景德傳燈錄 26.125

26.125

Chan Master Faqi, the second generation of Changshou, was a native of Wuzhou. His surname was Ding. At first he lectured on the two treatises of the Hundred Dharmas and Buddhist Logic (Hetuvidyā). Soon he put aside lecturing to travel as an itinerant monk, receiving the mind-seal from Great Master Guangfa. In the second year of the Jianlong era, Guangfa passed into quiescent extinction and entrusted the abbacy to him. The Military Commissioner Qian Renfeng treated him with great reverence and invited him to proclaim the essential truth. A lecturer on the Hundred Dharmas asked: "The Duke has issued an invitation, and the fourfold assembly gathers like clouds. We invite the master to expound the transcendental ancestral vehicle." The master said: "The Treatise on the Gate of Understanding the Hundred Dharmas." The lecturer said: "Ultimately, what is it?" The master said: "All phenomena are without self." He asked: "The old mother east of the city was born at the same time as the Buddha; why did she never see the Buddha?" The master said: "Not seeing is indeed the Way." The monk said: "Then one sees it." The master said: "The old mother east of the city was born at the same time as the Buddha." In the third year of the Taiping Xingguo era, cyclical year wuyin, the master relinquished the assembly, built a separate room in this cloister, and dwelled at ease. On the eleventh day of the twelfth month in the third year of the Xianping era, cyclical year gengzi, he manifested extinction. His age was eighty-nine, his monastic age seventy-two.