3The Patriarch Reads No Sutras東印請祖
Introduction 示眾
劫前未兆之機，烏龜向火；教外別傳一句，碓嘴生花。且道：還有受持讀誦分也無？
The workings that left no trace before the first age dawned. A turtle warming itself at the fire. The one line handed down outside the teachings. Flowers blooming from a stone pestle. So tell me: is there any way to take it up, to hold it, to recite it and read it?
東印土國王，請二十七祖般若多羅齊。王問曰：「何不看經？」祖云：「貧道入息不居陰界，出息不涉眾緣，常轉如是經，百千萬億卷。」
The king of Eastern India invited the twenty-seventh patriarch, Prajnatara, to a meal. The king asked, "Why don't you read the sutras?"
The patriarch said, "Breathing in, I don't dwell in the realm of the senses. Breathing out, I don't get tangled in things. Always I am turning a sutra like this, a hundred thousand million scrolls of it."
Verse 頌
雲犀玩月璨含輝，
木馬游春駿不羈。
眉底一雙寒碧眼，
看經那到透牛皮。
明白心起曠劫，
英雄力破重圍。
妙圓樞口轉靈機，
寒山忘却來時路，
拾得相將携手歸。
The cloud-rhino toys with the moon, its glow brimming over.
The wooden horse roams the spring, a colt no rope can hold.
Beneath his brows, a pair of cold blue eyes:
what sutra-reading ever cut clean through the hide?
A clear mind rises and the long ages fall away;
the hero's strength bursts the ring of siege wide open.
At the pivot's mouth, perfect and subtle, the living spring turns.
Hanshan forgets the road that brought him here,
and Shide takes his hand and leads him home.