Faith in mind(1)

Written by Seng Ts’n, the zen’s class Third Patriarch

The supreme way is not difficult

If only you do not pick and choose.

Neither love nor hate.

And you will clearly understand.

Be off by a hair,

And you are as far from it as heaven from earth.

If you want the way to appear,

Be neither for nor against.

For and against opposing each other,

This is mind disease.

Without recognizing the mysterious principle,

It is useless to practice quietude.

The way is perfect like great space,

Without lacked, without excess.

Because of grasping and rejecting,

You cannot attain it.

Do not pursue conditioned existence;

Do not abide in acceptance of emptiness.

In oneness and equality,

Confusion vanishes of it self.

Stop activity and return to stillness,

And that stillness will be even more active.

Merely stagnating in duality,

How can you recognize oneness?

If you fail to penetrate oneness,

Both places lose their function.

Banish existence and you fall into existence;

Follow emptiness and you turn your back on it.

Excessive talking and thinking turn you from harmony with the way.

Cut off talking and thinking,

And there is nowhere you cannot penetrate.

Return to the root and attain the principle;

Pursue illumination and you lost it.

One moment of reversing the light is greater than the previous emptiness.

The previous emptiness is transformed;

It was all a product of deluded views.

No need to seek the real;

Just extinguish your views.

Do not abide in dualistic views;

Take care not to seek after them.

As soon as there is right and wrong,

The mind is scattered and lost.

Two comes from one,

Yet do not even keep the one.

When one mind does not arise,

Myriad dharmas are without defect.

Without defect, without dharmas,

No arising, no mind.

The subject is extinguished with the object.

The object sinks away with the subject;

Subject is subject because of the object.

Know that the two are originally one-emptiness.

In one emptiness, that the two are the same,

Containing all phenomena.

Not seeing fine or coarse,

How can there be any bias?

The great way is broad neither easy nor difficult.