Posts Tagged → dharma

where can the dust alight?

fabrice dozias

 

The Fifth Ancestor

Daimin Konin wanted to find

his successor. He asked the monks to write

a poem to express their understanding. Jinshu,

the headmonk, wrote the following poem

on the wall in the middle

of the night:

 

Our body is the bodhi tree,
our mind a mirror bright.
Carefully wipe then hour by hour,
and let no dust alight.

 

When Eno saw this

next day, he said to the monk

standing next to him, “I too have a poem.

Since I am illiterate, would you

write it down for me?”

 

There is no bodhi tree,
nor stand of a mirror bright.
Since all is void,
where can the dust alight?

 

When Konin saw this, he

knew the author had the understanding

he was looking for, and he recognized Eno as

his dharma heir and hence the

Sixth Ancestor.

 

Shunryu Suzuki

branching streams flow in the darkness

 

how can it be taken by force?

one robe, one bowl

 
Having left the Fifth Ancestral Teacher’s place, Hui Neng traveled south for two months, and had reached the Ta Yu Range. He was pursued by the monk Hui Ming, who was originally a general, accompanied by several hundred men, who wanted to seize the robe and bowl (emblematic of succession to the ancestral teachers).

Ming was the first to overtake him. The Sixth Ancestral Teacher threw down the robe and bowl on a rock and said, “This robe signifies faith: how can it be taken by force?” Ming tried to pick up the robe and bowl, but was unable to move them. At that point he said, “I have come for the Dharma, not for the robe.”

The Ancestral Teacher said, “Since you’ve come for the Dharma, you should put to rest all your motivations, and don’t give rise to a single thought, and I will explain for you.” After a silence, he said, “Without thinking of good, and without thinking of evil, at just such a time, which is your original face?”

At these words, Hui Ming was greatly enlightened. He also asked, “Besides the intimate words and meaning that struck home a moment ago, is there any further intimate message?”

The ancestral teacher said, “If it were said to you, it wouldn’t be intimate. If you turn around and reflect, what’s intimate is in you.”

 

Dahui

i don’t know

🪷

 

promptly stop your search

deshan

If you can refrain from producing a single thought, you’ll be forever freed from birth and death, and will not be bound up by birth and death. You go when you want to go and sit when you want to sit — what further concern is there?

Don’t go crazy; I suggest to you that it would be better to stop and not be obsessed with anything. The moment a thought flashes through your mind, you’re a minion of the devil, an immoral worldling.

Just do not stick to sound and form externally, and do not conceive of subject and object internally. In essential being there is neither ordinary nor holy — what more would you learn? Even if you learn a hundred thousand marvelous doctrines, you’re just a sore-sucking ghost; it’s all mere fascination.

I do not mean to slander him about this, but this is why Buddha spewed out so much spittle of expedient means, to teach you to be free. Don’t search outside. As long as you don’t acquiesce, you want to collect unusual sayings and store them in your chest, so you can talk cleverly, getting by on glibness, hoping to be acknowledged by people as a Chan master, wanting to obtain a position of prominence.

If you entertain such views, someday you’ll go to hell where your tongue will be pulled out.

My perception is not that way. Here I have no Buddha and no Dharma. Bodhidharma was a smelly old foreigner, the bodhisattvas of the tenth stage are dung haulers, the equally and subtly enlightened are immoral worldlings, bodhi and nirvana are donkey-tethering stakes, the twelve-part canonical teachings are ghost tablets, paper for wiping pus from sores, those who have attained the four fruitions, the three ranks of sages, and those from initial inspiration to the tenth stage are ghosts haunting ancient tombs, unable to save even themselves. Buddha was an old foreigner, a piece of crap.

Good people, don’t make the mistake of putting on a garment of sores.

Here I have no doctrine at all to give you to interpret. I don’t understand Chan myself, and I am no teacher. I don’t understand anything at all, I just consume and excrete. What else is there?

I urge you to be free from concerns, promptly stopping your search; don’t learn aberration and madness. Everybody carries around a corpse, traveling, licking up the slaver of the old baldies wherever you go. Imbibing their drivel, you immediately proclaim that you are going into samadhi, cultivating capacities, accumulating good deeds to nurture the embryos of sagehood in hopes of fulfilling the realization of Buddhahood.
 

This radiant void is unobstructed, free:

it is not something you can attain

by embellishment.

 
You are people of the present time; don’t seek somewhere else. Even if Bodhidharma were to come here, he would just tell you to be without affectations; he would tell you not to be contrived. Dressing, eating, excreting, there is no more “birth and death” to be feared, and no nirvana to be attained, no enlightenment to be realized. You’re just an ordinary individual, without affectations. 

Do you want to know? It’s just a void, with nothing to attain, pure and clear everywhere, radiant with light, thoroughly translucent inside and out. There is no affectation, no dependence, nothing to dwell on. What are you concerned with?

Deshan Xuanjian

treasury of the eye of true teaching