you haven’t toiled in vain

the moral fighting shape

 

Renounce riches and jewels.

Look lightly on body and life.

Reject them as spit and phlegm, and do not hesitate!

Hold precepts purely,

Be blemishless!

In four comportments be clear as ice and pure as jade.

When scolded, don’t be angry;

When beaten, do not hate.

Bear what is hard to bear. Forget about mockery. Overlook sarcasm.

Oblivious to winter and summer,

Be ceaselessly relentless.

From start to finish, hold Amitabha Buddha’s name in mind.

Do not lapse into torpor;

Refrain from getting scattered.

Be like the pine and the cypress, never withering, evergreen.

Doubt not the Buddha.

Doubt not the Dharma.

Inherent awareness lets us know clearly what we see and hear.

Bore through the paper,

Pierce the cowhide.

Make your mind perfectly bright and free from error.

Return to the origin;

Reach liberation.

Go back to the source, retrieve your inherent innocence.

Nothing’s not nothing;

Emptiness isn’t empty:

The divine potential’s revealed; its wonder hard to imagine.

When you arrive,

You haven’t toiled in vain.

The impacts of your causal ground are finished.

Now you are known

As a Great Hero,

All ten titles fit perfectly. You are a teacher of many generations.

Ah! The same leaking shell can now manifest

As a complete body pervading ten directions!

With good and evil distinguished clearly, no more mistakes occur. 

So why rely on the false alone and fail to practice the true?

 

Hsu Yun

 

zazen perfects the human being

this is zazen

 

Scholar’s studies

can become an obstacle,

making the mind difficult to control.

The effect of zazen is to let your mind and

body really listen to you. Quiet sitting is good.

Zazen can reasonably be taken as far

as one chooses—one can advance

by the light discovered

within it.

 

There’s no deception

in it. It’s a natural need in a human

being’s life.It’s the call by the Universe

to a human being’s true nature.

Zazen perfects the

human being.

 

The mission of humans is

to cease producing the waves of thought that

have occurred up until now as a result of egotism.

When that is done, a human being is

born for the first time.

 

Katō Kōzan

everyone is originally pure, not different from the buddha

 

be free of all worldly affairs

stop your search

 

Do not look for a chance to go out.

But if necessary, going out is permitted once a month.

People in the past lived in the remote mountains and practiced

far away in the forests. Not only were they free of all worldly affairs,

but they abandoned all relationships. You should learn the heart of their

covering brilliance and obscuring traces. Now is the time for the fire

on your head to be wiped out. Is it not sad if you waste this time,

concerning yourself with secular affairs? The impermanent

is unreliable. Nobody knows where or when this

dew-like existence will drop into the grass.

Not recognizing impermanence is

truly regrettable.

 

Dogen