in it.