Linji Yixuan

Selected excerpts from The Recorded Sayings of Linji - translated by J.C. Cleary

There is only the person in all of you right here and now listening to the Dharma. This person enters fire without being burned and water without being drowned. This person enters the mires of hell as if strolling in a garden sightseeing. This person enters the planes of the hungry ghosts and animals without being subject to their suffering. Why so? Because for this person there is nothing to reject, nothing to avoid.

When it's time to get dressed, put on your clothes. When you must walk, then walk. When you must sit, then sit. Just be your ordinary self in ordinary life, unconcerned in seeking for Buddhahood. For if you love the sacred and despise the ordinary, you are still bobbing in the sea of delusion. The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on earth. Those who are nothing in particular are noble people. Don't strive - just be ordinary.

If you try to grasp Zen in movement, it goes into stillness. If you try to grasp Zen in stillness, it goes into movement. It is like a fish hidden in a spring, drumming up waves and dancing independently. The moment a student blinks his eye, he’s already way off. The moment he tries to think, he's already differed. The moment he arouses a thought, he's already deviated. But for the one who understands, it’s always right there before their eyes. 

Never ever engage in random speculation— whether you understand or don’t understand, either way you’re mistaken. I, a mountain monk, tell you clearly—within the body-field of the five skandhas there is a true person with no-rank, always present, not even a hair's breadth away. Why don't you recognize him? The real being, with no status, is always going in and out through the doors of your face. Followers of the Way, if you take my viewpoint you’ll cut off the heads of the Saṃbhogakāya and Nirmāṇakāya Buddhas; a bodhisattva who has attained the completed mind of the tenth stage will be like a mere hireling; a bodhisattva of equivalent enlightenment or a bodhisattva of marvelous enlightenment will be like pilloried prisoners, an arhat and a pratyeka- buddha will be like privy filth; bodhi and nirvana will be like hitching posts for asses. Why is this so? Followers of the Way, it is only because you haven’t yet realized the emptiness of the innumerable kalpas that you have such obstacles. 

Be a master everywhere and wherever you stand is your true place. Followers of the Way, when I, this mountain monk, expound the dharma, what dharma do I expound? I expound the dharma of mind-ground, which enters the secular and the sacred, the pure and the defiled, the real and the temporal. But your ‘real and temporal,’ your ‘secular and sacred,’ cannot but attach labels to all that is real and temporal, secular and sacred. The real and the temporal, the secular and the sacred, cannot attach a name to this person. Followers of the Way, grasp and use, but never name—this is called the ‘mysterious principle’.

Followers of the Way, don’t have your face stamped with the seal of sanction by any old master anywhere, then go around saying, ‘I understand Chan, I understand the Way.’ Though your eloquence is like a rushing torrent, it is nothing but hell-creating karma. 

The true student of the Way does not search out the faults of the world,  but eagerly seeks true insight. If you can attain true insight, clear and complete, then, indeed, that is all. There is only the person of the Way who depends upon nothing, here listening to my discourse—it is they who is the mother of all buddhas. Therefore buddhas are born from nondependence. Awaken to nondependence, then there is no buddha to be obtained. Insight such as this is true insight.

Outside mind there’s no dharma, nor is there anything to be gained within it. What are you seeking? Everywhere you say, ‘There’s something to practice, something to obtain.’ Make no mistake! Even if there were something to be gained by practice, it would be nothing but birth-and-death karma. 

You say, ‘The six pāramitās and the ten thousand [virtuous] actions are all to be practiced.’ As I see it, all this is just making karma. Seeking buddha and seeking dharma are only making hell-karma. Seeking bodhisattva- hood is also making karma; reading the sutras and studying the teachings are also making karma. Buddhas and patriarchs are people with nothing to do. Therefore, for them, activity and the defiling passions and also nonactivity and passionlessness are ‘pure’ karma.

From Samaneri Jayasāra - Wisdom of the Masters