法苑珠林 90.37

90.37

Furthermore, the Xiangfa jueyi jing says: In future worlds, all secular people will look down upon and despise the Three Jewels precisely because bhikṣus and bhikṣuṇīs do not act according to the Dharma. They put on the kāṣāya but manage worldly affairs, or do business in the marketplace to support themselves, or travel along the roads as merchants seeking profit; or work as painters, scribes, statue-makers, and craftsmen; or practice divination concerning men and women, houses, fields, and gardens, prognosticating various kinds of fortune and misfortune; or drink alcohol, get drunk, sing and dance, make music, and play weiqi and liubo; or covet wealth and seek gain, idling away the days and months while neglecting and forgetting their scriptural study; or cure sicknesses with spells, falsely citing the scriptures while practicing dhyāna and divination to make a wrong livelihood; or practice medicine, acupuncture, moxibustion, concocting herbal decoctions, taking pulses, and prescribing remedies, mingling promiscuously with men and women. In this way they incur defilement, ruining their good roots and increasing evil. It is indeed because of this that they invite the ridicule and slander of the worldly. Now, those who leave household life to seek liberation must first keep distant from sin, taking the precepts as foremost. If one does not rely upon the precepts, the manifold goods will not abide—just as when a person lacks a head, the sense faculties are ruined and he is called a dead man. Thus the Vimuttimagga says: 'Just as when a person has no head, all his sense faculties cannot grasp their objects, and at that time he is called dead; so too, a bhikṣu has the precepts as his head. If his head is severed, he loses all wholesome dharmas and is dead to the Buddha's Dharma, just as a corpse is not received by the great ocean.'