(Record of LinJi; T. Cleary translation)
Outside of mind there is nothing, and what is within mind is also unattainable. What are you looking for? All of you people everywhere talk of having cultivation and having realization, but don’t make this mistake. Even if you gain something from cultivation, it is just the karma of birth and death. You say you cultivate the six perfections and the myriad practices, but as I see it you are just building karma. When you seek Buddha and seek the Dharma, you are creating hellish karma. When you seek to be bodhisattvas, you are also creating karma. When you read the sutras, you are also creating karma. The buddhas and ancestral teachers were people without concerns. Thus they make nothing but pure karma, whether they are in the defiled realm of contrived action, or in the stainless realm without contrived action.
There are a certain kind of blind shave-pates who eat their fill of food and then go to sit in meditation. They grab hold of wayward thoughts and do not let them go on. Weary of noise, they seek quietude. These are not Buddhist methods. The ancestral teacher [Shenhui of Heze] said: "If you fixate your mind and contemplate stillness, hold up your mind for outer awareness and hold in your mind for inner realization, freeze your mind and enter stable concentration, this is all contrived activity."
It is the person in you who is listening to the Dharma this way right now. How can you try to cultivate this person or realize him or adorn him? He is not something that can be cultivated or adorned. If we would have him adorned, in fact all things are what adorn him.
Good people, if you can comprehend like this, you will avoid being obstructed by ordinary and holy names. [Otherwise, as usual] you interpret the empty fist as if it really held something and vainly concoct strange things among the elements of sensory experience. You slight yourselves when you bow out saying that you are only ordinary people, while those [who succeeded on the Path] were sages.
You shaven-headed ones with many births to go, what is the big hurry? You have put on a lion’s skin, yet you howl like little foxes. You are really great people, but you do not breathe with the energy of the really great. You refuse to believe in what’s in your own house, and instead go seeking outside like this. You fall into traps with the empty and free names and formulations used by the ancients and try to make patterns of categories by depending on them, but you are unable to comprehend them on your own. When you encounter objects you become entangled; when you meet with sensory experiences you grasp them. Delusion arises everywhere you touch; you have no sure stability of your own.
Good people of the Path, do not grasp what I say. Why? Because verbal explanations have no basis: they are temporary sketches on the void, like images formed of colored clouds. Good people, do not think ‘Buddha’ is the ultimate. I see [such dualistic views of an external buddha] as a stink-hole. [Concepts of] ‘bodhisattva’ and ‘arhat’ are fetters and chains, things to bind people with. That’s why [in the stories in the sutras] [Manjusri] slew Buddha with his sword and [Angulimala] took his knife and wounded Buddha. Good people, there is no buddha that can be attained. Even the three vehicles, the five categories of beings, the round and the sudden manifestations of the teachings, [and all Buddhist formulations] are all just medicines to deal with the diseases of a certain period. There is no real doctrine at all. If there are [doctrinal teachings], they are open announcements that show some semblance of [real truth], public verbal demonstrations. Arranged for effect, they explain as they do for the time being.
Good people, there are some misguided monks who attach their efforts to what is in these teachings, trying to find a world-transcending truth, but they are making a mistake. If people seek Buddha, they lose Buddha; if they seek the Path, they lose the Path; if they seek the patriarchs, they lose the patriarchs.
Submitted May 08, 2020 at 06:37PM by GuruHunter https://ift.tt/2YL7D3e
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