25The Hermit of Lotus Flower Peak

Introduction 垂示

機不離位，墮在毒海；語不驚群，陷於流俗。忽若擊石火裏別緇素，閃電光中辨殺活，可以坐斷十方，壁立千仞。還知有恁麼時節麼？試舉看。

Let your wit sit in its slot and you drown in poison. Talk that doesn't stop a crowd cold sinks into the same old chatter. But strike a spark off flint and tell black from white in the flash, catch a bolt of lightning and pick out life from death in the flicker, and you can cut off all directions at once and stand like a sheer thousand-foot wall. Is there such a moment? Let's see.

蓮花峯庵主拈拄杖示眾云：「古人到這裏，為什麼不肯住？」眾無語，自代云：「為他途路不得力。」復云：「畢竟如何？」又自代云：「楖𣗖橫擔不顧人，直入千峯萬峯去。」

The hermit of Lotus Flower Peak held up his staff before the assembly and said, "When the old masters reached this place, why wouldn't they stay?" No one answered. So he answered for them: "Because the road gave them no footing." Then he pressed on: "And in the end, what then?" Again he answered himself: "Staff across my shoulder, heeding no one, I walk straight into the thousand peaks, the ten thousand peaks."

Verse 頌

眼裏塵沙耳裏土，
千峯萬峯不肯住。
落花流水太茫茫，
剔起眉毛何處去。

Grit in his eyes, dirt in his ears,
through the thousand peaks, the ten thousand, he will not stay.
Fallen blossoms, running water, on and on without end.
He lifts his eyebrows. Where has he gone?

Pointer

A hermit here is a Chan monk who has walked out of the big monasteries to live alone in a hut, this one on a peak named for the lotus. He runs a one-man dialogue: he poses a question to his students, they freeze, and he answers it himself, twice over. His subject is the danger of getting comfortable. The old masters never settled into any "attainment," because clinging to a resting place kills you, gives you "no footing," and his own answer is to keep moving, shoulder the staff and march into the endless mountains rather than camp anywhere. The verse's "grit in his eyes, dirt in his ears" is not an insult; it is the look of someone genuinely out on the road, weathered and walking, not parked somewhere clean and safe. This is the lonely peak Guishan predicted for Deshan back at case 4, lived rather than threatened.