You must take the two characters birth-death, paste them on your forehead, and demand of yourself a clear understanding of this [matter]. If you just follow the crowd and team up with them, killing time just making a racket, one of these days the old one Yama [Judge of the Hells] will calculate the tab for your meals. [When that time comes,] don’t say I didn’t tell you! If you’re thinking of doing gongfu, you must constantly look carefully [at birth-death], at every moment pulling [birth-death] into full awareness. Where are you gaining energy? Where are you failing to gain energy? Where are you lapsing? Where have you not failed? There is a type who, having barely gotten up on the sitting cushion, immediately dozes off. When he gets around to waking up, he indulges in all sorts of phantasies. Having barely gotten off the sitting cushion, he immediately starts telling a mish-mash of stories. If you practice the Way in this manner, even by the time that Maitreya comes down to be reborn, you will not yet have it in the palm of your hand. You must fiercely apply energy, keep on raising this birth-death to full awareness, probe day and night, locking it into position. You must not do cross-legged sitting in “the tiny room behind the little door at the side of the main gate” [i.e., remain confined to the useless place of nothing-to-do]. And you must not do dead sitting on top of the sitting cushion. If miscellaneous thoughts arise in great numbers and vie with one another, gently let them go and get down [from the sitting platform] to the ground to walk around one circuit. Then get back up on the sitting cushion, open both eyes, clench your two fists, straighten up your back, and, as before, keep on raising the cue to full awareness. You will immediately become conscious of a refreshing coolness, like pouring a dipper of cold water into a pot of boiling water. If you do gongfu in this way, there will certainly be a time when you will arrive at your [original] home [of great peace and joy].
essentialsaltsbook notechandex - It doesn't matter if you sit, how you sit, or whether you think sitting is Zen or not. Mujaku Dōchū, in his commentary on Swampland Flowers, summarizes the matter thusly: "Dahui considers the smashing of the birth-and-death mind the most important thing—this is not necessarily bound up with Zen sitting." Gongfu (工 夫) is the expenditure of energy and time in working or work; labor; effort. Is it worth the effort, in your book, to be liberated from birth and death?
Submitted January 26, 2018 at 10:40PM by essentialsalts http://ift.tt/2Fl1q0W
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