12Dizang Plants the Fields地藏種田

Introduction 示眾

才士筆耕，辯士舌耕。我衲僧家，慵看露地白牛，不顧無根瑞草，如何度日？

The talented scholar farms with his pen. The clever debater farms with his tongue. But us monks? We're too lazy to watch the white ox out in the open field, and we pay no mind to the auspicious weed with no roots. So how do we get through the day?

地藏問脩山主：「甚處來？」脩云：「南方來。」藏云：「南方近日佛法如何？」脩云：「商量浩浩地。」藏云：「爭如我這裏種田博飯喫？」脩云：「爭奈三界何？」藏云：「爾喚甚麼作三界？」

Dizang asked Xiushan, "Where are you coming from?"
Xiushan said, "From down south."
Dizang said, "How's the Dharma doing down south these days?"
Xiushan said, "Everyone's busy arguing about it."
Dizang said, "How does that beat me up here, planting fields and cooking my rice?"
Xiushan said, "And what about the three worlds?"
Dizang said, "What is it you're calling the three worlds?"

Verse 頌

宗說般般盡強為，
流傳耳口便支離。
種田博飯家常事，
不是飽參人不知。
參飽明知無所求，
子房終不貴封侯。
忘機歸去同魚鳥，
濯足滄浪煙木秋。

Teaching, talking, all of it forced labor,
passed mouth to ear till it falls to pieces.
Plant the fields, cook the rice, the everyday round,
and if you haven't trained to the bone you'll never know it.
Train to the full and you know: nothing to chase.
Zhang Liang in the end cared nothing for rank and fief.
Drop the scheming, go home, fall in with fish and birds,
wash your feet in the blue river, misty trees, autumn.

Pointer

Two Chan teachers meeting: Dizang runs a quiet monastery, Xiushan is a traveling monk passing through. Xiushan reports that down south the Dharma is all hot debate and theory, and Dizang counters that he would rather farm and cook, since for him that plain physical labor of running a monastery is the practice. Then Xiushan springs the trap, "the three worlds," the Buddhist name for the entire web of existence and suffering you are supposedly trying to escape: nice talk, he implies, but you cannot dodge the big spiritual problem by hiding in chores. Dizang's reply flips it, refusing to accept the three worlds as some looming wall and instead asking what exactly Xiushan even means by the phrase. That is the move worth watching, a teacher who will not let an abstraction become a thing to climb. The verse points to Zhang Liang, the statesman who helped win an empire and then walked away from the rewards, because the whole drift here is wanting nothing.