No mud, no
lotus.
Posts Tagged → meditation
promptly stop your search
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
the world is open sky and also dustbin
This world
is an open sky and also a dustbin,
giving life to some and death to others;
the outcomes are not controlled
by this world.
Press
your finger into the world
and put it to your nose. You may smell
sweetness, or you may smell dung.
Discernment is possible in
these matters.
True hearts
stay awake if love is possible. The
others have no need for beauty, nor hope of
it. If you are holding gold in your hand,
don’t imagine ways to turn it
into mud.
☯️
The Old Fool wears
second-hand clothes and fills his belly
with tasteless food, mends holes to make a
cover against the cold, and thus the myriad affairs
of life, according to what comes, are done. Scolded, the
Old Fool merely says, “Fine.” Struck, the Old Fool falls
down to sleep. “Spit on my face, I just let it dry;
I save strength and energy and give you no
affliction.” Paramita is his style; he
gains the jewel within.
Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch
🪷
Forget the body.
Let go of sensations
and obsessions and objects.
Do non-doing to the point that thoughts
cease to arise. Releasing mental constructs and
emotional entanglements, you’ll begin
to flow as a sage. Then let go
of that notion on top
of everything
else.
just attain the Way
If
you haven’t
attained the Way,
don’t admonish others.
Don’t waste time blaming
yourself, either. Just
attain the
Way.
i ching hexagram 38 ䷥ opposition
You
can now buy
Wei wu Wei Ching as part of a
five-app bundle of Taoist classics
for iPhone or iPad for less than
the cost of one hardcover
book.
the most important things in our practice
If you
are trying to attain
enlightenment, you are creating
and being driven by karma, and you are
wasting your time on your black cushion.
The most important things in our practice are
our physical posture and our way of breathing.
We are not so concerned about a deep understanding
of Buddhism. As a philosophy, Buddhism is a very deep,
wide, and firm system of thought, but zen is not concerned
about philosophical understanding. We emphasize practice.
We should understand why our physical posture and
breathing exercise are so important. Instead of
having a deep understanding of the teaching,
we need a strong confidence in our teaching,
which says that originally we have
Buddha nature. Our practice
is based on this
faith.
Hexagram 55: FÊNG /
ABUNDANCE
In
the search
for enlightenment,
there is an ever-present
certainty that there is more to do,
someone else who holds the
secret, another state to
attain.
In the
finding of it,
there is the comical
revelation that not one
of those things was
ever true.
小畜
Hexagram 9: HSIAO CH’U /
THE TAMING POWER OF THE SMALL
The
best effort
one can make is the
gentlest effort: wei wu wei.
Quietly, persistently direct the
mind toward emptiness. When
all thoughts and ideas have
dissipated, then make no
further effort. Just
breathe.
This
is the only
practice required of a
human, the best one, the one
that perfectly purifies
our lives.
You
can now buy
Wei wu Wei Ching as part of a
five-app bundle of Taoist classics
for iPhone or iPad for less than
the cost of one hardcover
book.