經律異相 20.17

20.17

When the Buddha was in Śrāvastī, there was a certain monk who went daily outside the city to the wilderness and charnel grounds along a road that passed through another person’s field. Seeing him, the field's owner became angry: “What sort of religious practitioner is this, who comes and goes daily without cultivating virtue?” He then questioned the monk: “What kind of mendicant are you, freely crisscrossing through my field until a human path has formed?” The monk replied, “I have a dispute and have come seeking witnesses.” At that time, the field's owner, connected by past karma, was due to be saved; so he followed the monk, secretly shadowing his steps. He saw that in the charnel ground, corpses and skeletons were scattered about, bloated and foul-smelling, devoured by birds and beasts, strewn all over the place. Some had been completely eaten, others only partially, resembling ash-colored doves, with maggots swarming over them, emitting a stench unbearable to approach. Crows, magpies, foxes, dogs, old vultures, and horned owls were eating the human corpses. The monk raised his hand and said to that man, “These birds and beasts are my witnesses.” The man asked, “Why are these birds and beasts witnesses? With whom are you, monk, currently disputing?” The monk replied: “The sickness of the mind has many outpourings and afflictions. I contemplate these skeletons, discerning their foul discharges, and then return to my cell to contemplate my own body from head to foot, finding it no different from them. Yet this mind races in ten thousand directions, chasing after illusions and falsities, and phenomena such as sights, sounds, scents, tastes, and subtle touch. I now wish to recognize the origin of the mind. You, mind, must now give rise to this thought: do not lead me into the hells and the hungry ghosts! I am currently an ordinary worldling, not yet freed from the fetters; yet this thief of a mind refuses to obey my command. For this reason, I go daily to the wilderness, expounding for it the notion of foul discharges and impurity. I again admonish the mind: ‘You are a hasty, violent, chaotic, erroneous, and unsettled mind; you must change now and not create evil conditions!’” When the field owner heard the monk’s instruction, he wiped away tears with his hands, choking with grief and unable to speak. For ten thousand years during the time of Kāśyapa Buddha, that field owner had cultivated the contemplation of impurity; he immediately discerned the thirty-six bodily constituents and their foul discharges and impurity. At that moment, both the monk and the field owner attained the path of a srotaāpanna right there in that great, fearsome charnel ground in the wilderness (extracted from the Sūtra on the Monk Seeking Witnesses).