This teaching turns on a single hinge — Right View, the first limb of the Eightfold Path, the eye by which every other practice is guided: if the seeing is true, thought, word, and deed all bend toward liberation; if it is skewed, all the rest goes wrong. The Holy Teacher descends bearing the Eternal Mother’s decree and, before any exhortation, asks gently whether his disciples are well — then opens with the Diamond Sutra’s “dwelling nowhere, the heart-mind arises” and the Buddha’s wordless lifting of a flower, to say that Dao is not far off but meets you in the very moment your mind stops grasping. The central charge is to till one small acre of the heart’s field daily: strip away the showy and false, return to what is real, and refuse the contrivance that tumbles a person into the realms of suffering. False view, he warns, is a poison nursed within — the pain of lancing it far outweighs the rot of leaving it. From there the path unfolds in order: the Six Perfections led by prajñā, seeing the original face to cross beyond birth-and-death, turning the self-view so all things reveal themselves, and the ascent through the Wisdom of Equal Nature and the Wisdom of Wondrous Observation to the Great Perfect Mirror Wisdom that reflects reality without clinging. (Delivered in the playful register of “Crazy Ji,” the fan-swaying monk — warmth that holds a blade, tending the heart before pressing the teaching home.)
鎮壇詩 Altar-Pacifying Verse · recited
應無所住而生心
yīng wú suǒ zhù ér shēng xīn
Dwelling nowhere, the heart-mind arises —Rest your mind on nothing, and your true heart wakes on its own —
This borrows the most famous line of the Diamond Sutra (金剛經) — 應無所住而生其心, “give rise to a mind that dwells nowhere” — the very line that broke open the Sixth Patriarch when he heard it as an unlettered woodcutter. To dwell nowhere is not to go numb; it is to let the heart-mind (心) touch sight, sound, and circumstance without clinging, so that the already-awakened heart wakes of its own accord.
無有罣礙塵沾襟
wú yǒu guà ài chén zhān jīn
no hindrance clings, no dust stains the robe.nothing snags it, no worldly dust settles on your robe.
The second line echoes the Heart Sutra (心經), where the awakened mind is 無罣礙 — “without hindrance.” The dust on the robe is the old Chan picture of the mirror that needs no wiping because it never gathers dust in the first place: rest the mind on nothing, and the world’s grime finds no purchase.
有志竟成始終貫
yǒu zhì jìng chéng shǐ zhōng guàn
The one with true aspiration sees it through, threaded from the beginning to the end:Whoever truly sets their will sees it through — holding to it from start to finish:
Aspiration must follow insight. 有志竟成 (“the one with true aspiration sees it through”) carries the weight of its classical source, and 始終貫 — “threaded from beginning to end” — adds the demand that the will hold steady, not run hot today and cold tomorrow.
效法聖賢之精神
xiào fǎ shèng xián zhī jīng shén
emulate the spirit of sages and worthies.take the sages and the worthy ones as your model.
Take the sages and worthy ones as your model. Cultivation toward sagehood is a sustained work, sustained the way a great resolve is sustained — by emulating the spirit of those who saw it through to the end.
This opening altar-pacifying verse sets the keynote of the whole teaching by holding emptiness and resolve together. Its first couplet draws on the Diamond Sutra line that broke open the Sixth Patriarch — “give rise to a mind that dwells nowhere” — so that the awakened heart-mind arises of itself, unhindered, no dust clinging to the robe, just as the Heart Sutra describes a mind “without hindrance.” The closing couplet then turns from the heights back to the ground: borrowing the resolve of “whoever truly sets their will sees it through” and the Analects’ image of a single thread running through all things, it reminds those who serve at the altar that becoming a sage is a great undertaking — one that asks for a soaring aspiration, the example of the worthies, and steadiness held from start to finish, never hot today and cold tomorrow. Emptiness and aspiration stand side by side, and that pairing is the doorway into everything that follows.
吾乃 Self-Introduction · recited
吾乃 持扇搖擺的和尚 濟顛是也 領 Φ命 至壇地 進門參叩 Φ畢 問聲徒兒可安怡
wú nǎi · chí shàn yáo bǎi de hé shàng · Jì Diān shì yě · lǐng · Mǔ mìng · zhì tán dì · jìn mén cān kòu · Mǔ bì · wèn shēng tú ér kě ān yí
I am — the fan-swaying monk, Ji Dian, that is to say — bearing Φ’s decree, I come to the altar ground; entering the door, I bow and pay obeisance; the bowing to Φ now complete, I ask my disciples — are you well, at ease?I am the fan-waving monk — “Crazy Ji,” as they call me — sent down by the Eternal Mother to this altar; I step through the door, bow low, and once the bowing is done I ask: my disciples, are you well and at peace?
In this short self-introduction the Holy Teacher names who is speaking, and in doing so sets the tenderness that colors the whole teaching. He comes not as an austere patriarch but as the fan-swaying, free-wheeling monk “Crazy Ji” — bearing the Eternal Mother’s decree, he steps to the altar floor, bows, and then, before any exhortation, asks simply: are you well, at ease? Those who fill a temple-service class are seasoned cultivators worn down by daily labor for the hall, and his first move is to care for them as people before teaching them as students. This is his constant manner — ask after them first, then open the truth. The warmth of this opening should be carried into the stern passages ahead: however sharp the later words, they are the other face of compassion, not rebuke.
本訓 Main Teaching · sung to 〈見與不見〉
清風拂面,月落繁星滿天.
qīng fēng fú miàn, yuè luò fán xīng mǎn tiān.
A clear breeze brushes the face; the moon sets, the sky fills with stars,A cool breeze brushes your face; the moon goes down and the sky fills with stars,
The opening image is the cosmological canvas for everything that follows: the moon sets, but the stars remain; outward forms change, the underlying body does not. The Dao is like this breeze and starlight — everywhere, at every hour, illuminating the world whether or not anyone notices.
照亮這個世間,歲歲年年.
zhào liàng zhè ge shì jiān, suì suì nián nián.
illuminating this world — year after year, age upon age.lighting up this world, year after year, age after age.
The stars light the world “year after year, age upon age” — the Dao does not wait for us to perceive it in order to be real. It is already shining; the only question is whether we have the eyes to see it.
微笑破顏,心心相印之間.
wēi xiào pò yán, xīn xīn xiāng yìn zhī jiān.
A smile breaks across the face; mind meets mind between us.A face breaks into a smile; in that moment, one heart meets another.
This gathers the Flower Sermon into a couplet. On Vulture Peak the Buddha lifted a golden lotus and said nothing; of the whole assembly only Mahākāśyapa understood and broke into a smile (破顏微笑), and from that wordless meeting the Chan transmission traces its mind-to-mind lineage. The real communication passes in silence, mind meeting mind.
拈一朵花無言,本心的示現.
niān yì duǒ huā wú yán, běn xīn de shì xiàn.
Lifting a single flower in silence — the original mind, showing forth.Holding up one flower without a word — and the true, original heart shows itself.
Holding up the single flower in silence is the original mind (本心) showing itself — the truth of the Dao is not in words or ritual forms but in the moment a person stops grasping for it and lets the true, original heart reveal itself on its own.
Dao is not far off; its principle is clearly seen — at every turn, the source meets you.The Dao is not far away; once you see its truth clearly, you meet its wellspring wherever you turn.
“Dao is not far off.” 左右逢源 is used here in its old Mencian sense (from the Mencius, 離婁下), not the modern, slightly cynical “working every angle.” When you have cultivated deeply enough to become 自得, “self-gotten,” the wellspring of understanding is already there wherever you turn. You do not need to find the Dao; you need to stop being the kind of person who cannot see it.
As time passes and circumstances shift — revere what is inmost, walk the true path, exhort yourself — and till one small acre of the heart’s field.As times change and things move on — honor what is deepest in you, truly live it out, keep pushing yourself — and work that one small plot of land that is your heart.
The work is patient and agricultural: till one small acre of the heart’s field (心田), a single 畝 at a time. Revere what is inmost, walk the true path, exhort yourself — these are daily practices, not mystic breakthroughs. Outward circumstances keep shifting; this one plot must be worked every day and never left to go fallow.
正見能不?華黜任真從吾.
zhèng jiàn néng fǒu? huá chù rèn zhēn cóng wú.
Right View — can you? Strip away the ornament, let the true be true, and follow me.Right View — can you reach it? Drop the showy and false, let what’s real be real, and follow me.
This is the pivot of the whole teaching. 正見 (Right View) is the first limb of the Eightfold Path — the eye by which thought, speech, and action are all guided; let the view bend, and everything after it bends away from liberation. The question “can you?” is asked gently, like a hand held out: strip away the showy and false, let what is real be real.
不落鑿脫三塗,世役的制縛.
bù luò záo tuō sān tú, shì yì de zhì fù.
Do not fall into artifice and slip into the three realms of suffering, into the bindings of worldly toil.Don’t fall into scheming and tumble into the three realms of suffering, or into the chains of worldly drudgery.
To fall into 鑿 — the chiseling-away of the natural that the Zhuangzi warns of, where contrivance and calculation carve up the originally whole heart — is how one tumbles into the 三塗, the three realms of suffering (hell-fire, hungry-ghost hunger, animal slaughter) shaped by greed, hatred, and delusion. Keep your nature unspoiled and these bindings of worldly toil lose their hold.
且試韜穎,羈於俗囿之徒.
qiě shì tāo yǐng, jī yú sú yòu zhī tú.
Try, then, sheathing your edge — you who are tethered in the common enclosure.So try hiding your sharp edge — you who are still penned in by the ordinary world.
“Sheathe your edge.” 韜穎, from the Book of the Later Han (後漢書), means to hide the point of your blade — to withhold your brilliance from a world that would only dull it. The address is tender toward those still penned inside the ordinary enclosure.
False view confounds the eyes and ears, rots the gut from within — how can you not wake with a start?Wrong views muddle what you see and hear and rot you from the inside — how can you not jolt awake?
False view (邪見) does not merely mislead — it “rots the gut from within.” The sickness is physical: wrong seeing muddles the eyes and ears and decays a person from the inside. The danger most easily missed is one’s own crooked view — clinging to “I am the one serving,” “I have accumulated merit” — a slow poison that does not announce itself until it has spread.
The pain of lancing the abscess is greater than the poison you nurse by leaving it — the great furnace of Creation-Transformation.The pain of cutting open the sore is better than nursing the poison by leaving it — all of us are forged in the great furnace of Heaven and Earth.
The pain of lancing the abscess is better than nursing the poison by leaving it — the surgical image 潰癰養毒 from the Records of the Grand Historian (史記): you must cut to heal, and evasion is the slower death. 造化洪爐, the “great furnace of Creation-Transformation” from the Zhuangzi, completes it: all beings are smelted in the crucible of Heaven and Earth, and the pain of being forged is the pain of being made real.
舉要刪蕪,縱一葦之所如.
jǔ yào shān wú, zòng yì wěi zhī suǒ rú.
Lift up the essential, cut away the overgrowth; let the single reed drift where it will.Keep what matters, clear away the weeds; then let your little reed-boat drift wherever it goes.
“Lift up the essential, cut away the overgrowth” comes from the Wén Xīn Diāo Lóng (文心雕龍), the classic on literary composition — the cultivator’s gesture of pruning all that is not essential. Only then can you “let the single reed drift where it will”: a double image of Su Shi’s reed-boat adrift on the moonlit Yangtze (前赤壁賦) and Bodhidharma crossing that same river on a single reed. Once the overgrowth is cleared, the small reed moves freely across vast waters.
Right — Right is the pivot of cultivation; in ten-thousand practices, practice the Six Perfections.Right — being upright is the hinge of all practice; in the thousand things you do, practice the Six Perfections.
Right is the pivot (中樞) of all cultivation — fix the hinge, and the ten-thousand practices have a center to turn on. Those practices do not stray from the Six Perfections (六度): giving, discipline, patience, effort, meditation, and wisdom — the six means of crossing from this shore to the other.
般若為導師,指引路.
bō rě wéi dǎo shī, zhǐ yǐn lù.
Prajñā is the guiding teacher, pointing the way.Let wisdom that sees reality directly be your teacher, pointing the road.
Of the six, wisdom is the guiding teacher. Prajñā (般若) — the wisdom that grasps the emptiness and conditioned arising of every thing — leads the other five: without it, giving and discipline become mere good works; with it, they become liberation. It is the eye that shows the road.
見本來面目,諸佛之囑咐.
jiàn běn lái miàn mù, zhū fó zhī zhǔ fù.
See the original face — this is the charge entrusted by all the Buddhas.See your original face — this is the one thing all the awakened ones have asked of you.
“See the original face” (本來面目) is the Patriarch’s charge from the Platform Sutra (六祖壇經): “without thinking good, without thinking evil — in this very moment, what is your original face, before your parents were born?” That face — the self that is already pure, already complete — is the one thing every awakened one, in every age, has asked of every disciple.
越生死與身終成無.
yuè shēng sǐ yǔ shēn zhōng chéng wú.
Cross beyond birth-and-death; with this very body, in the end, become no-thing.Pass beyond living and dying; even this body, in the end, returns to nothing.
Seeing that original face, one passes beyond birth-and-death. The “no-thing” the body finally becomes is not blank emptiness but the open nature that has crossed past the opposition of living and dying: the body ends, but the original face neither arises nor perishes.
執則生患,詮性平等智觀.
zhí zé shēng huàn, quán xìng píng děng zhì guān.
To grasp is to birth affliction; read the nature through the Wisdom of Equal Nature’s seeing.To cling is to breed trouble; instead, understand your nature with the seeing that treats all things as equal.
To grasp is to breed affliction — every clinging is a thorn lodged in the heart. The remedy is the Wisdom of Equal Nature (平等性智), one of the Four Wisdoms of the Yogācāra tradition, which arises when the self-centering seventh consciousness is turned: it sees every being as equal in nature, dissolving the root division of “self and other.”
理真實出離證,慈悲無間斷.
lǐ zhēn shí chū lí zhèng, cí bēi wú jiàn duàn.
The truth of principle: liberation, realized — and compassion, without break, without cease.The real truth is freedom, actually attained — and compassion that never stops, never breaks.
The real truth is liberation actually attained, not merely understood. And once the “self and other” division is gone, compassion no longer needs to be forced — it flows without break, without cease, the way water naturally runs downhill.
諸眾佛子：轉我見法自然
zhū zhòng fó zǐ: zhuǎn wǒ jiàn fǎ zì rán
All you children of the Buddhas: turn the self-view, and the dharmas show themselves of themselves.All you children of the awakened ones: turn away from clinging to “me,” and all things reveal themselves on their own.
“All you children of the awakened ones” names those who serve at the altar as heirs of the Buddha-lineage, not merely students. The instruction: turn the self-view (我見), the root of every false view, and all things reveal themselves of their own accord (自然) — spontaneously so, in the Daoist sense, not by any law imposed from outside.
觀諸法自相與共相於眾前.
guān zhū fǎ zì xiāng yǔ gòng xiāng yú zhòng qián.
Observe each dharma’s particular mark and the mark it shares, plainly, in the presence of all.See what makes each thing itself and what it shares with everything else — openly, before everyone.
Observe both 自相 and 共相 — each thing’s own particular mark and the mark it shares with everything else. This Yogācāra pair is true seeing: discern what makes each thing itself without confusing it with another, and discern what all things hold in common, without clinging to any one of them as permanent.
Speak the wondrous dharmas — so that all sentient beings attain the state from which there is no turning back.Teach the wonderful truths — so that every living being reaches the place from which they can never slide back.
Only when your own seeing is true can the truths you speak hold a listener. Teaching that accords with reality brings beings to 不退轉 (the Sanskrit avinivartanīya), the bodhisattva stage of non-regression — the point from which one can no longer slide back. The aim is not only your own awakening but making it durable enough to steady others.
大圓鏡智,功德依止按,
dà yuán jìng zhì, gōng dé yī zhǐ àn,
The Great Perfect Mirror Wisdom — in this, all merit takes its refuge —The wisdom that mirrors all things perfectly and whole — every good thing rests upon it —
The Great Perfect Mirror Wisdom (大圓鏡智) is the crown of the Four Wisdoms — the transformation of the eighth, storehouse consciousness into a great round mirror that reflects all things without distortion and without clinging to any image that passes. Every merit takes its refuge here.
常如法性圓覺緣.
cháng rú fǎ xìng yuán jué yuán.
always in accord with dharma-nature, the condition of perfect awakening.always at one with the true nature of things, the ground of complete awakening.
The fruition: a heart always in accord with dharma-nature (法性), the true body of all things, and with perfect awakening (圓覺, from the sutra of that name). This is where the whole teaching has been leading — not a technique or a secret, but seeing so clear it reflects reality the way a polished mirror does.
The main teaching, sung to the tune “Seen and Unseen,” takes Right View — the first limb of the Eightfold Path — as its spine. It opens on an ordinary scene: a clear breeze on the face, the moon setting as the sky fills with stars, lighting this world age upon age — an image of the Dao’s own nature, where outer forms change but the source does not, and the Way is everywhere in the everyday. It then gathers in the Flower Sermon on Vulture Peak, where a single lifted blossom and a wordless smile pass mind to mind, to make its point: the truth of the Dao is not in words or ritual but in the instant the present thought meets the original heart directly. Drawing next on the Mencian sense of “the source meets you at every turn” — deep cultivation that becomes self-gotten, not mere social cleverness — it lands on the line “the Dao is not far off,” and brings the seeker home to the one practice that matters most: tilling that small acre of the heart’s field.
From here the teaching turns on its central question — Right View — can you? When the view is set straight, thought, speech, and conduct all find the right road; and so it presses a series of warnings against false view. Do not fall into the contrived “chiseling-away” of the natural, do not tumble into the three realms of suffering, do not let worldly toil bind you. The most dangerous wrong view is the cultivator’s own inward distortion — clinging to “me,” to merit, to virtue — which rots from within like a slow abscess; better the pain of lancing it now than the poison of leaving it, for all beings are forged in the great furnace of Heaven and Earth, where pain is purification rather than torment. The editorial image from the classics — lift up the essential, cut away the overgrowth — joins Su Shi’s reed-boat adrift on the river and Bodhidharma crossing on a single reed to picture the freedom that comes once attachment is seen through.
The closing movement lifts the teaching to its doctrinal height: the ten-thousand practices never leave the Six Perfections, and the Six are led by prajñā, the wisdom that gives them their direction. To see one’s original face is the charge every awakened one has entrusted to every seeker; once that face is known, birth-and-death is itself crossed. To grasp is to breed affliction, so the self-and-other divide is dissolved by the Wisdom of Equal Nature, while the Wisdom of Wondrous Observation sees each thing’s particular mark together with the mark it shares, and the dharmas are spoken so that beings reach the stage from which there is no turning back. It all comes to rest in the Great Perfect Mirror Wisdom — the storehouse-consciousness turned clear, reflecting all things without distortion, always in accord with dharma-nature and perfect awakening. This is the final direction the teaching opens for those who serve: you who labor for others must first establish your own Right View; once it is set, every practice has its footing, and only then can you carry beings across to the far shore. The Dao is not far off — it waits in this very thought.