弘明集 5.45

5.45

After the treatise was completed, there were guests living in retirement who, strolling under the bright moon on a night excursion, gathered together at the Dharma Hall. Thereupon they asked, saying: 'Respectfully investigating your refined treatise, the general purport can be seen, and there is almost no flaw. One day we tried studying it again, and what was left unexhausted was only a few points. In our view, the model of virtue of the śramaṇa is a distinct institution transforming secular custom; the titles and vessels of the Daoist masters when applied to ruler and parents may certainly dispense with bodily reverence. What we doubt now is this: one who has just embarked on an enterprise difficult to achieve and looks far forward to achievements beyond the transformation [of this world], whose hidden moisture yields no visible effect in the present Dharma, and whose future recompense is dark and not yet answered—does this not cause princes and dukes to present offerings and faithful gentlemen to bend their bodies, so that he might sit and receive their virtue, falling into the liability of premature reckoning, and idly partake of their kindness, sharing in the reproach of eating without working?' The master of the house responded after a long pause, saying: 'Allow me to draw an analogy close at hand for you worthy gentlemen: suppose there is someone here who receives and proclaims the ruler's mandate, traveling far to reach the customs of distant regions requiring nine interpreters. If I ask whether the king should provide him with provisions and bestow chariots and robes upon him, what would you say?' They answered, 'Yes.' The master said, 'The category can be investigated. Why is one called a śramaṇa? It means that he can open the dark blindness of the unenlightened worldly folk and reveal the profound path beyond transformation; he is about to go forth together with all under Heaven through the Dao of double forgetting, allowing those who aspire to high things to draw from his surviving customs, and those who rinse their mouths in streams to taste his lingering moisture. If so, although the great enterprise is not yet achieved, observing the traces of his transcendent strides, that to which he has awakened is already vast indeed! In that case, the merit of opening passage and the benefit of supporting life have not even repaid the intention of his initial vow, how much less could they repay the toil of the three actions? Moreover, as for such a person, although his body is dependent, his affections have no close attachments; he regards the offerings of the four necessities as crane flies and mosquitoes passing before him. How could the kindness of wetting each other with saliva even be worth speaking of?' The guests thereupon first awakened to the fact that the dark path takes the pioneering of the way as its merit, and that pacifying the mind takes ultimate purity as its Dao; pleased and with relaxed hearts, chanting words, they withdrew.