弘明集 4.15

4.15

You also say: 'When future lives are clearly set forth as warnings, can one fail to revere them? A person of compassionate protection sees deeply into these numbers.' It is unclear whose child this so-called 'person of compassionate protection' is! If one relies on the doctrines of retribution in non-Buddhist texts, they are all what I call provisional teachings. Whenever examining the ultimate principle, you never analyze it using the words of the sages, but instead widely gather bizarre and uncanny tales to bolster your position. Does this not resemble using water to save [someone from] water?
You also say: 'Things do not happen in vain; rather, each resonates according to its category. When one constantly uses goodness to rescue, goodness also follows; its dynamic is like a shadow and a gnomon, arriving of itself without premeditation.' If these words are truly so, then things resonating by category must match in light and heavy, and the dynamics of the shadow and gnomon must have measure in long and short. Adorning earth and wood does not give rise to a mind of compassion; hunting in accordance with the seasons does not root a cruel and tyrannical nature. Why should the splendid joy of the heavenly palaces be awarded to ascend, and why should the dark torments of the hells be punished to plunge into? To make such sweeping declarations that reach extremes of high and low, while establishing teachings without scales or measures, has reached this point!
Furthermore, wet nurses and guardians extend their care even to filth and grease, while skilled cooks hold their knives with their hearts trembling before the maternal lineage. Those sages had radiance equal to the sun and moon, and their transformations opened the Three Beginnings. If retributive response were bound to match reality, what harm would it have been to the teaching, instead of locking it away in the records of Fuxi and Tang Yao, and burying it during the generations of the Duke of Zhou and Confucius? First tying nets to fish and hunt, giving rise to sins by the hundred million; then instituting sacrificial beasts, opening up punishments of the long night; abandoning that heavenly kitchen and relishing these domestic animals! There was never the benevolence of rescuing the drowning, yet they arbitrarily brought about the cruelty of pushing people into ditches. That this is not so should be evident to your profound reflection. If you say that even the wisdom that exhausts the spiritual still has something it could not comprehend, then although your lofty feelings love the wondrous, I imagine you have not yet reached the point of insulting the sages.