Notes Beside the Bamboo Window — Third Collection, Part 27
Continuing the Third Collection (三筆). Zhuhong revisits a Daoist's old advice that ordination is unnecessary and finds real truth in it after all, then dismantles every worldly scheme for achieving "immortality" through fame, writing, or monuments, and closes with an argument against eating meat grounded as much in physiology as in compassion.
99. 修行不在出家 — Genuine Practice Does Not Depend on Ordination
Zhuhong revisits a Daoist's old advice — that formal ordination matters less than finding a genuine teacher — which he had dismissed in his own eagerness to be ordained, and finds real, uncomfortable truth in it after watching sincere lay believers outlast monks who drifted from their own early devotion once ordained.
予昔將欲出家，有黃冠語予：「不必出家，祇在得好師耳。」予時出家心急，置其語不論。出家後，思彼以延年、修養色身為業，得傳而留形久住足矣，何必出家。為僧者，欲破惑證智，上求佛果，下化眾生，則古德皆捨家離俗而作沙門。又彼若志求金丹大道，亦須出家，則彼之言未為當理。但觀今人有未出家前，頗具信心，剃染之後，漸涉世緣，翻成退墮；則反不如居家奉父母、教子孫，得一好師示導正法，依而行之，是如來在家真實弟子，何以假名阿練若為哉？如是，則彼言亦甚有理，又不可不知也。
Long ago, when I was about to leave home and become a monk, a Daoist practitioner said to me: "There's no real need to be ordained — the only thing that matters is finding a genuinely good teacher." At the time, I was so eager to be ordained that I paid his words no attention at all. After my ordination, I reflected that Daoist practice takes prolonging life and cultivating the physical body as its own proper business — for such a person, receiving proper transmission and achieving a long-lasting bodily existence would indeed be sufficient, with no need for ordination at all. But for a Buddhist monk, whose aim is to break through delusion and attain wisdom, seeking buddhahood above and transforming sentient beings below, the ancients all left home and renounced worldly life to become monastics. And even someone within the Daoist tradition itself, if truly seeking the great alchemical path to immortality, would likewise need to leave ordinary household life behind — so on reflection, that Daoist's original words did not actually hold up.
And yet, observing people today, I see many who, before their own ordination, possessed real and considerable faith, but who, once they had shaved their heads and donned the monastic robe, gradually became entangled in worldly affairs and ended up backsliding instead. Such a person would have done far better to remain at home, caring for his own parents and raising his own children, while still finding a genuinely good teacher to guide him in the true Dharma and following that teaching faithfully — this too would make him a genuine lay disciple of the Tathāgata. Why, then, borrow the empty title of a forest-dwelling ascetic for himself? Seen this way, that Daoist's original words hold real truth after all, and this too is something one ought not fail to understand.
This entry's structure — Zhuhong first refuting the Daoist's claim on doctrinal grounds, then conceding its practical wisdom on observing real cases of ordained backsliding — mirrors the same two-stage honesty already seen in his exchanges with the Daoist critic in entries 93 and 94 above, where an outsider's pointed criticism of Buddhist practice was met not with reflexive defense but with genuine reconsideration; the closing question about "borrowing the empty title of a forest-dwelling ascetic" (阿練若, from the Sanskrit āraṇyaka) reflects a concern, voiced throughout this collection, that outward monastic form without inward transformation is worse than no ordination at all.
100. 不朽計 — Calculating for Immortality
A sweeping dismissal of every worldly scheme for achieving lasting fame — collected writings, inscribed bronze vessels, stone monuments, even the words of sages themselves — all of which perish eventually, in favor of the one thing Zhuhong holds to be genuinely beyond destruction: the unborn, undying nature of mind itself.
世人將平生所作詩文彙為一集，乞諸名人序跋之曰，以此為不朽計也。噫！古之人必也名喧寰宇，昭灼於人之耳目者，乃所著述，方傳之至今。其次焉者，身沒之後，極之數十年間，墨之楮者或覆瓿，而劂之木者或資釜矣，安在其不朽也？必也鐫之鼎彝，篆之碑碣，數百年之後，存者亦不多見矣！即孔子之文章，二帝三王之典謨訓誥，傳諸萬世無弊，而三災起時，大地須彌、諸天宮殿皆悉碎為微塵，蕩為太虛，安在其不朽也？真不朽者，其不生不滅之本心乎！此則先天地而無始，後天地而無終。鸞法師曰：「此吾金仙氏之長生也。」予亦曰：「此吾大雄氏之所謂不朽也。」何不捨世必朽之閒家具，而求真不朽之正知見也？不此之計，而漫勞其心，其為計也疏矣！
People in this world gather their lifetime's poems and essays into a single collection, and beg some famous contemporary to write a preface or afterword for it, believing this secures their own immortality. Ah! Among the ancients, only those whose reputation genuinely resounded across the whole realm, unmistakably fixed in people's ears and eyes, ever had their writings survive down to the present day.
As for lesser figures, within mere decades of their own deaths, the paper their ink was written on may end up used to cover the mouth of some jar, and the wooden blocks that printed it may end up burned as kindling — where, then, is their immortality? Even carved into bronze ritual vessels or engraved on stone tablets, after several hundred years, few such objects survive at all! Even the writings of Confucius himself, or the canons, counsels, instructions, and proclamations of the two ancient sage-emperors and three sage-kings, though transmitted across ten thousand generations without ever being lost — when the three great cosmic catastrophes eventually arrive, the earth itself, Mount Sumeru, and every heavenly palace will all be shattered into fine dust and scattered into empty space. Where, then, is their immortality?
What is truly immortal is nothing other than each person's own unborn, undying original mind! This alone exists before heaven and earth, without any beginning, and continues after heaven and earth, without any end. Master Tanluan himself once said: "This is our own Golden Immortal's true secret of long life." I too would say: this is what our own Great Hero calls true immortality. Why, then, would one not set aside the world's inevitably perishable furnishings, and seek instead the genuinely imperishable right understanding and right view? To fail to plan for this, and instead exhaust one's mind chasing after the other — how careless a plan that truly is!
The "three great catastrophes" (三災) — destruction by fire, water, and wind at the end of a cosmic age — are a standard feature of traditional Buddhist cosmology already invoked elsewhere on this site in the context of impermanence, and Zhuhong's citation of Tanluan's own phrase "the Golden Immortal's true secret of long life," already quoted in this collection's earlier discussion of longevity in entry 81, deliberately echoes that entry while extending its argument from mere physical lifespan to the far larger question of what, if anything, could ever count as genuinely permanent; the two ancient sage-emperors and three sage-kings cited here (Yao, Shun, and the founders of the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties) represent the highest conceivable standard of enduring worldly reputation within the Confucian tradition, making Zhuhong's argument that even their words will not survive the end of a cosmic age a deliberately maximal claim.
101. 人不宜食眾生肉 — Human Beings Should Not Eat the Flesh of Other Sentient Beings
An argument against eating meat grounded as much in physiology as in compassion: Zhuhong traces the process of digestion itself to argue that habitual meat-eating literally reconstitutes the human body out of the very animals consumed, turning abstinence into a matter of basic self-respect as much as ethical restraint.
經言靴裘等物皆不應著，以其日與諸畜相親近也。夫此特著之身外，況食肉則入於身內乎！今人以犬、豕、牛、羊、鵝、鴨、魚、鱉為食，終世不覺其非，何也？夫飲食入胃，遊溢精氣以歸於脾，其渣滓敗液出大小腸，而華腴乃滋培臟腑，增長肌肉，積而久之，舉身皆犬、豕、牛、羊、鵝、鴨、魚、鱉之身也。父母所生之身，見生即異類矣，來生云乎哉？夫五穀為養，五菜為充，五果為助，《內經》語也，人之所食也亦既足矣，而奚以肉食為？既名曰人，不宜食肉。
The sutras teach that one should not even wear boots or fur garments made from animal hide, since doing so keeps one in constant close contact with these creatures upon one's own body. But this is merely something worn on the outside of the body — how much more true this must be of eating meat, which enters directly into the body itself!
People today eat the flesh of dogs, pigs, cattle, sheep, geese, ducks, fish, and turtles, and pass their entire lives without ever recognizing this as wrong. Why is this? When food and drink enter the stomach, their refined essence flows onward and is absorbed by the spleen, while their waste residue and spent fluids pass out through the large and small intestines; the nourishing essence that remains goes to sustain the internal organs and build up the body's own flesh. Accumulated over a long span of time, one's entire body comes to be composed of nothing but dog, pig, cattle, sheep, goose, duck, fish, and turtle. The very body given by one's own parents thus already becomes, within this present life, a body made of other kinds of creatures entirely — to say nothing of what awaits in the life to come!
"The five grains for nourishment, the five vegetables for sustenance, the five fruits for support" — these are the very words of the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon itself. What a person needs to eat is already fully provided by these alone — what need, then, is there for meat at all? Having been given the name "human being," one ought not to eat the flesh of other sentient beings.
Zhuhong's physiological argument here draws directly on the digestive theory of classical Chinese medicine as set out in the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon (Huangdi Neijing), which he cites by name for its own dietary prescription of grains, vegetables, and fruit as sufficient nourishment — grounding what might otherwise read as a purely ethical or karmic argument in the same medical framework his contemporaries would have taken as simple common knowledge; this fusion of physiological and karmic reasoning about diet is distinctive among this collection's many discussions of compassion toward animals, treating habitual meat-eating not only as a moral failing but as a literal, bodily self-transformation into the very creatures consumed.