This dharma
is such that it cannot be attained
by groping or searching about. In the realm
of seeing, knowledge perishes. At the
moment of attaining, mind
is surpassed.
Posts Tagged → dharma
don’t learn aberration and madness
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?
treasury of the eye of true teaching
why try to look for it?
The nature of mind is
non-arising: why try
to look for it?
Originally there is no dharma —
why talk about smoke
and fire?
Going and coming without end,
clinging to what you’ve known —
don’t bother.
All these things are useless.
In a place of quiet illumination,
see for yourself.
washing dirt in mud
By even speaking a phrase to you,
I have already doused you with dirty water.
It would be even worse for me to put a twinkle in my eye
and raise my eyebrow to you, or rap on the meditation seat
or hold up a whisk, or demand, “What is this?”
As for shouting and hitting, it’s obvious
that this is just a pile of bones
on level ground.
There are also the type
who don’t know good from bad and
ask questions about Buddha and Dharma and Zen
and the Tao. They ask to be helped, they beg to be received,
they seek knowledge and sayings and theories relating to
the Buddhist teaching and to transcending the world
and to accommodating the world. This is washing
dirt in mud and washing mud in dirt —
when will they ever manage
to clear it away?
Forget the words and
embody the meaning.
where can the dust alight?
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.
branching streams flow in the darkness