45The Four Lines of the Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment覺經四節

Introduction 示眾

現成公案，只據現今；本分家風，不圖分外。若也強生節目，枉費工夫，盡是與混沌畫眉、鉢盂安柄。如何得平穩去？

The case is already here, whole, right in front of you. Go by what's present now. The family style is your own plain self; don't reach for anything extra. Start manufacturing fancy steps and you've thrown your effort away: it's like painting eyebrows on raw chaos, or fitting a handle to a begging bowl. How will you ever come to rest and stand level that way?

圓覺經云：「居一切時不起妄念，於諸妄心亦不息滅；住妄想境不加了知，於無了知不辨真實。」

The Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment says: At all times, don't kick up deluded thoughts; but don't stamp out the deluded mind either. While you sit in the realm of delusion, don't pile on understanding; and in that not-knowing, don't sort out what's real.

Verse 頌

巍巍堂堂，
磊磊落落。
鬧處刺頭，
穩處下脚。
脚下線斷我自由，
鼻端泥盡君休斵。
莫動著，
千年故紙中合藥。

Towering, upright.
Solid, wide open.
In the racket, he plants his head right in.
On steady ground, he sets his foot down.
Cut the cord beneath my feet and I go free.
The speck of mud is off your nose, so drop the axe.
Don't lay a finger on it.
You're brewing medicine from thousand-year-old scrap paper.

Pointer

The case quotes four lines from a scripture, the Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment, and they read like a tightrope walk in slow motion: don't kick up wandering thoughts, but don't stamp them out either; don't pile analysis onto what's in front of you, but don't then congratulate yourself on "not knowing." Every correction you'd reach for turns out to be one motion too many, and there sits the whole difficulty. The verse's nose and axe is the key image: a craftsman could shave a fleck of plaster off a man's nose with an axe and leave no scratch, but only because the man held dead still and never flinched. The flinch is what undoes you here, not the plaster, so once the speck is gone, drop the axe. The case is already complete and sitting right here, which is why the harder you saw at the scripture, the more you're just brewing cures from worthless old paper.