Master Deshan said to an assembly,
What concerns do you have, from morning to night? Isn't it that you want to show off by questioning me? I'm not afraid of you, but I wonder what doubts you have.
Recently, in this time of degenerate teaching, there are lots of groups of ghosts who run off at the mouth to others, claiming to be Chan teachers. I wonder how much Chan you have managed to learn - come tell me about it!
Your blind baldies at various centers have taught you to 'practice' - how many Buddhas have you produced running to irrelevancies?
If there is nothing to learn, then what are you after? If you have learned anything, then try to show me what you've learned. But you'll have to be ready to take a beating if you say anything wrong.
You've been charmed by the old baldies in centers all over into claiming you are 'practitioners' and rigidly posturing as if you were like enlightened people.
Don't use your mind whimsically; revolving in endless mundane routines is all because of state of mind. Why? Because when the mind is aroused all sorts of things arise.
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?
I see that wherever you go you determine to learn Buddhism in the assembly of some old baldy, taking on a load without concern for your body or life. All of you have had your eyes nailed shut and your root of life severed. You're like two or three hundred whores.
You say your regal sway sets up the banner of the teaching to open the eyes of later generations; but can you even save yourselves?
You talk of 'practice' like this, but haven't you heard that Buddha went through three long eons of cultivation? And where is he now? He died after eighty years - how was he different from you?
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.
You see me appearing in the world, and you all want to get together in groups of five and ten and come challenge me with difficult questions, hoping to tongue-tie and silence me. You're puppets! Why don't you come forth now?
If you fill a burlap sack with awls, you'd be quite skilled if none of them stuck out. I'd like to ask you what's true - don't be mistaken. You impulsively run elsewhere claiming to understand Chan and the Way, boasting and putting on airs. When you get to this point, you'll have to vomit it all out before you can realize freedom.
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.
This void of mine might be said to exist, yet it is not existent; it might be said not to exist, yet it is not nonexistent. You might call it ordinary, but it is not ordinary; you may call it holy, but it's not holy. It cannot be placed anywhere, but it is the teacher of all your myriad things.
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, some day you'll go to hell where your tongue will be pulled out.
Everywhere you go, you look for people to say you are a member of the school of the Chan founder, but when you are questioned about the fundamental matter your mouths are like a wooden bolt, immediately shooting off about bodhi, nirvana, thusness and liberation, extensively quoting the verbal teachings of the triplex canon, claiming this is Chan, this is the Way, fooling the people at large.
What relevance has this? You are bringing our spiritual forbears into disrepute.
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.
What are you studying? Having eaten your fill, you talk about thusness and nirvana - do you have blood under your skin? You have to have a strong character before you can attain: don't be infatuated with sages, for 'sage' is an empty name. Anyone who can present you anything from anywhere for you to cling to obsessively, produce interpretations for, keep carrying around and caring for, has in any case become delusive and aberrant.
This is the result of insisting there is something to acquire by learning. This is what is meant by sprites haunting grasses and trees, and wild foxes.
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 embryo of sagehood in hopes of fulfilling the realization of buddhahood.
I see such people as having poison arrows in their hearts, blinding needles deranging their eyes. They are the antithesis of our spiritual ancestors; they cause the plan of our school to stagnate. They say they are renunciants, but this way they consume the donations of patrons everywhere without being able to digest even water.
Don't calculatingly claim you venture to travel in foreign lands, not taking care of your parents at home - do you think there is no fault in that? Don't misuse your mind - the lord of the underworld will dun you for the cost of your footgear some day, put a ring through your nose and hitch you to a post to make you pay back the cost of your lodging. Don't say I didn't tell you!
You people sure seem lucky, meeting me coming out in public to untie you, uncage you, and unburden you, so you can be decent people. No state of being in any realm can contain you. There is no special doctrine besides.
This radiant void is unobstructed, free: it is not something you can attain by embellishment. From the Buddha and from the Chan founders, all have transmitted this teaching, whereby they attained liberation; the doctrines of the whole canon just put it in orderly arrangements.
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.
Most important of all, don't fold your hands and pretend to be a Chan teacher, looking for a place to appear in public, talking cleverly to seduce the younger generation in hopes of getting people to call you an Elder. Totally alienated from your real self, you only know a flood of subjective consciousness, hoking up oddities day and night, never ceasing, claiming famous names, titles, and heritage. I am not one of your gang: If I see a great master failing to discern good and bad, I criticize him for it.
As for you, just don't get obsessed with thoughts of reputation and appearance, terminology and rhetoric, maxim and meaning, objective representation, function and principle, good and bad, ordinary and holy, grasping and rejection, focus on objects, defilement and purity, light and darkness, being and nonbeing. If you get it this way, only then are you an unaffected individual. Then even Buddha cannot compare to you; even the Chan founders cannot compare to you.
Don't go running off flattening your feet - there is no special Chan path to study. If anything is attained by study, it is secondary or tertiary, an externalist view.
There are no psychic powers or capacities of altered manifestation to attain either. You say psychic powers are wisdom, yet angels, wizards, cultists with the five powers, and titans also have psychic powers - but are they enlightened?
Suppose you live alone on a solitary mountain peak, eat but once a day, sit constantly without lying down, practice prostration and recitation six times a day, and try to fend off birth and death with that: Buddha had a saying, 'all activities are impermanent - this is the law that whatever is created must perish.'
If you say you can attain by entering concentration, stilling the spirit, quieting down thoughts, well, some cultists have also managed to get into states of tremendous concentration seeming to last eighty thousand eons, but are they enlightened? Obviously they are mesmerized by false notions.
Buddha was not a holyman; Buddha was an old foreigner, a piece of crap. What I want of you is to distinguish good and bad; don't get stuck on personality and ego. Then you will avoid the language of 'holymen' and the language of 'enlightenment,' becoming liberated.
Wonderful sayings and principles drown you and bind you. Why? If the deluded mind isn't stopped for a moment, this is how birth and death will continue.
Time does not wait for anyone: don't pass the days wavering and shilly-shallying. Time should be valued.
I'm not expecting you bumpkins to carry baggage - if you agree, then trust; if you don't agree, well, everyone has his own bowl of crap - take it away!
I also don't seek after your old baldies all over the place who occupy a site and preach Chan and Tao. You rush to learn from them and quote from them, but here I don't have any doctrine at all to give you.
You take what you get by question and study to be knowledge and understanding, but I can't go to the hell for liars, where tongues are pulled out - if anyone has anything at all to teach you, or says there is the Buddha, there is the doctrine, there is the world to escape, they are all foxy charmers.
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?
I'll just be an old beggar all my life, until the day I die. Though I live in the world, I'm not affected by it - where would I want to escape from? Even if there were some place to go, that too would be a cage, where bedevilment can get at you.
Don't belabor your body and mind, for there is nothing to attain. All that is necessary is to avoid belaboring sound and form at all times; just set aside your activities hitherto, and you will suddenly shed bridle and chain, and forever remove cover and wrapping. When a single thought is not produced, then linear succession is cut off: without cogitation, without thought, there is nothing at all that can affect your feelings.
How can you even attempt to express this in words? You have a lot of intellectual understanding, but have you ever perceived It face to face?
Renunciants and others up to the tenth stage bodhisattvas with satisfied hearts cannot even find a trace of It. That is why the celestial angels celebrate, the earth spirits offer support, the Buddhas of the ten directions sing praises, and the king of demons wails. Why? Because this void, leaping with life, has no root, no dwelling place.
If your eyes waver at this point, then you miss it.
Don't seek Buddha, for Buddha is a mass-murdering robber who has seduced who knows how many people into the pits of the demons of lust.
Do not seek Manjusri or Samantabhadra, for they are bumpkins. What a pity to be a fine upstanding individual, but take someone else's poison and then try to imitate the appearance of a Chan teacher, seeing spirits and seeing ghosts.
After that you'll go crazy, running around to other houses looking for gypsy women to tell fortunes. You have been slipped 'fortunes' by ignorant old baldies who tell you to bow to the ghosts of 'Patriarchs,' the ghosts of 'Buddhas,' the ghost of 'enlightenment,' the ghost of 'nirvana.'
The little whores who don't understand them ask, 'What is the meaning of the Patriarch's coming from the West?' The old baldies then hit their meditation benches, pretending that is objective representation; or hold up a fly whisk and say, 'Fine weather, nice rain, good lamps,' using clever words to create arbitrary categories, saying there is a 'mystic path,' a 'bird's path,' and an 'outreach.' If you hold onto explanations like this, that is like putting filth in a precious vessel, like using human waste for incense.
You are grown adults, just as others are - who should you be afraid of? You spend whole days slurping the snivel and drool of old baldies elsewhere, and wind up without conscience and shameless. How miserable - they make you crazy.
The result of this cause is clear. As water buffaloes, you will pull plows, your eyes bulging; your strength unable to rise to the occasion, you will be beaten on the back. This is for having stolen food and clothing from Buddhism, claiming you were 'practicing.'
If you do not understand the great principle, even if you pass through Buddha's belly you're just a walking piece of crap. Never having met a good person, you readily accept the scenery at the doors of the six senses, spouting cliches as if they were mysterious words and marvelous sayings, colorful and fresh, without having any attainment of your own - it's just the snivel and drool of other people.
There is also a type who gather in twos and threes for discussion - where is freedom from affectation preferred? - winter and summer they glibly talk about Chan, with intellectual interpretation for understanding meanings and principles. You all entertain views like this, looking for some advantage. Is there any true principle like this? You'll go to hell some day; don't say I didn't tell you.
Wherever you go, you don't harvest a single vegetable, you don't gather a single bundle of firewood - one day when your luck runs out, you'll be eating nothing but grass. Consuming the donations of the faithful in vain, you only arbitrarily claim to be studying, even pretending to be Chan masters.
This is of no benefit to people. For your own part, in all your activities twenty-four hours a day your mind will stick to things; when you see people, you only want to seduce them, wagging your tail, pointing to one thing and talking about another. In the eyes and in speech unable to see in actuality, you just want to use imitative sayings to check understandings.
How am I different from you? Don't take the glibness of the moment and wind up ingesting others' poison, becoming like greedy whores with no morals, blind baldies and herds of sheep-like monks perverting other people and leading them into hell.
Don't read books in a trivializing way, pursuing slogans and mottoes, looking for competition. When one after another passes stuff like this along, when will you ever stop?
What I am encouraging is not a bad thing. You must have your own eyes to discern the pure and the polluted - are they words of a Buddha, or words of a demon? Don't let others confuse you.
The most wonderful sayings are all temporary expedients of Buddha. What is essential is to stop - don't rely on anything, or take in the words of others for intellectual understanding, discriminating near and far, forging superficial falsehoods, memorizing the idle words and long talks of others - all of this is conjectural thought.
I'm afraid you'll fall into a pit doing superficial acts of piety, robbed by mere talk, getting little but considering it enough, stationary in quietude, unwilling to progress further. Confused by things yourself, you get other people mixed up. You follow myriad doctrines because you don't believe there is fundamentally nothing concrete to the void; you can't augment it or diminish it.
You people are like crows, with bodies in the sky but minds in the trash, just looking for carrion to eat. Don't say I've never engaged in community discussion, that I holler mercilessly, without fear of the consequences. It's just because you don't keep to your own lot but race off to the four quarters to stand by others' doors, like banshees relating statements and passing on sayings, making up interpretations according to obsessions, tracks of mind not forgotten.
Not even standing on your own, you carry a corpse around all the time, wearing stocks and chains, traveling five hundred or even a thousand miles to come here and stand in front of me, as if you lacked the way of Chan - 'Master, explain for us, instruct us!' I act with my whole being, clobbering and warding off you bumpkins, hollering at you thieving pieces of crap. You may put on impressive appearances, but you don't know good from bad.
For you to come to me is like meeting someone from the bayous and cooking up a mess of fish chowder. What I am aiming at for the time being is for you to put down your heavy burden, take off your stocks and chains, to be decent people. Do you consent?
If you consent, then stay. If not, go off wherever you will. Fare well. Good bye.
My comment:
You may put on impressive appearances, but you don't know good from bad. - Master Deshan
Submitted September 27, 2020 at 07:04AM by CultAwarenessNetwork https://ift.tt/3i6XRi7
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