法苑珠林 19.36

19.36

The commentary says: For this reason, one must especially be reverent and prudent, and not elevate oneself, lest it damage one's future retribution. Recently, I have seen worldly people who, upon receiving a minor official post, do not generate faithful minds, but falsely produce arrogance, scolding and reviling monks and nuns with all kinds of humiliation. Or, having them stand before the court hall while remaining seated on high couches, they dispatch people to drag and pull them, shaming and beating them contrary to principle. In destroying the good and increasing evil, nothing exceeds such acts as these. Even if [clergy] violate royal laws, it must be handled according to principle; although secular law is carried out, internally one must examine oneself with shame. Clergy and laity alike are ordinary mortals dwelling in the three realms; before attaining the noble state, who is without fault? Yet as for those who renounce the householder's life, even if they have no real practice within, outwardly they display shaved heads and bodies clad in the kāṣāya; beholding these forms engenders goodness, and those who see them produce reverence. Monks and nuns who break the precepts are still able to mount the seat and expound the Dharma in diverse ways to benefit the multitudes of sentient beings. When other people hear and see this, they cultivate and uphold the six perfections, successively transforming one another. Because of cultivating good deeds, in their future places of birth they attain rebirth among humans and devas in the short term, and achieve the noble fruit in the long run. Having attained this noble state, they further successively bring inexhaustible benefits. For instance, just as a single lamp lights hundreds of thousands of lamps, its brightness is never exhausted. Measuring this inexhaustible Dharma, all this great benefit is attained through the teaching and converting merits of those former monks and nuns who broke the precepts. Since there is such benefit, each must be prudent. Even if one succeeds in mistreating hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of renunciants, one cannot in the present attain the slightest benefit; one only adds to one's bad reputation spreading throughout the four seas, and will undergo calamity across kalpas in future places of birth. Therefore a sūtra says: 'A single thought of evil can open the five gates of unwholesomeness,' as will be recounted below.