廣弘明集 22.28

English (machine translation) 22.28

Language: English

22.28

Your treatise also says: "Those that arise suddenly perish suddenly; those that arise gradually perish gradually." Allow me to borrow your own battering ram to attack your city wall. By "perishing gradually," you mean that the physical remains of the deceased begin as insentient and culminate in rotting away. If that is so, then body and spirit are fundamentally a single thing: when the body falls ill, the spirit likewise reports illness; when the body perishes, the spirit likewise perishes. The working of gradualness should proceed together with the body. When the body has just died and not yet decayed, this constitutes gradualness; why alone should the spirit not undergo gradualness from beginning to end?

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廣弘明集 — Classical Chinese