Wumen on working hard to arouse doubt

My translation of Wumen's commentary in Case 1 of Wumenguan:

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麼將三百六十骨節八萬四千毫竅。通身起箇疑團。參箇無字。晝夜提撕。莫作虛無會。莫作有無會。如吞了箇熱鐵丸。相似吐又吐不出。蕩盡從前惡知惡覺。久久純熟。自然內外打成。一片如啞子得夢。只許自知。驀然打發。驚天動地。如奪得關將軍大刀入手。逢佛殺佛。逢祖殺祖。於生死岸頭得大自在。向六道四生中。遊戲三昧。且作麼生提撕。盡平生氣力。舉箇無字。若不間斷好。似法燭一點便著。

Arouse your entire body, with its three hundred and sixty bones and joints, with its eighty-four thousand pores of the skin, all into a single lump of doubt and participate in the single word "Wu (無)." Carry it day and night. Do not understand it as a vacant nothingness. Do not understand it through a [dualistic formulation of] existence/non-existence. It’s like swallowing a red-hot iron ball that you can’t spit even if you try. Wiping out all previous foul knowledge and foul realisation, by and by with familiarity, the internal and external will merge together on its own. Like a dumb man who has a dream, only you know it for yourself.

Then suddenly, a release – astonishing the heavens and shaking the earth. It’s like snatching the great sword of general Guan Yu into your hand: when you meet Buddha, you kill Buddha; when you meet patriarch, you kill patriarch. Attaining great freedom/autonomy at the brink of life and death, you head into the six-ways¹ and four-births² in a samadhi of playful flow.

So, how to carry this out? Use all your life’s energy and strength to raise this single word "Wu." If there’s no breakage in between, it’s like a dharma candle that, once lit, catches fire.

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1. Six-ways refer to the six samsara ways of existence: hellish-being (naraka), hungry ghost (preta), animal (tiryag), human (manusya), demi-god (asura) and heavenly-being (deva).

2. In Buddhism, the four-births are (1) birth from the womb, as in the case of mammals; (2) birth from eggs, as in the case of birds; (3) birth from dampness (or moisture) —the way worms were thought to be generated; and (4) birth by transformation, that is, spontaneous appearance without the womb, eggs, or dampness, as in the cases of deities and beings in the hells.

Submitted October 31, 2018 at 01:06PM by chintokkong https://ift.tt/2Q7UOc6