弘明集 2.4

2.4

The utmost wonder of the Dao is certainly what customs and transformations ought to honor. Yet the world mostly considers the Buddha absurd, all holding that 'since my own person is not provided for, how do I have leisure to worry about what comes after?' Matters of ten thousand li away and things beyond a hundred years are all dismissed by them as untrue. How much more so the vastness of Sumeru, the grandeur of the Buddha realms, the spirit's imperishability, that humans can become Buddhas, that the mind creates all existing things, that all phenomena are empty, and that past causes are so distant that retribution comes only after hundreds of millions of kalpas! These are all extraordinarily transcendent, profoundly coherent, credible, and real. How could ears attuned to the popular tunes of Huanghua admit the melodies of Yunmen? Worldly people again esteem the writings and canons of the Duke of Zhou and Confucius. From Yao down to the Han, [the Buddha] was never mentioned in the Nine Provinces and the Hua-Xia realm. How could a foreign land move Emperor Ming of Han? What virtue did he possess that the spiritual radiance was revealed to him alone? All sentiments such as these are merely clinging to previous habits and failing to broaden the mind with profound insight. Thus, the ultimate principle is not distant, yet through doubt they submerge themselves. How sorrowful! The gentlemen of the Central Kingdom understand ritual and righteousness, but are ignorant of knowing the minds of men—how could they know the mind of the Buddha? In the present world, when the planning of proximate affairs is flawed, it brings about rise and fall, reversals of fortune; how much more so with the spirit, which is the self! If one attains it, one ascends purely without end; if one loses it, one falls forever without limit. Can one not approach the deep abyss and tread on thin ice with care? Even in a single game of chess, the calculations of shapes are shallow, yet did the mind of Yi Qiu ever hold back? And yet people wish to employ the perspective of a frog in a well to recklessly suppress the Great Way, going so far as to plunge their spirits alone beneath heaven's pitfall—is this not excessive? Now, using dim and obscured knowledge to illuminate profound and dark causes, since they cannot examine what they have lost, how can they alone understand what they have gained? One ought only to clarify the refined and illuminate the dark, pursue the good Dao, and naturally cultivate oneself using the Buddhist scriptures as a compass. Those Buddhist scriptures encompass the virtues of the Five Canons and deeply add to them distant and great reality; they contain the emptiness of Laozi and Zhuangzi and double the ultimate thoroughness of universal emptiness. Their lofty words and true principles solemnly move the spirit; their illumination is like the sun, their purity like the wind. If not a sage, who could speak them? I respectfully examine what is seen by the world and join it with the principles of the Buddha to elucidate them.