Notes Beside the Bamboo Window — Second Collection, Part 8
Continuing the Second Collection (二筆) in the source text's own order. This section closes with one of the collection's most personal entries — Zhuhong's own grief at losing his parents just as he began to hear the Buddha's teaching, and his resulting counsel that guiding one's parents toward the Pure Land is filial piety's highest form.
95. 念佛不礙參禪 — Buddha-Recitation Does Not Hinder Chan Investigation
An argument, supported by five named Chan masters who also practiced Pure Land devotion, that even a genuinely awakened Chan practitioner benefits from vowing rebirth in the Pure Land.
古謂：「參禪不礙念佛，念佛不礙參禪。」又云：「不許互相兼帶。」然亦有禪兼淨土者，如圓照本、真歇了、永明壽、黃龍新、慈受深等諸師，皆禪門大宗匠，而留心淨土，不礙其禪。故知參禪人雖念念究自本心，而不妨發願，願命終時往生極樂。所以者何？參禪雖得箇悟處，倘未能如諸佛住常寂光，又未能如阿羅漢不受後有，則盡此報身，必有生處。與其生人世而親近明師，孰若生蓮花而親近彌陀之為勝乎？然則念佛不惟不礙參禪，實有益於參禪也。
The ancients said: "Chan investigation does not hinder Buddha-recitation, and Buddha-recitation does not hinder Chan investigation." Others have said: "The two must not be combined together." And yet there have also been those who combined Chan with Pure Land practice — masters such as Yuanzhao Zongben, Zhenxie Qingliao, Yongming Yanshou, Huanglong Wuxin, and Cishou Huaishen were all great masters of the Chan school, and yet they gave real attention to the Pure Land as well, without this ever hindering their Chan practice.
From this we know: though a Chan practitioner investigates his own original mind in every single thought, this does not prevent him from also vowing to be reborn in the Pure Land of Ultimate Bliss at the moment of death. Why is this? Even should Chan investigation bring one to a place of genuine awakening, if one has not yet attained a dwelling like the buddhas' own in the Land of Eternal Tranquil Light, nor attained the arhat's freedom from further rebirth, then once this present retribution-body comes to its end, one must certainly be reborn somewhere again. And between being reborn into the human world, where one might at least draw near a wise teacher, and being reborn instead within a lotus in the Pure Land, drawing near Amitābha Buddha himself — which could possibly be better? Buddha-recitation, then, not only does not hinder Chan investigation — it genuinely benefits it.
All five named masters were genuine, historically documented Chan figures who also maintained Pure Land practice — Yongming Yanshou is the same sixth Pure Land patriarch already discussed for his "Four Selections" verses in entry 84 above, and Huanglong Wuxin is recorded as declaring he would personally "fall into the hell of having his tongue pulled out" should sincere Buddha-recitation ever fail to produce rebirth in the Pure Land, one of Chan Buddhism's more startlingly direct endorsements of the practice.
96. 醫戒殺生 — Refraining from Killing in Medical Practice
A challenge to the common medical justification for using animal ingredients, arguing that treating human life as more valuable than animal life reflects ordinary bias rather than the buddhas' own impartial compassion.
陶隱君取生物為藥，遂淹滯其上昇。夫殺生以滋口腹，誠為不可；損物命而全人命，宜若無罪焉？不知貴人賤畜，常情則然，而非諸佛菩薩平等之心也。殺一命，活一命，仁者不為；而況死生分定，未必其能活乎，則徒增冤報耳！抱病者熟思之，業醫者熟思之。
Lord Tao the Recluse used living creatures to make medicine, and this delayed his own ascent to immortality. Killing living things merely to satisfy one's own appetite is certainly wrong — but harming an animal's life to preserve a human life, one might think, ought to carry no such fault? What one fails to realize is that valuing human life while treating animal life as worthless is simply the ordinary sentiment of the unenlightened, not the equal, all-embracing compassion of the buddhas and bodhisattvas. Taking one life to save another is something a truly benevolent person would never do — and besides, life and death are already fixed by one's own karma, and the patient may not even recover regardless; such killing only adds a further debt of vengeful retribution! Let those who are ill reflect carefully on this, and let those who practice medicine reflect carefully on this too.
Lord Tao the Recluse is Tao Hongjing (456–536), a genuinely major figure in Chinese medical and religious history — founder of the Shangqing school of Daoism, compiler of the foundational pharmacological Collected Commentaries on the Divine Farmer's Classic of Materia Medica, and adviser so valued by Emperor Wu of Liang (the same emperor defended in entry 45 above) that he was called "the prime minister among the mountains" despite never holding office. The legend behind Zhuhong's opening line holds that Tao's own ascent to immortality was delayed for twelve years as karmic consequence for the animal-derived medicines in his pharmacological writings — a story taken seriously enough within the tradition that Tao himself is said to have later compiled a supplementary materia medica substituting plant ingredients for animal ones.
97. 勘驗 — Testing
Two gōng'àn stories of masters testing a student's claimed awakening through sudden, physical confrontation, contrasted with the empty polish of merely intellectual Chan composition.
參學人有悟，必經明眼宗師勘驗過始得。如一僧常於神廟紙爐中宿，有師潛入紙爐，俟其來宿，攔胸把住，便問：「如何是祖師西來意？」僧云：「神前酒臺盤。」又一僧，人言其得悟，玄沙故與偕行，至水邊，忽推之落水，急問：「牛頭未見四祖時如何？」僧云：「伸腳在縮腳裡。」云云。此二僧者，非胸中七穿八洞、千了百當，隨呼隨應如空谷發聲，隨來隨現如明鏡對物，何能於倉卒忙遽做手腳不迭時，出言吐語如是的當、如是自在？彼閒時以意識摶量卜度，酬機作頌，非不粲然可觀，爭奈迅雷不及掩耳處，一場懡，可不慎歟？
When a student of Chan claims awakening, this must always be verified by a master with genuinely clear eyes before it can be accepted as real. Consider a certain monk who habitually slept inside the paper-burning brazier of a spirit shrine — a certain master crept into the brazier and waited for him to return for the night, then seized him by the chest and demanded: "What is the meaning of the Patriarch's coming from the West?" The monk answered: "The wine-table before the god's altar." Or consider another monk, whom people said had attained awakening — Xuansha deliberately walked alongside him to the water's edge, then suddenly pushed him in, and urgently demanded: "What was it like before Farong of Ox-Head Mountain ever met the Fourth Patriarch?" The monk answered: "A foot stretched out inside a foot drawn in" — and so on.
Neither of these two monks, unless his own chest had already been thoroughly pierced through and settled in every particular, ready to respond the instant he was called upon exactly as an empty valley echoes a sound, appearing the instant something approaches exactly as a bright mirror reflects an object, could ever have produced, in such sudden, hurried, unprepared circumstances, an answer so precisely apt, so utterly at ease. Those who, in their idle hours, work out clever answers through mere intellectual calculation and speculation, composing polished responses and verses to old cases, may well produce something dazzling to look at — but how helpless they would be the moment a real challenge struck like sudden thunder giving no time to cover one's ears, left with nothing but a moment of shame! Can a student of the Way afford not to take this seriously?
The first monk is the celebrated "Clam Monk" of Tang-dynasty Fujian, who lived by the shore gathering shellfish and slept in a temple's paper-burning brazier — his tester was Huayan Xiujing, a fellow disciple in the same Dongshan Liangjie lineage, whose own closing remark after the exchange ("truly no different from my own root") is recorded as an acknowledgment that they shared the same realization. The second story involves the master Xuansha Shibei testing a monk already praised for a striking awakening verse about peach blossoms — the same gōng'àn later became the basis of a still more famous second testing by Yuanwu Keqin (the compiler already cited in entry 80 above), pushing his own student into a pond with the identical question, a layered chain of verification the entry compresses into its own brief retelling.
98. 百法寺道者 — The Ascetic of Baifa Temple
A brief, admiring portrait of an anonymous, radically austere practitioner Zhuhong encountered — recorded, he says, precisely because such discipline is now so rare.
嘉靖間，有道者某，寓吳山百法寺，不乞化，弟子一人，賣藥以贍。日三食，每粥二盂，菜數莖，寄煮粥鍋。終日坐一室，嘿如也。有作念佛會者造之，擬發問，輒搖手云：「第靜坐，毋開言。」既不得言，遂逡巡而退。以餅餌蔬果進，拒不納，曰：「幸自有饘粥療饑，沒來由著此等向腹中轉一過，何為哉？」當時雖未覈其所修何道，而精專脫逸，不染世緣，今時似此者極少，誠予所不及，因識之。
During the Jiajing era, there was a certain ascetic who lodged at Baifa Temple on Wu Mountain. He never went out to beg for alms; a single disciple supported him by selling medicine. He ate three meals a day, each consisting of two bowls of rice porridge and a few stalks of vegetable, all cooked together in a single pot. He sat all day long in a single room, entirely silent. Someone who had organized a Buddha-recitation gathering came to visit him, intending to ask him questions, but the ascetic immediately waved his hand and said: "Just sit quietly — do not speak." Unable to obtain any teaching from him at all, the visitor withdrew after only a moment. When people brought him pastries, vegetables, and fruit as offerings, he refused them, saying: "I already have my own rice porridge to satisfy my hunger — why should I let these other things pass needlessly through my stomach as well?"
At the time, I did not verify exactly what practice this man followed, and yet his single-minded discipline, his freedom from ordinary convention, his complete detachment from worldly entanglement, are things exceedingly rare to find today — genuinely beyond what I myself have achieved — and so I record his story here.
Baifa Temple was a real, modestly sized temple on Hangzhou's Wu Mountain, in continuous use in some form from the Southern Song through the Qing dynasty; Zhuhong's admission that he never confirmed what school or method this ascetic actually followed is characteristic of his honesty elsewhere in the collection — the entry values the man's visible discipline on its own terms, without needing to first classify or credential it.
99. 出世間大孝 — Filial Piety That Transcends the World
One of the collection's most personal entries: Zhuhong's own grief at losing his parents just as he began to encounter Buddhism, and his resulting counsel that guiding one's parents toward the Pure Land is the highest form of filial piety.
人子於父母，服勞奉養以安之，孝也；立身行道以顯之，大孝也；勸以念佛法門，俾得生淨土，大孝之大孝也。予生晚，甫聞佛法，而風木之悲已至，痛極終天，雖欲追之，末由也已。奉告諸人，父母在堂，早勸念佛；父母亡日，課佛三年。其不能者，或一週歲，或七七日，皆可也。孝子欲報劬勞之恩，不可不知此。
For a child to serve and support his parents, giving them peace, is filial piety; to establish himself and walk the Way, bringing honor to his parents' name, is great filial piety; to urge them toward the teaching of Buddha-recitation, so that they may be reborn in the Pure Land, is the greatest filial piety of all. I myself was born late in my parents' lives, and had only just begun to hear the Buddha's teaching when the grief of losing them arrived — a sorrow that will last my whole life; though I wish I could have guided them, there was no longer any way to do so.
I say this to urge everyone: while your parents are still living, urge them toward Buddha-recitation as early as possible; once your parents have passed away, recite the Buddha's name on their behalf for three full years. If this is not possible, one full year, or even forty-nine days, will also do. Any child wishing to repay the debt of his parents' toil and care ought to understand this teaching.
The phrase "the grief of the still wind and the tree" (風木之悲) alludes to a story from the Han-dynasty Han Shi Wai Zhuan about a man named Gao Yu, who wept by the roadside that "the tree wishes to be still, but the wind will not stop; the child wishes to care for his parents, but they no longer wait" — a grief specifically for having become able to act only after it was too late to matter, which is exactly the loss Zhuhong describes suffering himself, making this among the most nakedly autobiographical passages in either collection.