The Supreme Way is not difficult
If only you do not pick and choose. 1
Neither love nor hate
And you will clearly understand. 2
Be off by a hair
And you are as far from it as heaven from earth. 3
If you want the Way to appear
Be neither for nor against. 4
For and against opposing each other –
This is the mind’s disease. 5
Without recognising the mysterious principle
It is useless to practice quietude. 6
The Way is perfect like great space
Without lack, without excess. 7
Because of grasping and rejecting
You cannot attain it. 8
Do not pursue conditioned existence
Do not abide in acceptance of emptiness. 9
In oneness and equality
Confusion vanishes of itself. 10
Stop activity and return to stillness
And that stillness will be even more active. 11
Merely stagnating in duality
How can you recognise oneness? 12
If you fail to penetrate oneness
Both places lose their function. 13
Banish existence and you fall into existence
Follow emptiness and you turn your back on it. 14
Excessive talking and thinking
Turn you from harmony with the Way. 15
Cut off talking and thinking
And there is nowhere you cannot penetrate. 16
Return to the root and attain the principle
Pursue illumination and you lose it. 17
One moment of reversing the light
Is greater than the previous emptiness. 18
The previous emptiness is transformed
It was all a product of deluded views. 19
No need to seek the real
Just extinguish your views. 20
Do not abide in dualistic views
Take care not to seek after them. 21
As soon as there is right and wrong
The mind is scattered and lost. 22
Two comes from one
Yet do not even keep the one. 23
When one mind does not arise
Myriad dharmas are without defect. 24
Without defect, without dharmas,
No arising, no mind. 25
The subject is extinguished with the object
The object sinks away with the subject. 26
Object is object because of the subject
Subject is subject because of the object. 27
Know that the two are originally one emptiness
In one emptiness the two are the same containing all phenomena. 28
Not seeing fine or coarse
How can there be any bias? 29
The Great Way is broad
Neither easy nor difficult. 30
With narrow views and doubts
Haste will slow you down. 31
Attach to it and you loose the measure
The mind will enter a deviant path. 32
Let it go and be spontaneous
Experience no going or staying. 33
Accord with your nature, unite with the Way,
Wander at ease, without vexation. 34
Bound by thoughts you depart from the real
And sinking into stupor is as bad. 35
It is not good to weary the spirit
Why alternate between aversion and affection? 36
If you wish to enter the one vehicle
Do not be repelled by the sense realm. 37
With no aversion to the sense realm
You become one with true enlightenment. 38
The wise have no motives
Fools put themselves in bondage. 39
One dharma is not different from another
The deluded mind clings to whatever it desires. 40
Using mind to cultivate mind
Is this not a great mistake? 41
The erring mind begets tranquility and confusion
In enlightenment there are no likes or dislikes. 42
The duality of all things
Issues from false discriminations. 43
A dream, an illusion, a flower in the sky –
How could they be worth grasping? 44
Gain and loss, right and wrong
Discard them all at once. 45
If the eyes do not close in sleep
All dreams will cease of themselves. 46
If the mind does not discriminate
All dharmas are of one suchness. 47
The essence of one suchness is profound
Unmoving, conditioned things are forgotten. 48
Contemplate all dharmas as equal
And you return to things as they are. 49
When the subject disappears
There can be no measuring or comparing. 50
Stop activity and there is no activity
When activity stops there is no rest. 51
Since two cannot be established
How can there be one? 52
In the very ultimate
Rules and standards do not exist. 53
Develop a mind of equanimity
And all deeds are put to rest. 54
Anxious doubts are completely cleared
Right faith is made upright. 55
Nothing lingers behind
Nothing can be remembered. 56
Bright and empty, functioning naturally,
The mind does not exert itself. 57
It is not a place of thinking
Difficult for reason and emotion to fathom. 58
In the Dharma Realm of true suchness
There is no other, no self. 59
To accord with it is vitally important
Only refer to “not two”. 60
In not-two all things are in unity
Nothing is excluded. 61
The wise throughout the ten directions
All enter this principle. 62
This principle is neither hurried nor slow –
One thought for ten thousand years. 63
Abiding nowhere yet everywhere
The ten directions are right before you. 64
The smallest is the same as the largest
In the realm where delusion is cut off. 65
The largest is the same as the smallest
No boundaries are visible. 66
Existence is precisely emptiness
Emptiness is precisely existence. 67
If it is not like this
Then you must not preserve it. 68
One is everything
Everything is one. 69
If you can be like this
Why worry about not finishing? 70
Faith and mind are not two
Non-duality is faith in mind. 71
The path of words is cut off
There is no past, no future, no present. 72
Attributed to Seng Ts’an (b.606AD), the Third Patriarch, but probably written later.
This translation by Ch’an Master Sheng-yen “Faith in Mind”, 1987, ISBN 0-9609854-2-5
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