Miccaka Leaves the Small Stream

Keizan's commentary

The teacher was from central India and led eight thousand hermits. One day he brought the assembly to pay reverence to Venerable Dhītika and said, “Long ago you and I were born together in Brahmā's heaven. I met the hermit Asita and received the methods of the immortals. You met a disciple of the One Possessing the Ten Powers and cultivated meditation. Our resulting circumstances then sent us on different paths, and six kalpas have passed.” Dhītika said, “Dispersed through kalpa after kalpa—truly, this is no fiction. Now abandon what is deviant, return to what is right, and enter the Buddha-vehicle.” The teacher said, “Long ago the hermit Asita predicted: ‘Six kalpas from now, you will meet a former fellow student who has realized the undefiled fruit.’ We have met today. Is this not a former affinity? I beg you, in your compassion, to free me.” Venerable Dhītika then let him leave home and receive the full precepts. The remaining hermits at first gave rise to pride. Dhītika displayed great spiritual power; all of them raised the mind of awakening and left home at the same time. The eight thousand hermits became eight thousand monks. As they were about to leave home together, Dhītika instructed them with the words beginning, “The Buddha said that cultivating immortality and studying the lesser vehicle...” through “The teacher heard this, accorded with it, and awakened.” Although practitioners of immortality may obtain long life and subtle spiritual powers, they understand only eighty thousand kalpas of the past and eighty thousand of the future. Their sight does not extend farther in either direction. Though they cultivate the sphere of neither-perception-nor-nonperception and enter an absorption without conscious thought, regrettably they are born in that heaven and become long-lived gods. They may lose a body of form, but the current of karmic consciousness remains. They cannot meet a buddha or penetrate the way. When that karmic result is exhausted, they instead fall into the uninterrupted hell. They are therefore like something hauled about by a rope and have no share in liberation.¹ Students of the lesser vehicle may realize the first, second, third, or fourth fruit, or the realization of a solitary buddha. Yet this is still cultivation within body and heart, practice within delusion and awakening. Thus, Keizan says, a sage of the first fruit passes eighty thousand kalpas before becoming a beginning bodhisattva; one of the second fruit, sixty thousand; one of the third, forty thousand; and a solitary buddha, ten thousand kalpas before entering the bodhisattva way. Their good cause finally returns, but the karma of revolving has not yet ceased. This too resembles being pulled by a rope. They are not people liberated from the beginning.² They may break the eighty-eight impulses of view and thought and the measureless delusions fine as dust, leaving not a speck or hair of confusion. Still, this is conditioned achievement and not the undefiled Buddha-fruit. Practices of “returning to the root and going back to the source,” or of “waiting for awakening as the rule,” all belong here. Therefore, all of you, do not demand nothingness. You may become like an outsider who falls into dead emptiness. Do not remain in the empty kalpa before the Buddha Awesome Voice. That resembles a dead person whose ghost has not dispersed. Do not try to remove the illusory flowers of delusive dharmas in order to reach a true original nature. That instead resembles the sage who cuts off ignorance and realizes the middle way. It raises clouds where there were none and produces a flaw where none existed. You become a destitute child wandering helplessly in another country, a poor traveler drunk on ignorance. Consider: who are you, that you speak of before birth and after death? What past, future, or present could still remain? From vast ages onward you have not missed by even a moment. From birth to death it is only this. Yet unless you have once run into it, you will be deceived by faculties and objects, fail to know yourself, and make what is before your eyes remote. You therefore do not know where body and heart arise or distinguish the place from which all dharmas flow. Without cause you try to remove something; without cause you hope to obtain something. That is why you make the Buddha go to the trouble of appearing in the world and the ancestral teachers go to the trouble of giving careful admonitions. Even when they lower a hand in this way, you are still deceived by your own knowing and seeing. Some call it not-knowing; some call it non-discrimination. It is neither actual ignorance nor the intimate fit of box and lid. You remain within deliberation and calculation, distinguishing right from wrong. Do you not know? You answer when called and arrive when pointed to. This does not arise from consideration or from conscious knowing. It is precisely your own master. That master has no face and no bodily marks, yet it never stops moving. From it this heart arises, and this is named body. Once the body appears, four elements, five aggregates, eighty-four thousand pores, and three hundred sixty joints combine as your one body. It is like jade possessing luster or sound carrying an echo. Through birth and death not one moment is missing and not one moment is left over. This arising and ceasing arises without a beginning to birth and dies without a trace of death. It is exactly like waves rising in the sea and leaving no scar—and like the waves never being extinguished. Going and going, they never go to another place. They are only news of the sea. Great waves and small waves rise without disappearing. Your heart is the same: it moves without a moment's rest. It appears as skin, flesh, bones, and marrow; it works as four elements and five aggregates. It also appears as peach blossoms and green bamboo, and realizes as attaining the way and illuminating the heart. Sound and color divide into kinds; seeing and hearing take different paths. It is used as putting on clothes and eating rice, and works as speech and daily affairs. Though divided and divided, these are not separate dharmas. Though manifest in every form, it does not remain in any bodily mark. It is like an illusionist performing many illusions, a dream producing many forms, or ten thousand images and a thousand changes appearing in a mirror that remains this one face of mirror. If you do not know it in this way, cultivating immortality and studying the lesser vehicle will never bring a time of liberation. Every one of you has no one binding you. What new release could there be? Delusion and awakening have never existed; bondage and release were separate from the start. Is this not the unborn? Is this not the great ocean? Where could a small stream be? Lands fine as dust, every one of them, are the ocean of the Dharma-realm. Ravine torrents, swollen falls, rivers, and circling currents are all the ocean's rolling movement. There is no small stream to discard and no great ocean to take up. Because it is this way, the joints naturally dropped away and Miccaka's old view changed at once. He abandoned immortality practice and left home. His former affinity had opened and accorded. When you investigate in this way, heart and speech penetrate together. Intimate friend meets intimate friend; self nods to self. Together they swim in the ocean of nature, never separated for a moment. When it opens in this way, former affinity appears. Have you not heard Master Ma say: From measureless ages, all sentient beings have never left the samādhi of Dharma-nature. They constantly remain within the samādhi of Dharma-nature. Putting on clothes, eating rice, speaking, responding, employing the six faculties, and every act they perform—all of it is Dharma-nature.³ When you hear these words, do not understand them to mean that sentient beings exist inside Dharma-nature. Saying “Dharma-nature” and saying “sentient beings” is like saying “water” and saying “waves.” According to language, we speak of water and speak of waves. How could there be many different kinds? This morning, to disclose the encounter once more, I have a humble verse. Great assembly, do you wish to hear it?