make an offering of stillness

Once you

merge your tracks

into the stream of zen,

you spend your days silencing

your mind and studying with your

whole being. You realize that this Great Cause

is not obtained from anyone else but is just a matter

of taking up the task boldly and strongly, and making constant

progress. Day by day you shed your delusions, and day by day you

enhance your clarity of mind. Your potential for enlightened perception

is like fine gold that is to be refined hundreds and thousands of times.

What is essential for getting out of the dusts, what is basic for

helping living creatures, is that you must penetrate

through freely in all directions and arrive at

peace and security free from doubt and

attain the stage of great

potential and great

function.

This work

is located precisely in

your own inner actions. It is just

a matter of being in the midst of the interplay

of the myriad causal conditions every day, in the confusion

of the red dusts, amid favorable and adverse circumstances and

gain and loss, appearing and disappearing in their midst,

without being affected and turned around by

them, but on the contrary, being able

to transform them and turn

them around.

…When you

go on grinding and polishing

like this for a long time, you are liberated

right in the midst of birth and death, and you look upon

the world’s useless reputation and ruinous projects as mere dust

in the wind, as a dream, as a magical apparition, as an

optical illusion. Set free, you pass through the

world. Isn’t this what it means to be a

great saint who has emerged from

the dusts of sensory

attachments?

Yuanwu

zen letters