三天主考　爾師兄 慈悲訓示

The acrostic / 三代斯民直道行 / 毀譽 — The first characters of the four 鎮壇詩 lines read down as 三 · 天 · 主 · 考 — 三天主考, exactly the office the speaker names one line later. Each of those four characters is also load-bearing inside its own line (主 is the host of ZT3’s host-and-guest figure; 考 is the examining of ZT4), so the acrostic is not padding. It cannot survive into English, and no attempt is made to force it. — Both halves of this couplet compress a single Analects passage (衛靈公): 「吾之於人也，誰毀誰譽？如有所譽者，其有所試矣。斯民也，三代之所以直道而行也。」 — whom do I disparage, whom do I praise? … these people are those by whom the Three Dynasties walked the straight Way. It is one argument, not two thoughts: 斯民 is rendered ”these same people” because the demonstrative is the whole point — the people in front of you now are made of the same stuff as those through whom the golden ages held their rectitude. Corpus-verified verbatim. 枉 is to bend crooked.

樂只君子 / 德攸綏 / 篤·淳 — 樂只君子 (joyful is the noble one) is 詩經·小雅·南山有臺, 「樂只君子，邦家之基」, where such a one’s virtue is called the foundation of the state; 只 is a particle carrying no lexical weight. Corpus-confirmed. — ⚠ 德攸綏 is deliberately left UNATTRIBUTED. The exact phrase 「德攸綏之」 does not occur anywhere in the local classics corpus, and the pipeline’s own research blockquote appears to have spliced fragments of at least two distinct 詩經 poems together. No 詩經 chapter is asserted here or in any downstream layer. It is rendered from plain grammar only — 攸 = that wherein, 綏 = to bring to rest. — 篤 is to thicken, to be generous toward (not “sincere” here), and 淳 is unworked plainness. The couplet is timeless-gnomic rather than a narrative about the past, and 君子 is left without a supplied pronoun.

主 / 客塵 / 蝶夢 / 蟬蛻 — 客塵 (“guest-dust”) is 楞嚴經 卷一, where the Buddha explains it twice over: a traveler lodges at an inn, eats, sleeps, and moves on, while only the innkeeper stays — so what does not stay is called guest; and motes dance in a shaft of sunlight while the still air behind them does not move — so what moves is called dust. Affliction is guest-dust: not native to you, therefore removable. Against it the line sets 主, the host, and puts the host in the heart. This host-and-guest polarity is a structural spine of the whole teaching, returning in the body at `B04` as 過客. — 蝶夢 is 莊子·齊物論, 「昔者莊周夢為胡蝶，栩栩然胡蝶也」 — Zhuang Zhou dreams he is a butterfly and wakes unable to say which dreams which; 覺 is read jué, “to awaken,” not jiào. Corpus-verified verbatim. — 蟬蛻 is 史記·屈原賈生列傳, 「蟬蛻於濁穢，以浮游塵埃之外」 — sloughing the shell and coming up clean out of the mud. — The reading of 勞 turns on an elided negation: classical parallel verse routinely carries a 不 across the caesura, so 「客塵不生勞蟬蛻」 is read guest-dust never rises — [no] laboring to shed the cicada’s shell. A second reading is grammatically available (“since guest-dust does not arise, why still labor at the shell?”) and is recorded for senior review; the adopted reading is the one that keeps the couplet parallel with 覺 in the first half.

考 / 鑑 / 沉機遠慮 / 懷人歸 — 考 is to examine, to test — the acrostic character, and the speaker’s own office. 鑑 is to mirror: holding now up against long ago. 沉機遠慮 (“deep in design, far-reaching in forethought”) returned no confident corpus attribution and is carried as ordinary literary idiom, not cited as an allusion. — The couplet has no grammatical subject in the Chinese and none is supplied in English. Everything in the opening verse lands on its final three characters, 懷人歸 — the wish that people come home; every reproach later in the teaching sits on top of that. The examiner motif runs from here through 略批寫 in the 吾乃 line to 執起乩筆 at `B01`.

三天主考　爾師兄 / Φ / 塵幃 / 略批寫 — ⚠⚠ The self-description is rendered literally and nothing is inferred from it. 「三天主考」 → “Chief Examiner of the Three Heavens” (主考 is the officer who sets the questions and marks the papers); 「爾師兄」 → “your elder brother,” a relational self-title, not a personal name. No identity, lineage, office, organization, historical figure, or biography is claimed here, and none may be added downstream. The kinship register the line establishes (爾師兄 / 吾弟妹) is read as evidence of tone — an elder brother’s voice rather than a superior’s — and as nothing more. — ⚠⚠ Φ is SINGLE-TIER in this teaching. Both occurrences — 「今奉　Φ命」 and 「進門已然　Φ命謁」 — carry no 皇 honorific prefix, and both are therefore rendered identically as ”the Eternal Mother.” The two-tier honorific split that some sibling teachings in this fleet carry is not imported here, and its vocabulary appears nowhere in this file. Never a gendered pronoun; never “God”; never flattened to a bare “the Mother.” The full-width spaces before 　Φ命 and before the titles are the classical 敬空, the blank left before a supreme referent, and are preserved exactly in the Chinese field. (The Φ glyph is a typographic placeholder standing in for a Private-Use-Area codepoint in the source record — a substitution of glyph, not an interpretive claim about the one addressed.) — 塵幃 is the curtained dust: 幃 is a hanging screen, the world figured as a screened-off room thick with the very dust ZT3 has just named. — 略批寫 is precisely what an examiner does: 批 is the marking-comment written on a submitted paper. — Note the order of reverence: the audience upward is paid first, and only then the greeting to the assembly. 且平心氣行禮貴 is the plain claim that the settled heart, not the tidy gesture, is the precious part of a rite — and it is answered at `B20` by 收束雜浮念. The opening 哈哈 is answered by 哈哈止 at `B21` ([^b21]).

或兩從 — genuinely obscure; the SENSE is flagged, not the character ⚠ — The reading adopted, ”which of two courses one follows,” is structurally motivated by the explicit two-type split that follows immediately at `B03`/`B04` (deep affinity vs. passing guests), not by lexical certainty; 兩從 returns no confident classical warrant. Recommended for senior / 原稿 review, and worth re-checking against the 2022-07-30 class record if it can be retraced. Per the retrace-before-correcting discipline, no character is in question here — the text reads 兩從 and stands exactly as written; only its sense is uncertain. — 非是色膚而已矣: delivered to a class conducted in English in California, the line’s plain force is that what differs among those present is not anything a look would tell you. 根基 is the root-foundation, what a person actually stands on.

過客 — passing guests — and the character 客 has been seen before: it is the 客 of ZT3’s 客塵, the guest-dust of the 楞嚴經 that lodges a night and moves on. The line therefore says something harder than “some are less diligent”: some who enter are, in themselves, the transient thing the sūtra described. The 楞嚴經 test is not effort but staying — what does not stay is called guest. Delivered without heat, and the choice is handed back to the hearer.

倥傯 / 我意執牢 — 倥傯 is harried straits: pressed, hurried, hemmed in — the condition of a person permanently short of time for things that did not matter. It returned no confident corpus attribution and is glossed as vocabulary, not cited as an allusion. 竟 carries the sigh — and this is what it came to. — 我意執牢 names the root under the three cravings: not the wanting itself but the grip, the “I want” held tight.

合同 / 無常 / 性天 — ⚠ 合同 is rendered at its plain classical sense ONLY: a tally or indenture split into two halves that match when brought back together — hence a covenant, the pledge one can present and have honored. No expansion into any lineage-specific or ritual meaning is made in any layer, per the hallucination guard rails. — 無常 is impermanence, the fact that nothing holds still. The couplet’s logic is that the fear of it loses its purchase once the nature that does not move is known to be already, wholly, and equally one’s own: 本然 (“originally so”) and 各皆具 (“each and every one fully possesses it”) are the premise, and fearlessness is the consequence.

知性知天 / 盡心 — 孟子·盡心上, 「盡其心者，知其性也。知其性，則知天矣。」 — one who exhausts the heart knows the nature; knowing the nature, one knows Heaven. The sequence is the point: Heaven is not arrived at by contemplating Heaven but by spending the heart completely on what is in front of one. 盡心 is not “trying hard” — it is leaving no corner of the heart held back for oneself. — 真知灼見 is a later idiom, not a classical citation, and is rendered as ordinary language without allusion-weight. 渡迷童 is the consequence clause: what one does with the knowing is go back for those still in the dark.

迷則師渡悟自渡 / 立己立人 / 先鋒 — This is a direct quotation of the Platform Sutra, not a generic Chan saying: 六祖大師法寶壇經, 「迷時師度，悟了自度；度名雖一，用處不同。」 The teaching writes 渡 for 度 and compresses 時/了. The same English verb is used for both ferryings by design — Huineng’s own point is that the word is one and its use is two. — 立己立人 is 論語·雍也, where Confucius defines the humane person as one who, wanting to stand, first helps others stand. — 先鋒 is a military word: the vanguard, the unit that goes first and opens the road for everyone behind it. The line does not ask one to be exemplary; it asks one to go first.

標竿 / 困厄 / 改容 — 標竿, the marking-pole one takes one’s line from, is later vocabulary and returns no classical warrant; it is rendered as ordinary idiom, not as an allusion, and is made self-explaining in the English since no gloss travels with it. — 困厄 is hardship and hard straits; in the Confucian setting its concrete memory is the provisions running out between Chen and Cai, where the teaching continued anyway. 改容 is to change the look on one’s face. Keeping regular in good weather is easy; being the same person in bad weather is the standard being set — and it is set immediately after `B12` tells the hearer to go first.

本立道生 / 修以敬 / 天人相感通 — 本立道生 is 論語·學而, 「君子務本，本立而道生」 — the noble one works at the root, and once the root stands the Way grows out of it. 修以敬 is 論語·憲問, Confucius’s entire four-character answer to what makes a noble person: 「修己以敬」 — cultivate yourself with reverence. 敬 is not stiffness or scruple but the refusal to be casual about what matters. — 天人相感通 is the long-standing conviction that Heaven and the human are not sealed off from one another, that conduct here registers there. Note the 方能 (“only then”): resonance is named as the consequence of root and reverence, never as the thing to aim at — which is exactly what separates it from seeking a sign.

大同 / 開張心耳 — 大同 is 禮記·禮運, 「大道之行也，天下為公……是謂大同」 — the world held in common, the aged with their close, the able with their use, the young with their growth, and no one left uncared for. — 開張心耳 is open wide the ears of the heart — not the eyes, and not merely “listen.” The implication is that something is being said one is not currently able to hear, and that the obstruction is a heart arriving already full of its own settled views. 理研究 is the plain instruction that follows from having entered the class: investigate the principle yourself.

積跬成里 / 遠自邇 / 君德風 — 跬 is the half-step, the distance of one foot put forward. 荀子·勸學, 「故不積跬步，無以至千里」 — without accumulating half-steps there is no reaching a thousand miles; a fine horse cannot clear ten paces in one leap, and the merit is in not stopping. (The local corpus carries the line with the variant graph 蹞 for 跬 — an orthographic difference, not a different text.) — 遠自邇 is 中庸, 「君子之道，辟如行遠必自邇」 — travelling far must begin from what is near. — 君德風 compresses 論語·顏淵, 「君子之德風，小人之德草，草上之風必偃」 — the noble one’s virtue is a wind, and grass under wind must bend. The claim is not “be like the wind”: it is that quiet daily accumulation moves other people whether or not one ever intended to move them, which is the most ordinary possible gloss on 做先鋒 at `B12`.

明體達用 / 發大愿 / 廣渡有情 — 體 (substance, root, the principle itself) and 用 (function, application, what is actually done) are a core pair in Chinese philosophy; 明體達用 is the Song–Ming formulation of a cultivation that neither talks about the heart without acting nor acts without a root. Its conceptual source is traced to the 繫辭 of the 周易 (「顯諸仁，藏諸用」), which the corpus confirms; the four-character formula itself is later, and no single locus is asserted for it. — 發大愿 is to make the great vow; 有情 is sentient beings, those possessed of feeling and awareness. Note the order — understand, then apply, then vow, then go in company: the vow arises out of the understanding rather than out of a moment’s feeling.

滌除玄覽 / 暫 — 道德經 ch. 10, 「滌除玄覽，能無疵乎？」 — wash clean the mysterious mirror: can you make it flawless? 玄覽 is the deep seeing of the mind figured as a mirror; 滌除 is to scour it. A mirror needs no light added to it — clean it and the light comes out of its own accord, which is why the line reads 放光明 (“let the light shine out”) rather than “seek light.” The whole cultivation is subtraction, which returns the teaching to ZT3’s 客塵不生. — 暫 in the first half is for now: the teaching is not finished, only paused.

藉假修真 / 收束雜浮念 / 秉誠衷 — 藉假修真, use the false to cultivate the true: 假 does not mean “unreal” but not lasting — this body, this world, this stretch of time, none of which can be kept; 真 is the nature that does not pass. The instruction cuts both ways at once: do not mistake the borrowed thing for the real one, and do not despise it either, because it is the only boat there is for the crossing. It is a shared Daoist–Buddhist working principle with no single authoritative locus, and none is asserted. — 收束雜浮念 answers 且平心氣行禮貴 in the 吾乃 line: the teaching closes where it opened. — 誠 is the last word of the instruction; after all the method and all the citation, sincerity.

「　好嗎」 — a MID-BODY interjection, not a closing tag ⚠ — This segment is composite. Its Chinese field carries three source elements concatenated in source order: the standalone line 「　好嗎」, then the final couplet 「吾即隱身一旁立　各自打點道歸程」, then the closing 「　哈哈止」 — each with its own leading full-width space exactly as written in 原文, and nothing added between them. The fold follows this fleet’s established convention of carrying a non-couplet coda inside the last 本訓 segment rather than creating a segment for it. — ⚠ 「好嗎」 sits BETWEEN the twentieth couplet and the last one, not at the end of the teaching. It is outside the 7+7 couplet pattern, does not rhyme, and carries its own leading 全角 space. In sibling teachings 好嗎 usually appears as a soft rhetorical closer, so this position is unusual and is flagged explicitly for senior review — it is the first mid-body interjection of this kind in this fleet’s processed set. It is rendered ”Is this understood?” on its own line and deliberately not over-read: the source gives two characters, so it is carried as a pause to check that the class has followed, with no assertion about what specifically is being confirmed, and it is never translated as a farewell. — 隱身一旁立 is hide myself and stand off to one side — not “I am leaving”: the speaker steps out of sight but remains, which is the same posture as ZT4’s 懷人歸. 打點 is a plain domestic verb, putting one’s things in order before a journey; set against 過客 at `B04`, the closing image separates the traveler who has a direction from the one merely passing through. — 哈哈止 is the warm laugh and then the stop; it answers the 哈哈 that closed the 吾乃 line ([^wn]).