"Epitaph for Huineng, the Sixth Grand Master"
(from The Wisdom of Huineng, Chinese Buddhist Philosopher: The Platform Sutra and Other Translations)
六祖能禅师碑铭
By Wang Wei (701-761 A.D.) as a stone tablet inscription
He does not have anything to abandon
Because he has arrived at the source.
He does not reside in emptiness
For he knows that emptiness is also empty.
Away from action and non-action,
He lets Nature run its course and follows its eternal principles.
He lives with the hundred dharmas without possessing them,
And he takes care of the ten thousand things without being fatigued.
The oarsman at sea in search of the precious pearl
May never find the thing he is looking for.
The goddess that showered Buddha's disciples with flowers
Could become a sravaka or a pratyekabuddha.
Thus it is known that the Dharma is not produced.
It is to be perceived by the mind.
The perception of the mind is fickle but the Dharma is constant.
Huineng the perfect man of the world has testified to this.
He has attained passionless purity, yet he is not indulged in it.
He liberates sentient beings, yet he is not insentient.
Such is the chan master from Caoxi!
The master is from the Lu clan
Of such-and-such a county
Of such-and-such a prefecture.
Since names are illusory,
The master does not belong to a clan with a name.
Since the Dharma does not have a center and a border,
The master does not belong to the land of China.
When he was a child,
His good habits were seen in the games he played
And his sharp roots were recognized in his child's heart.
Without a selfish love of his body,
He sweated and stank in the farm fields.
He lived in barbarian country,
Where he looked for meaning.
At a certain age,
He went to attend Master Hongren in Huangmei,
Where he exerted himself.
He was quite comfortable with the labor of getting water from the well
And pounding rice in the mortar room.
Regularly he looked into his own mind
And was enlightened while working among the weeds.
Every time the Fifth Grand Master was seated on the platform,
Around him were gathered a courtyardful of students.
Amid the audience,
There were the roots of the three vehicles to hear the Dharma from one voice.
Huineng silently committed everything to heart.
Once, he did not notice that the lecture had stopped
And for a while he remained motionless.
He retreated from the congregation and examined himself.
He had had attained anatman, the annihilation of the ego.
While the desire of the thirsty deer who took a mirage for water was still there,
And the ambition of the flying bird was not dropped,
The aftertastes of a delicious meal still lingered on the tongue
And the rags were still on the body,
Everyone else said,
"Now I am at home with the teaching,
And I can gauge the oceans and look into the skies.
This is the so-called 'the acquisition of the Yellow Emperor's pearl'
And from now on I am worthy of receiving the imprint of the King of the Dharma."
Master Huineng understood he alone got it
But he was humble and kept silence.
Why is it necessary to speak the intention of Heaven?
Who dare compare with the holy and the saintly?
Confucius once said to one student of another,
"Si! Neither you nor I can compare with Hui!"
When the Fifth Grand Master was dying,
He bestowed upon Huineng the robe and the Dharma
That had been inherited from his predecessor.
He said,
"A thing shall not be unique in its goodness
And a person shall not excel alone.
After I die, please carry it on."
Therefore, with his inherited treasures
Master Huineng went into hiding
Somewhere in a strange land.
All the living things constituted his Pure Land
And he dwelt among the common folks.
Worldly affairs constituted the liberation door
And he engaged himself in agriculture and business with troublesome companions.
Thus he spent sixteen years.
Master Yinzong in Nanhai was explaining The Nirvana Sutra,
And Huineng was in the audience.
The Master asked him about the drift of the sutra and the true vehicle,
There was nothing he could not answer.
The Master asked a few more questions and said in astonishment,
"This very person is the reincarnation of a bodhisattva,
Who has the eyes of a mortal.
Let me open your eyes of wisdom."
Then, the master, accompanied by his disciples, went to Huineng's room,
Where they bowed to him
And the master performed the religious ritual of hair-cutting for him.
From then on, the rain of Dharma was everywhere,
Cleaning up alien dusts.
Huineng taught forbearance.
He said,
"With forbearance one is not subject to life and death
And therefore is able to annihilate one's ego
And develop the initial mind for enlightenment."
He became head of a Buddhist sect.
He was imperturbable and nothing could enter him.
He was wise and was attached to nothing.
His great body moved in all the ten directions.
The original bodhi transcended the three periods of time:
The past, the present and the future.
While his roots and sensations did not perish,
He said no to all phenomena and emptiness as well.
He made wishes, yet none for himself.
He was a mortal but he was a saint.
He moved his feet and found himself in bodhimandala,
The place of enlightenment.
This mind and this heart together went to the ocean of bhutatathata,
The true nature of the manifest world.
In The Lotus Sutra,
The merchant was fatigued and stopped halfway at the magic city,
And the undoubting prodigal son directly opened the treasures.
Without planting the roots of virtue,
One can hardly enter into the spirit of sudden enlightenment.
When one is deranged he sees flowers in the air.
It is not the fault of the sun of wisdom.
Grand Master Huineng often sighed,
"To give alms of seven treasures that equal the sands of the Ganges,
And to cultivate deeds for countless eons of time
That all ink on the planet combined is insufficient to record
Is not as good as spontaneous turn of the Wheel,
Nor as good as uninhibited compassion,
Which nurtures caturyoni － the four forms of birth －
And protects the three kinds of existence."
And then, marga and prapta,
The right way and its keeping,
Were everywhere
And word was spread far and wide.
The well-dressed rich individuals were ready
To experience any hardship to see the saint,
And foreigners with their painted bodies
And pierced earlobes
Spent years at sea, in order to see
The grace of the dragon-elephant
In the person of the master, forgetting
The dangerous mouths of sharks and killer whales.
Some stood outside the preaching floor and listened.
Some sat cross-legged in front of the platform inside.
In a wood of candanas, there was no other tree.
The only flower that was favored was the zhanpu,
And no other was smelt.
Most of the pilgrims had substantial progress
And dissociated themselves from illusions and paranoia.
From thousands of miles away,
Their Majesties longed to see him in earnest,
Thinking of a red-carpet welcome and bowing to him.
Zetian the Empress Dowager and Emperor Xiaohe himself wrote to him,
Requesting him to go to court.
The chan master had a heart like that of Zimou, Duke of Wei,
Who in as bad a shape as he was
Did not forget his king.
.
But Master Huiyuan's feet never went beyond
The Tiger Brook in front of the monastery.
On that excuse, he did not accept the royal invitation.
Then Their Majesties sent him a robe of a hundred patches
And money and silk in plenty.
The generous Emperor gave a precious robe
To the man of illusions
And the Empress Dowager out of previous karma
Gave money to an incarnate Buddha.
In all generations, valuable things have been symbolic
Of appreciation of virtue.
Until one day of a certain month of a certain year,
Master Huineng said to his disciples:
"I am on my way."
All of a sudden,
The room smelt of an unusual scent
And a white rainbow came down to the ground.
After having his meal, he was squarely seated.
Then he bathed himself and
Changed his clothes.
In the snap of fingers,
Gone was the Master.
The water flew and the lamp flickered.
The golden body withered.
The fuel ran out and the fire went out.
The mountains slid, and the rivers went dry.
The birds cried and the monkeys wailed.
The witnesses screamed,
"His eyes are closed."
All provinces mourned and the world felt its loss.
On a certain day of a certain month,
The saint was relocated to a certain place in Caoxi.
Without consultation with a geomancer,
An auspicious lot was chosen.
And it became a forest of good deeds and merits,
Where perched the white cranes.
Alackaday!
What a simple perfect soul the Master had!
What pure innocent gifts!
A hundred blessings were shown in his countenance
And all the profundity of thought gathered in his mind.
Whether he moved about or had his rest,
He was fulfilling his sacred obligations.
Therefore,
People under the five skies came one after another
And the hundred Yue tribes kowtowed to him.
Long snakes and big serpents
Gave up the use of their venom.
Halberds and arrows lost their edge.
All hunting and fishing ceased.
Pests and the poisonous Dan birds reformed themselves.
One after another
People stopped eating meat
And went vegetarian like the sangha.
One after another
They dropped the fish net
And donned clothes for the rice fields.
The promotion of the Dharma of the Buddha was
A great help to the Emperors
In the edification of the people.
The Sixth Grand Master in his old age had a disciple
By the name of Shenhui,
Who was enlightened in middle age.
Shenhui produced a magnanimity
From the soul of a mortal, and sharp wisdom
From his diligent learning.
One of the last students,
He was the best,
Which delighted the master.
What the deceased master envisioned
Was like the wish of the dragon
Who donated his pearl.
People did not recognize the pearl
And sulked over what they deemed
A piece of jade in their hands.
Shenhui trusts my understanding of the great master
And the following verses are written at his request:
1
By origin
There was none of the five components of being:
Nor were there the six sensations.
By a reverse calculation,
People fail to understand the right way.
Perched on the lotus seat
The master took his leave. .
Bereaved of his body and his mind,
Who else do we have to tell right from wrong, good from evil?
2
The Perfect Man has a big vision
And in his merits he is comparable to the Buddha.
If there is no desire to discard one's possessions
How can one access emptiness?
He is not attached to the three realms:
Earth, atmosphere and heaven.
He is not lured by the eight temptations called eight winds.
By virtue of his sharp intelligence,
He understood the essence of the belief.
3
Lost in side ways, one cannot hear the right teachings.
Huineng stooped among the evil kind
And promoted good actions.
He taught forbearance and non-complaining.
He taught the cultivation of compassion and the giving up of hunting.
One of the lotus flowers in the world,
He is the Sixth Grand Master.
