many words spoken
about what is or is not
the true way of zen
When Master Luoshan first became the resident master of a monastery, he went up in the hall to give a speech. As soon as he had gathered up his robe and was about to sit, he said, "Fare well," and immediately got down from the high seat.
After a while he came back and said, "Anyone who doesn't know, come forward."
When a monk came forward, as soon as he bowed Luoshan said, "Misery yet!"
When the monk rose from his bows, he said, "I ask the teacher..." Luoshan thereupon shouted him out.
A monk asked, "What is the special word?"
Luoshan said, "What are you saying?"
After a long while Luoshan said, "If you are a superior individual, you will understand everything the moment your foot crosses the threshold. If you make a presentation on meeting, you are still a dullard babbling; this is worthless.
who gets to decide
who can be superior
who understands zen
"Understand? It is not Chan, not Tao, not Buddha, not Dharma. What is it? The precious sword with the spiritual point is always openly present: it can kill, and it can also give life. If you can wield it, then you may wield it; but if you are going to take the field you have to be capable enough to manage it.
"Individual potentials complement each other, individual phenomena are rootless: they are guest and host to one another. Being as how this is so, studiously avoid fixed assumptions.
"If you cry like a fox, I roar like a lion; if I cry like a fox, then you roar like a lion. If you roar like a lion, I too roar like a lion. Set out and taken up according to the time, meaning and expression are mastered.
"Thus it is said, 'In meaning is expression, in expression is meaning; but expression is not kept in meaning, and meaning is not kept in expression.' If meaning and expression are not equivalent, how do you understand?
"The meaning can shave the expression, the expression can shave the meaning; the interaction of meaning and expression is awesome. If you don't understand meaning and expression, if you don't penetrate fact and theory, then you are just an iron hammerhead with no hole, what the ancients called a common vulgar cleric. Such people are as common as rice and flax, bamboo and reeds - what use are they?
meaning expression
each blade sharpens the other
with abrasive force
"In this school you have to be an individual, with eyes alert, turning freely at a touch. How could this be sought in your terms of purity and pollution? How can 'ordinary' or 'holy' explain it?
"A meeting of such people, superior individuals, is like a spark struck from flint, fast as the wind, swift eloquence like thunder. If attention is focused immediately, one or a half a person will be moved by their words, more than millions. If you lower your head and 'study Chan,' you can never get it.
"It is said, '"Thus"' is easy, "not thus" is hard,' yet it is also said, '"Thus" is hard, "not thus" is easy.' How about it? You must pay close attention.
"To go traveling you must be perceptive: don't let anyone trap you by teaching you simply to blank out, or to focus on details all the time.
What a pain! Once you're locked in stocks, even though innocent, when will you ever get out?
"This is like a gourd floating on water - can anyone keep it down? It is ever-present, flowing ceaselessly, independent and free - there has never been any doctrine that could encompass it, never any doctrine that could be its equivalent. It immediately appears on stimulus, turns freely on contact, encompassing sound and form. In extension it flows everywhere, without inhibition, always manifest before the eyes.
action potential
like a surfer on a wave
dynamically still
"How could this be a state of immobility? Go out, and nothing is not it; go in, and everything returns to the source. Prior to voicing, utterly transcendent, how could it fall into being or nonbeing?
"So it is said that the unique expression prior to voicing cannot be communicated but by sages; if you haven't ever approached it, it's like being a universe away.
"Everyone knows the unique expression prior to voicing; how do you understand this? Ordinarily it is said, 'Before voicing is a road that lets you understand clearly; if you don't come forth after expression, you're still missing a half. If there is anything, however slight, that you fail to penetrate, it is like being blocked off by an iron wall.' How do you ask questions and give answers in an extraordinary meeting?
following true north
finding an elaborate maze
walking through hedges
"Generally speaking, in order to expound the teaching it is necessary to understand the present, killing and giving life with meaningful expressions of life and death. The sword that kills, the sword that gives life - these were the thrusts of the devices of high antiquity, and are also essential for the present time; you have to overcome bedevilment and break obsessions.
"To directly reveal truth, you have to know it is in yourself; the aim goes through the target. The great function lacks nothing; when complete pervasion is actualized, bewilderment cannot affect you. If you have not yet attained this, how should you manifest it in every aspect of conduct?
"Do you see its face? Here it is ordinarily said, 'One thought in the senses is ever uninterrupted.' But can you be like this or not?
"If you do not yet understand, then for now you must stand on your own, unveiled, not being neighbor to myriad things, so nothing at all can cover it. This is why an ancient said, 'There are no things present; concepts are present. This is not present phenomena, not within reach of the senses.'
"Most important is to get fundamental insight to appear, so the scenery of the fundamental ground is always revealed, unconcealed. When you are independent and free, and can go out and in unhindered, only then may you differ from the times; even dragons and spirits find no path to strew flowers on, outsiders secretly spying cannot see any tracks.
understand the jewels
and overlook the gold thread
or the opposite
"This is not obliteration of form and substance; you have to penetrate the heights and the depths before you attain it. Don't just throw around a few sayings about the relative and the absolute, interjecting remarks wherever you go, pointing to the east delineating the west, citing ancients and quoting contemporaries. When it comes to people like this, what crime would it be to beat ten thousand of them to death? Tomorrow is the next day that they will entrap people's sons and daughters. Some day they'll make you ghost bone behinds.
"The depths of Chan take the measure of your heart. It's easy to be satisfied with plain food; chew it well, and you'll hardly feel hungry.
Variance from the fundamental derives from your own error; you'll labor all your life in vain. If you are gutless yet proud, whose fault is that?
"When you imbibe the words of others, distinguish what is so from what is not. If you only stick to your own strength, you'll never be right.
"Stay well. Good bye."
Treasury of the Eye of True Teaching #7
the words of others
signposts pointing the trail
to where they have been
Submitted June 12, 2022 at 05:26AM by eggo https://ift.tt/WpFcYwa
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