The Great Zen Master Ta Hui ~ 03

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event type discourse
date & time 16 Jul 1987 am
location Chuang Tzu Auditorium, Pune
language English
audio Available, duration 1h 59min. Quality: good.
Live music after the discourse.
online audio
video Available, duration 2h 3min. Quality: good.
online video
see also
online text find the PDF of this discourse
shorttitle TAHUI03
notes
synopsis
Reader of the sutras: Ma Prem Maneesha.
The sutra
Do not grasp another's bow
Now if you want to save mental power, do not be concerned with whether or not a three-year-old child can say it, or whether or not an eighty-year-old-man can carry it out. Just don't do any evil and you have mastered these words. They apply whether you believe or not, so please think it over.
If worldly people whose present conduct is without illumination would correct themselves and do good, though the goodness is not yet perfect, isn't this better than depravity and shamelessness? One who does evil on the pretext of doing good is called in the teachings one whose causal ground is not genuine, bringing on crooked results. If, with a straightforward mind and straightforward conduct, you are able to seize supreme enlightenment directly, this can be called the act of a real man of power. The concerns that have come down from numberless ages are only in the present: If you can understand them right now, then the concerns of numberless ages will instantly disperse, like tiles being scattered or ice melting. If you don't understand right now, you'll pass through countless eons more, and it'll still be just as it is. The truth that is as it is has been continuous since antiquity without ever having varied so much as a hairsbreadth.
Matters of worldly anxiety are like the links of a chain, joining together continuously without a break. If you can do away with them, do away with them immediately! Because you have become habituated to them since beginningless time, to the point where they have become totally familiar, if you don't exert yourself to struggle with them, then as time goes on and on, with you unknowing and unawares, they will have entered deeply into you. Finally, on the last day of your life, you won't be able to do anything about it. If you want to be able to avoid going wrong when you face the end of your life, then from now on whenever you do anything, don't let yourself slip. If you go wrong in your present doings, it will be impossible not to go wrong when you're facing death.
There's a sort of person who reads scriptures, recites the Buddha-name and repents in the morning, but then in the evening runs off at the mouth, slandering and vilifying other people. The next day he does homage to Buddha and repents as before. All through the years till the end of his life he takes this as daily ritual -- this is extreme folly. Such people are far from realizing that the sanskrit word 'kshama' means to repent faults. This is called "cutting off the continuing mind." Once you have cut it off, never continue it again; once you have repented, do not commit [wrongdoings] again -- this is the meaning of repentance according to our Buddha which good people who study the path should not fail to know.
The mind, discriminating intellect, and consciousness of students of the path should be quiet and still twenty-four hours a day. When you have nothing to do, you should sit quietly and keep the mind from slackening and the body from wavering. If you practice to perfection over a long, long time, naturally body and mind will come to rest at ease, and you will have some direction in the path. The perfection of quiescence and stillness indeed settles the scattered and confused false consciousness of sentient beings, but if you cling to quiescent stillness and consider it the ultimate, then you're in the grip of perverted "silent illumination" ch'an.


(source:CD-ROM)


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