Notes Beside the Bamboo Window — Third Collection, Part 16
Continuing the Third Collection (三筆). Following directly from the previous entry's warning about food-offering officiants, Zhuhong argues that lecturing on scripture carries its own, perhaps greater, risk of error — then turns to the sheer improbability of ever encountering the Pure Land teaching at all, and closes with two entries condemning casual, unexamined cruelty toward animals, whether for the table or for mere decorative pleasure.
71. 講法師 — Lecturing Dharma Masters
A challenge to the assumption that scriptural lecturers face less spiritual risk than food-offering officiants — arguing that the sheer breadth of scripture makes genuine mastery even harder to achieve than a single ritual technique, and cataloguing the specific faults careless lecturers commit.
或謂：「講法師有化物之功，無交鬼神之責，其寡過矣乎！」曰：「殆有甚焉！施食，一法耳，一法猶易精：經論繁多，一一而欲精之，亦難矣！故古人業有專攻，如恭《法華》、善《華嚴》之類是也。今則無經不說，無論不宣，其果超越於先哲乎？遂有師承無自而臆見自用者；有好為新說，而妄議前賢者；有略加銷釋，而全無發揮者，皆未免於過也。必其精研有素，博學無方，惟以明道為懷，不圖利養於己，庶幾有功而無過耳。」或又謂：「智者云：『為利弘經，亦恆有菩薩之名』者，何也？」噫！此為具菩薩之大悲，而未臻菩薩之實行者言也，非為貪利者言也。不察此意，幾許誤哉！
Someone said: "A lecturing Dharma master has the merit of converting sentient beings, without bearing any responsibility for communing with spirits — surely he commits fewer faults!" I answered: "Perhaps his faults are even greater! The food-offering rite is only a single method, and even a single method is relatively easy to master fully; but the sutras and treatises are so numerous that mastering every single one of them in full is genuinely difficult. This is why the ancients devoted themselves to a single specialization — reverent devotion to the Lotus Sutra, or deep expertise in the Flower Ornament Sutra, and the like. Today's lecturers, by contrast, expound every sutra and every treatise without exception — do their own insights truly surpass those of the sages of old? And so we see some who, lacking any genuine transmission from a teacher, rely entirely on their own subjective, willful opinions; some who delight in novel interpretations and recklessly criticize the worthies of the past; and some who merely paraphrase the text superficially, drawing out no genuine meaning at all. All of these fall short in one way or another. Only one who has genuinely, thoroughly studied the texts, whose learning is broad without limit, whose sole concern is clarifying the truth rather than seeking his own profit and support, comes close to having real merit without real fault."
Someone else asked: "Master Zhiyi himself said: 'Even one who expounds the sutras for personal gain may still bear the name of bodhisattva' — how do you explain this?" Ah! This was said of one who already possesses the bodhisattva's own great compassion, but has not yet fully perfected the bodhisattva's actual conduct — it was never said on behalf of those who are simply greedy for profit. Failing to examine this distinction carefully has led to no small confusion!
This entry functions as a direct companion to entry 70 immediately preceding it — having just warned that food-offering officiants risk genuine spiritual danger through insincerity, Zhuhong pivots to argue the more prestigious role of scriptural lecturer carries at least as much risk, simply of a different kind, continuing the same broader concern about unearned authority already developed across this collection's entries 53, 59, and 66 above.
72. 一蹉百蹉 — One Misstep, a Hundred Missteps
Using a striking image of ants who have failed to escape their own species across seven successive buddhas' appearances in the world, Zhuhong argues that failing to seize the rare opportunity to encounter the Pure Land teaching in this life risks an almost incalculable delay.
古云：「今生若不修，一蹉是百蹉。」一之至百，何蹉之多直至於是？經言：離惡道得人身難，得人身逢佛法難；然而逢念佛法門，信受為尤難也。如經所言，蟻子自七佛以來，未脫蟻身，安知何日得人身？又何日逢佛法？又何日逢念佛法門而信受也？何止百蹉，蓋千蹉萬蹉而無窮也。傷哉！
The ancients said: "If one fails to cultivate in this present life, a single misstep becomes a hundred missteps." Why should a single misstep lead to so many further ones, all the way to a hundred? The sutras teach that escaping the lower realms to obtain a human body is difficult; obtaining a human body and then encountering the Buddha-dharma is difficult; and encountering the Pure Land teaching of Buddha-recitation, and believing and accepting it, is more difficult still. As the sutra says: a colony of ants has already lived through the appearance of seven successive buddhas in this world, and still has not escaped its own ant-body — who can say when it will ever obtain a human body at all? Or when it will ever encounter the Buddha-dharma? Or when it will ever encounter the Pure Land teaching and believe and accept it? This is not merely a hundred missteps — it is a thousand, ten thousand missteps, without end. How truly sorrowful!
The ant story comes from the Sutra of the Wise and the Foolish, in which the elder Sudatta and Śāriputra, while surveying a site for a new monastery, notice a colony of ants that Śāriputra recognizes as having occupied that exact same spot through the appearances of seven previous buddhas across ninety-one kalpas, never once escaping their own ant-form — a genuinely staggering scriptural image of karmic stagnation that Zhuhong uses here to sharpen the urgency already expressed throughout this collection's many entries on wasted time (compare entries 39–40 and 65 above).
73. 禁屠 — Forbidding Slaughter
A pointed observation that officials only forbid slaughter during droughts and floods, revealing an unspoken awareness that killing is wrong even as ordinary daily butchery — and even sacrificial slaughter in Guanyin's own honor — continues unchecked the rest of the time.
世人廣殺生命，以供朝夕，備宴賞，奉祭祀，皆謂理所當然。既其當然，則何為旱乾水溢而官禁屠宰，然後知屠宰之為非也？雖然，旱災而小霑，水災而少霽，已彘肩羊肘高懸市井矣！又杭俗祈禱觀音大士，必請至海會寺，而滿城宰殺，誠意何在？深可怪歎！儻其時時戒殺，戶戶持齋，必能感召天和，雨暘時若，田禾豐穰，海宇清寧，葛天、無懷之風再見于今日矣；奈何習俗相沿不可救也，哀哉！
Ordinary people slaughter living creatures on a vast scale, to supply their own morning and evening meals, to prepare banquets and celebrations, to offer sacrifices — all considered entirely a matter of course. But if it is truly a matter of course, why is it that whenever drought or flood strikes, the government forbids slaughter, and only then do people realize that slaughter itself is wrong? And yet, the moment a drought receives even a light rain, or a flood begins even slightly to clear, pig hocks and lamb shanks are already hanging high in the marketplace stalls once again! And according to Hangzhou custom, whenever people wish to pray to the Bodhisattva Guanyin, they must first invite her image to Haihui Temple — and then slaughter animals throughout the entire city to offer in sacrifice. Where, in this, is any real sincerity to be found? How truly strange and lamentable this is!
Should people everywhere refrain from killing at all times, and every household observe a vegetarian fast, this would surely call forth the natural harmony of heaven and earth — rain and sunshine arriving in their proper season, the harvest abundant, the whole realm at peace — and the customs of the legendary sage-rulers Getian and Wuhuai might appear once again in our own day. And yet this corrupt custom, handed down through the generations, has become impossible to reverse. How sorrowful!
Haihui Temple was a genuine, historically documented Chan monastery in Hangzhou's own Shi Fo district, where the Caodong-lineage master Touzi Yiqing once taught — Zhuhong's specific complaint about slaughtering animals throughout the city in the very act of praying to Guanyin, a bodhisattva whose entire cult centers on compassion toward suffering beings, is a genuinely sharp piece of local social observation rather than an abstract doctrinal point, naming an actual civic custom he witnessed in his own home region.
74. 畜魚鶴 — Keeping Fish and Cranes as Pets
A brief but pointed argument that keeping ornamental fish and cranes causes genuinely vast, cumulative killing purely for visual pleasure — worse, in Zhuhong's view, than raising livestock for actual subsistence.
世俗畜小金魚者，飼以蟣蝦；畜鶴者，飼以細魚。飼鶴則一食動以百計，飼金魚則一食動以千計，積日而月，積月而年，殺業無邊矣！夫養蠶也，孳生六畜也，為飽暖而造此殺業也；魚與鶴，供一翫視而已。嗟乎！是亦不可以已乎？
Ordinary households that keep small goldfish feed them water fleas; those that keep cranes feed them small fish. Feeding a crane, one feeds it by the hundreds at a single meal; feeding goldfish, one feeds them by the thousands at a single meal — accumulated day after day, month after month, year after year, the resulting karma of killing is truly boundless! Raising silkworms, breeding the six domestic animals — these at least involve killing for the sake of one's own food and clothing, one's own basic livelihood; but fish and cranes serve only for one's own visual amusement. Alas! Could this not simply be given up?
This entry deliberately echoes the same moral hierarchy Zhuhong already applied to sericulture in the Second Collection's own "Silk" entries (entry 50 above) — there, too, he distinguished killing genuinely necessary for subsistence from killing that could easily be avoided, and here extends that same distinction to an entirely avoidable category: keeping decorative pets whose feeding requirements multiply the very killing they were meant only to entertain their owner into forgetting.