..续本文上一页try to] embrace him, you cannot gather him in; though you [try to] drive him away, you cannot shake

　　him off . If you seek him he retreats farther and farther away; if you don”t seek him, then he”s right there before your eyes, his wondrous voice resounding in your ears. If you have no faith [in this], you”ll waste your entire life.

　　“Followers of the Way, in an instant you enter the Lotus World, the Land of Vairocana, the Land of Emancipation, the Land of Supernatural Powers, the Land of Purity, and the dharma realm; you enter the dirty and the pure, the secular and the sacred, the realm of hungry ghosts and the realm of beasts. Yet however far and wide you may search, nowhere will you see any birth or death; there will only be empty names.

　　Illusory transformations, flowers in the sky—

　　Don”t trouble to grasp at them.

　　Gain and loss, right and wrong—

　　Away with them once and for all!

　　“Followers of the Way, my buddhadharma is that of the correct transmission, a transmission that has continued in a single line through the masters Mayu, Danxia, Daoyi, Lushan, and Shigong, and has spread abroad over all the world. Yet no one has faith in it and everyone heaps slander on it.

　　“Venerable Daoyi”s activity was pure and simple; not one of his three to five hundred students could discern what he meant. Venerable Lushan was free and true; whether conforming or opposing, his actions were unfathomable to his students—they were all dumbfounded. Venerable Danxia played with the pearl, concealing and revealing it; every single student who camewas reviled by him. As for Venerable Mayu, his activity was as bitter as the huangbo tree; no one could approach him. Venerable Shigong”s activity was to search for a man with the point of his arrow; all who came before him were struck with fear.

　　“With respect to my own activity today—true creation and destruction—I play with miraculous transformations, enter into all kinds of circumstances, yet nowhere have I anything to do. Circumstances cannot change me.

　　“Whenever someone comes here seeking I immediately go out and look at him. He doesn”t recognize me. Thereupon I don various kinds of robes. The student, assigning some meaning to this, straightway falls into words and phrases. What a pity that the blind shavepate, a man without the eye [to see], grasps at the robe I”m wearing and declares it to be blue or yellow, red or white! When I remove the robe and enter the state of purity, the student takes one look and is immediately filled with delight and longing. Then, when I cast off everything, the student is stunned and, running about in wild confusion,cries, “You have no robe!” If I say, “Do you know me, the man who wears these robes

　　” he”ll abruptly turn his head around and recognize me through and through.

　　“Virtuous monks, don”t acknowledge robes. Robes cannot move of themselves, but people can put them on. There is the robe of purity, the robe of birthlessness, the robe of bodhi, the robe of nirvana, the patriarch-robe, and the buddha-robe. Virtuous monks, these spoken words and written phrases are all nothing but changes of robes.

　　“Churning up the sea of breath in your belly and clacking your teeth together, you devise wordy interpretations. So it”s clear that these are only illusory transformations. Virtuous monks:

　　Acts of speech are displayed without,

　　Mental activities are manifested within.

　　Because of mental activities thoughts arise, but these are all just robes.

　　“If all you do is acknowledge as real the robes that are merely put on, even after the passage of kalpas numerous as dust you”ll still have nothing but an understanding of robes, and will continue going round and round in the three realms, transmigrating through birth-and-death. Much better do nothing.

　　I meet [him] yet do not re…

《镇州临济慧照禅师语录 The Recorded Sayings of Chan Master Linji Huizhao of Zhenzhou》全文未完，请进入下页继续阅读…