Meditate
within eternity.
Don’t stay in the mind.
Your thoughts are like a child
fretting near its mother’s breast,
restless and afraid, who with a
little guidance can find the
path of courage.
Abandonment
of self is freedom from desire.
Freedom from desire is freedom from distress.
No this, no that — just exquisite
emptiness.
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.
People who study the Way begin by having the faith to turn toward it. They are fed up with the vexations and filth of the world and are always afraid they will not be able to find a road of entry into the Way.
Once you have been directed by a teacher or else discovered on your own the originally inherently complete real mind, then no matter what situations or circumstances you encounter, you know for yourself where it’s really at.
But then if you hold fast to that real mind, the problem is you cannot get out, and it becomes a nest. You set up “illumination” and “function” in acts and states, snort and clap and glare and raise your eyebrows, deliberately putting on a scene.
When you meet a genuine expert of the school again, he removes all this knowledge and understanding for you, so you can merge directly with realization of the original uncontrived, unpreoccupied, unminding state. After this you will feel shame and repentance and know to cease and desist. You will proceed to vanish utterly, so that not even the sages can find you arising anywhere, much less anyone else.
That is why Yantou said, “Those people who actually realize it just keep serene and free at all times, without cravings, without dependence.” Isn’t this the door to peace and happiness?”
“Enlightenment” and “Nirvana”?
They are dead trees to fasten a donkey to.
The scriptures? They are bits of paper to wipe mud
from your face. The four merits and the ten steps?
They are ghosts in their graves. What can
these things have to do with you
becoming free?
When the level of concentration
on the void is gradually attained, one will feel
that he is free from delusion. Although he keeps himself
pure and rejects the impure, his mind is not yet
completely pure — it is as a sword that
has cut through mud and
remains uncleaned.
…When one reaches jen-wei, or
the level of absolute freedom, he is truly free.
His mind and body are non-attached to anything.
There is absolutely no gain and no loss. This mystery
is the way of non-differentiation. If one tried
to say even one word about it, he
would miss the point.
