Seekers cut off contusion in every state of mind, but the mind that does the cutting off is a thief. When one thief sends off another, when will you ever realize the basis of speech and silence? You may recite a thousand scrolls of scripture without understanding how the scripture applies to yourself; if you do not understand the comprehensive completeness of what the Buddha taught, you are just wasting effort following lines and counting ink marks.
Ascetic exercises and austere practices may be done seeking meritorious qualities in later life, but seeking is itself a barrier to wisdom; how could the Great Way be attained thereby? It is like crossing a river in a dream: the boatman, having crossed over the river, suddenly awakens to find he’s been sleeping in bed, and has lost the way to ferry the boat. The boatman and the people he ferries over never know each other.
Sentient beings, confused and bound up, come and go in the realms of desire, form, and abstraction, to the extremes of exhaustion. When they realize that life and death are like dreams, all their sense of seeking will spontaneously stop.
~ Pao-chih, from "The Zen Reader", trans. by Thomas Cleary
Submitted June 03, 2019 at 04:01PM by mojo-power http://bit.ly/2WqvEgo
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