My duty compels me to attempt the impossible. Even in telling you to look directly into yourself and to be unconcerned about other things, I am already burying the real thing under verbiage. If you proceed from thence and set out in quest of words and sentences, cudgeling your brains over their logical meanings, working out a thousand possibilities and ten thousand subtle distinctions, and creating endless questions and debates, all that you will gain thereby is a glib tongue, while at the same time you will be getting farther and farther away from the Tao, with no rest to your wandering.
If this thing could really be found in words, are there not enough words in the Three Vehicles and the twelve divisions of scriptures? Why should there be a special transmission outside the scripture? And if you could get at it by studying the various interpretations and learned commentaries on such terms as "potentiality" and "intelligence," then how is it that the saints of the ten stages who could expound the Dharma as resourcefully as the clouds and rain, should still have incurred the reproach that they only saw the self-nature vaguely as through a veil of gauze.
From this we can know that to follow the intentions and vagaries of your mind is to be separated from your self as far as the earth from the sky. But if you have really found your true self, then you can pass through fire without being burned, speak a whole day without really moving your lips and teeth and without having really uttered a single word, wear your clothes and take your meal every day without really touching a single grain of rice or a single thread of silk. Even this talk is but a decoration on the door of our house. The important thing is your experiential realization of this state...
Yunmen Wenyan [born 864 - died 949]
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Submitted July 11, 2020 at 09:53PM by WildFoxSpirit https://ift.tt/324v1KV
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