三天主考　院長茂田 慈悲訓示

The first half comes from the Book of Songs (衛風·氓), where an abandoned woman says of the man who left her: 「士也罔極，二三其德」 — your conduct has no fixed point, what you say does not hold (a second locus, 小雅·白華, has 「之子無良，二三其德」). The second half is the Book of Changes verbatim, the third line of the hexagram 恆, constancy: 「不恆其德，或承之羞，貞吝」. The Analects (子路) quotes that line and Confucius adds 「不占而已矣」 — for such a person there is no need to consult the oracle at all. The opening sentence of the teaching says nothing about high or low attainment; it is about constancy. What defeats cultivation and service is almost never inability — it is inconstancy. Resolve today, cold tomorrow; all-out for this occasion, worn down by one difficult person before the next. And the cost of inconstancy has two layers: that the thing fails to come off is one, and the harder part is that disgrace comes down on you along with it.

The first half states who these particular people are: to proclaim the transforming teaching on Heaven’s behalf, to go where there is no altar yet and open the ground, to set the principle out plainly. This is a class for temple officers, and those eight characters are the name of the job in their hands. The second half is from the Analects (子罕): 「知者不惑，仁者不憂，勇者不懼」 — the wise are not confused, the benevolent do not worry, the courageous are not afraid. (The Analects writes 知; the teaching writes 智, the later standard graph for the same word.) Only the first two of the three virtues are taken, and reasonably so: the two drains that most often eat at someone doing this work are confusion — is this the right road, should I do it, is it worth it — and worry — what if it fails, what if people cannot get along. Wisdom dissolves the confusion; benevolence dissolves the worry. Without those two, what goes out is your own confusion rather than Heaven’s teaching.

This couplet names the disease most likely to grow on someone who serves. What you enter you make master, what you leave you make slave is generally attributed to 韓愈’s 〈原道〉 — whoever comes in at my door is honored as a lord, whoever goes out is treated as a servant; listening to one side only, you are blinded is the reverse face of the saying that hearing all sides brings light and trusting one side brings dark. (Both attributions are carried on the usual authority; neither could be checked word for word against the original book.) The two are two faces of one disease: first fasten on one thing, and then you cannot see anything else. The substance of principle is penned into a corner pushes the disease out of human affairs and into doctrine — 囿 is a walled park, 隅 a corner; Dao is open by nature, and the moment there are gates, Dao gets shut into a corner. The great uncarved block is lost to the chisel states the consequence to its end. The image is rooted in the Zhuangzi (馬蹄) — 「純樸不殘，孰為犧樽」, 「夫殘樸以為器，工匠之罪也」, that the ruin of unhewn wood is the craftsman’s crime — and in chapter 28 of the Daodejing, 「樸散則為器」, once the block is scattered it becomes implements; 斲 means to hew and to carve. The block that was whole and undivided got that way one stroke at a time: every act of discrimination, every gate erected, every my side is the right one is another cut. The finer the vessel, the less recoverable the block. Said to people who serve, the line is especially sharp, because sorting into categories, ranking high and low, deciding who is one of us — all of it looks a great deal like the work itself.

The couplet before named the disease; this one gives the medicine, and it opens with the examiner’s own verb, 通考 — not examining a stretch or a moment but going through the whole of it, root to branch. 本末 comes from the Great Learning: 「物有本末，事有終始，知所先後，則近道矣」 — things have root and branch, affairs have an end and a beginning, and knowing which comes first brings one near to Dao. The disease of the previous couplet was taking the branch for the root and a corner for the whole; the cure is seeing root and branch through again. And having seen it through, carry it through — which returns to the constancy the first couplet was about. The closing line is from the Doctrine of the Mean: 「萬物并育而不相害，道并行而不相悖，小德川流，大德敦化，此天地之所以為大也」. Great virtue transforms deeply and generously as thick earth does; small virtue runs each on its own course as rivers do; and what makes Heaven and Earth great is exactly that they can hold things running side by side without conflict — the precise opposite of making master and slave. (The Doctrine of the Mean has the order 「小德川流，大德敦化」; the teaching reverses it, partly for the rhyme and partly because the line before has just called for examining root and branch: name the root first, then the branch. Not a misremembering.)

Three things get settled here: who has come, on whose authority, and to what end. The self-naming has two layers — Chief Examiner of the Three Heavens is the office, whose charge is assessment; Rector Mao Tian is the name. Worth noticing: having declared the examining office once, he calls himself nothing but Rector for the rest of the teaching, and calls the people in front of him 弟妹, younger brothers and sisters. Someone whose job is to grade has chosen to speak from an elder sibling’s place. That decides the register of the whole text: direct, but never from above; strict, but with a family member’s strictness. He comes bearing the Eternal Mother’s decree, not on his own initiative; and the first act through the door is not speech but the bow before the Sovereign Mother. (The original leaves a blank space before the names of the Eternal Mother and the Sovereign Mother — the raised-form convention of written reverence.) The order is itself a lesson: even one arriving under decree bows first, then greets, and only then begins. The 再 in then I offer my greetings means next, not once more. And settle your heart and your breath, and we will talk together uses the homely inclusive 咱, which covers both sides at once: the speaker levels his own heart and so must the listener — every one of the thirty lines below is an examination question, and an unsettled heart cannot take them in. The laugh at the end loosens the room: what is coming is not light, so let people sit down first.

After all these years of service, the friction between people along the way — disagreements, misunderstandings, coldness, quarrels — those are not noise on the road of cultivation. Those are the trials. The line consoles no one; it only changes the name of the thing. You thought you were being put upon. You were sitting an examination.

火候, fire-timing, is a term from inner alchemy. Refining watches the fire: too fierce and it scorches, too weak and it never cooks; when to advance the heat and when to draw it back is entirely a matter of measure (the 周易參同契 says of the work 「候視加謹密，審察調寒溫」 — watch closely, adjust cold and warm with care). Moved onto heart and nature, the meaning is this: how far a person’s cultivation has actually come is not read from what he says but from how well he judges measure when something happens. And the weight falls on 見 — the fire-timing shows; no report from you is required. The second half is the teaching’s first examination question, and it is put without softening: these years of service have certainly produced a great deal of activity, but has merit and virtue increased along with it? Doing a lot and merit growing are asked as two separate things, and no answer is supplied for you.

This line and the next in fact come from a single sentence of the Platform Sutra (般若品): 「心量廣大，遍周法界，用即了了分明，應用便知一切」 — the heart’s capacity is vast, pervading the whole dharma-realm, and in its very functioning it is completely clear. A vast capacity is substance; being completely clear in use is function — and the 用 of the teaching’s everyday function and the 體 of its vast in substance both sit inside that one sutra line. So the great Dao shows itself nowhere except where you use it every day: how you treat people, handle affairs, speak. And using it at all depends on the capacity being large enough; where the substance is not vast, the function is not true.

The exact inverse of the line before it. 器宇 is bearing and breadth of scale (the 世說新語 uses it of a man sized up by others). 我執 is the Buddhist term for clinging to this provisional assembly of body and mind as a real I. The Dunhuang recension of the Platform Sutra has the matching half of the thought — 「心量廣大，不行是小」, capacity is small because one will not act. The line stitches the Confucian word for capacity and the Buddhist word for clinging into a single sentence, and states the causation: the vessel is narrow because there is an I inside it. The second half is the heaviest warning in the teaching — not that you will go more slowly, but that you will go more dangerously. A narrow, self-clinging person who goes on serving does not stand still; he goes further off the line, and because he is serving, he goes off it with a clear conscience.

If the friction between people is the examination, then there are gates to be passed. How? 自覺覺他, awakening oneself and awakening others, is a phrase from the sutras (the 楞伽經 has 「善於如來自性，自覺覺他」, the 楞嚴經 「自覺覺他得無違拒」), and the weight lies on the whole road: whoever attends only to his own release has walked half of it; only bringing others along makes the road entire. Which is exactly what holding a post in this hall means — your gate was never a gate for one person.

When you err, do not shrink from correcting it comes from the Analects (學而): 「主忠信，無友不如己者，過則勿憚改」; 憚 is to be afraid — having erred, do not be afraid to put it right. But the teaching adds three characters, 真照見: 照見 is a prajñā word, truly seeing. So the line joins Confucian fault-correcting to Buddhist contemplation — correcting presupposes seeing, and really seeing, not merely knowing that the thing occurred. The second half then shows what refusing to look looks like. Why does a person dress up the surface? Because he is afraid of being seen. A decorated face and truly illuminate and see are a matched pair: one looks in, the other smears over the outside — and in front of an examiner, the smeared layer is precisely the most useless thing there is.

Heaven’s work must be done with Heaven’s heart: not with human calculation, human scheming, human likes and dislikes. And the second half immediately lowers the threshold — a Heaven-heart is not a talent but something already present; the clever have it and so do the slow. The three lines that follow prove that same point from three different angles.

根器 is the capacity to receive the teaching, and capacities are sharp or dull, so awakening comes sooner to one and later to another. But the verdict is in the two words 終能, in the end all can. Arrive where? 誠明明誠 compresses a whole passage of the Doctrine of the Mean: 「自誠明，謂之性；自明誠，謂之教。誠則明矣，明則誠矣」 — going from sincerity into clarity is inborn nature; going from clarity into sincerity is what teaching accomplishes. Two roads pointing in opposite directions with one and the same terminus: the sharp take the first, the dull take the second, and neither is a road that fails to arrive.

This couplet is a matched pair, and both halves say one thing: rank is not set by raw force. The archery rite does not score by piercing the hide is the Analects (八佾) verbatim: 「射不主皮，為力不同科，古之道也」. The old ceremonial archery did not decide a winner by driving the arrow through the leather of the target, because men’s strength is simply not of one grade (the 儀禮 likewise has 「禮射不主皮」); what the rite watched was bearing, measure, the yielding courtesies — not who had the stronger arm. Precisely because it does not compare force, the rite is what shows. The second half matches it. The 淮南子 puts it most plainly: 「夫騏驥千里，一日而通；駑馬十舍，旬亦至之」 — the thoroughbred covers the thousand li in a day; the worn-out nag walks ten stages and arrives in ten (荀子·勸學 says the same thing another way: 「騏驥一躍，不能十歩；駑馬十駕」). So the thoroughbred’s thousand li is not praise of speed; it says that the pace differs and the arrival does not — and that is exactly where virtue is entire sits. The whole couplet is the line before it, 「根器利鈍悟速遲　終能誠明明誠焉」, said over again in two more concrete pictures. On this point he is willing to repeat himself.

These five characters have a source, and they are the original words. In the Analects (雍也), Ran Qiu says to Confucius 「非不說子之道，力不足也」 — it is not that I take no delight in the Master’s Dao, it is that my strength is not enough. And the answer: 「力不足者，中道而廢。今女畫」 — a person genuinely out of strength gives out halfway; you drew the line yourself. The teaching presses harder than the Analects does: having drawn the line, one also opens a door for pretexts. Confucius said only you drew the line; here a further layer is added — once the line is on the ground, a person will find words for it. Someone limiting himself will not admit to limiting himself. He will say his ability only goes so far.

The preceding stretch levelled out the differences of talent; this one asks what a person then stands on between Heaven and Earth. Heaven and Earth are utterly impartial is the closing sentence of 周敦頤’s 《通書》 — 「天地至公而已矣」 — and it answers the preceding stretch exactly: being utterly impartial, Heaven and Earth do not hand you less because your capacity is duller. The human dwells in the midst of them, standing upright is the doctrine of the three powers, from the Book of Changes (繫辭下): 「有天道焉，有地道焉，有人道焉，兼三才而兩之，故六」 — Heaven, Earth and the human stand as three, and the human stands between the other two, head to Heaven and feet on Earth.

The previous line’s meaning, shrunk down onto a single written character. 人 is one falling stroke to the left and one to the right, two movements anyone can write; but what do those two answer to? The Book of Changes (說卦傳): 「立天之道曰陰與陽，立地之道曰柔與剛，立人之道曰仁與義」 — the way of Heaven is established as yin and yang, the way of Earth as the yielding and the firm, the way of the human as benevolence and rightness. The teaching’s one yin and one yang, the firm and the yielding gathers Heaven’s yin and yang and Earth’s yielding and firm into those two strokes — and 繫辭上 says 「一陰一陽之謂道」, one yin and one yang: that is Dao. Two strokes are easy to write; two ways are hard to hold whole. To hold that character up you have to carry the alternation of yin and yang and the measure of firm and yielding at once — firm where firmness is called for, yielding where yielding is. That is what it is to be a person.

How is it done? This line gives the method. Cultivating inner and outer together is the Confucian formulation — the heart-nature within and speech and conduct without, worked on together. Compassion and wisdom set in motion is the Buddhist one — compassion that draws out suffering, wisdom that sees clearly, and the two must run at once. Compassion without wisdom drowns; wisdom without compassion looks after itself only. Two vocabularies set side by side are one structure said twice: both sides together, either way you say it. 罅 is a crack and 漏 a hole (the four-character phrase 補苴罅漏 is generally attributed to 韓愈’s 〈進學解〉 — carried on the usual authority, not verified word for word against the original; the 朱子語類’s remark that the sages’ words have 「無些子偏重，亦無些子罅漏」 is an attested use). The cracks and holes in a person are exactly the places where inner and outer fail to match, where compassion and wisdom have tipped to one side — so this is not a new idea but a continuation of the one before: cultivating inner and outer, running compassion and wisdom, is the patching. Cultivate on the one hand and the seam closes on the other.

Everything up to here has been the work of cultivation; this line abruptly lifts the floorboards to show what the whole thing rests on. All of it — this life, this body, this Dao you happened to meet, even the little capacity that can bear being examined — all of it is bestowed by the Eternal Mother. Once that lands, the earlier reckonings about sharp and dull capacity and strength that does not reach have even less to stand on: none of it was earned in the first place. 蠢動含識 is a Chan phrase. The Chan books usually write 蠢動含靈 — the Records of the Transmission of the Lamp has 「蠢動含靈皆有佛性」 and the 五燈會元 「蠢動含靈是佛」; 蠢動 is everything that creeps and stirs, and the teaching writes 含識, harboring consciousness, which is a synonym-variant of 靈. Then comes 有情觀 — 有情 is every being that carries consciousness at all. So this gaze that sees everything as given has to reach all the way down to the smallest crawling thing: it too is bestowed by the Eternal Mother, and it too carries that spark.

The ten thousand things and I are one body — a claim the Zhuangzi (齊物論) makes most vividly in the butterfly dream: 「不知周之夢為胡蝶與？胡蝶之夢為周與？周與胡蝶，則必有分矣。此之謂物化」 — did Zhou dream he was a butterfly, or is the butterfly dreaming it is Zhou? Between Zhou and the butterfly there must be some division; and this is called the transformation of things. If it is one body, then who can stand aloof outside it? This is an examination question: on what grounds do you stand outside and watch? You are inside as well. The second half is the other half of the question. 桎 are fetters for the feet and 梏 manacles for the hands (Mencius 盡心上: 「盡其道而死者，正命也。桎梏死者，非正命也」; the Zhuangzi also speaks of 「解其桎梏」, loosing the fetters). If the ten thousand things and you are one body, what is gained by shackling yourself and going round and round in that whirlpool? The whirlpool is what was named earlier — the friction between people, the comparing and the reckoning, the sense of being treated unfairly — and it turns because you have cuffed your own hands and feet inside it.

Back again to the Platform Sutra (般若品): 「用自真如性，以智慧觀照，於一切法不取不捨，即是見性成佛道」 — use your own true-thusness nature, illuminate with wisdom’s contemplation, neither grasp nor reject any dharma, and that is seeing the nature and completing the way of a buddha. The teaching’s never departing from true nature is that use your own true-thusness nature; its ten thousand kinds of function is the everyday function of line 3. So true nature is not something to be sought somewhere else; it is in every ordinary thing you do, provided you do not leave it. Then why does one leave it? The second half answers: attachment and discrimination. Attachment is gripping and refusing to let go; discrimination cuts a reality that is one body into concepts set against each other — this good and that bad, this mine and that his. The stretch before has just said that thing and self are one body; here it names what does the cutting. And the practice is two words: put down. Never leaving true nature is substance; putting down attachment is the work — the two halves of this line are precisely substance and function.

From a passage of great vows in the Lotus Sutra (方便品): the buddhas appear in the world 「欲令眾生開佛知見」「欲示眾生佛之知見」「欲令眾生悟佛知見」「欲令眾生入佛知見道」 — to open, to show, to awaken to, and to enter that knowing-and-seeing of a buddha. The teaching takes the middle verb, 示, to show, and states how the showing is done: with the body. A buddha does not lecture you on a buddha’s view; he lives it where it can be watched. (The Platform Sutra (機緣品) uses the same phrase: 「若悟此法，一念心開，是為開佛知見」.) 迷團 is confusion wound into a knot that will not come apart — the attachment and discrimination just named, tangled long enough, are that knot; and the way a buddha shows has already given the way out of it: watch how it is done, then do it that way.

The three verbs run in sequence: be sincere first, then be able to hold to it, and only then is there anything to say about pressing forward. The 實 of truly press forward stands against the emptiness of the earlier falseness, putting forward a decorated face. The second half echoes the Analects (述而): 「述而不作，信而好古」 — Confucius says of himself that he transmits and does not invent, that he trusts and loves what came before. For people holding posts in a hall this is very practical: serving Dao is not invention, it is continuation. What you are here to do the sages and worthies have already done; do it their way.

Now to concrete conduct. Advance and withdraw with measure comes from the Book of Rites: 「居處有禮，進退有度，百官得其宜，萬事得其序」 — advance when it is time to advance and withdraw when it is time to withdraw, each with its measure. Follow compass and square is Mencius (離婁上): 「離婁之明，公輸子之巧，不以規矩，不能成方員」 — with all of Li Lou’s eyesight and all of Gongshu Zi’s skill, without compass and square you cannot make a true square or a true circle; however high the gift, it still needs the standard. Then this stretch’s examination question. Measure in advancing and withdrawing, compass and square — all of that can be seen from outside; and the question turns at once to the inside: standing before the altar, how do you settle your heart? This is the most direct question in the teaching. However neatly the outward rule is kept, if the heart is unsettled then all of it is only motion. And this question too is left unanswered; the answer has to be made in the next line, by you.

The line before asked how the heart is settled; this one is where to begin: gather the heart in first. The heart leaps about like a monkey and the will bolts like a horse — a pairing the Instructions for Practical Living uses in a vivid passage: 「初學時：心猿意馬，拴縛不定，其所思慮，多是『人欲』一邊；故且教之靜坐、息思慮」 — in the early stages the heart is a monkey and the will a horse, tethered but never settled, and most of what is being thought about lies on the side of human craving; so for the time being teach him to sit still and let the thinking subside. Note that the prescription is not scolding but 拴縛, tethering: give it a rope, give it somewhere to stop. The rope is the second half of the line. Those seven characters compress a whole passage of the Great Learning: 「知止而后有定，定而后能靜，靜而后能安，安而后能慮，慮而后能得」 — knowing where to rest, and then settledness; settled, then still; still, then at peace; at peace, then able to deliberate; deliberate, then attaining — beginning at 知止 and ending at 止於至善, coming to rest in the highest good. Settled, still, at peace, deliberate, attaining are five stages, not five adjectives standing side by side. So the answer to before the altar, how do you settle your heart? is on the third rung of that ladder: peace is what settledness and stillness buy. It is not something that can be asked for directly.

The consequence of a heart not gathered in, said in detail. 唐突 is to be abrupt, to give offence — the heart is not gathered, so the words go out, and so does the gesture. And the consequence is muddying the primal energy, and so departing from the primordial: 元氣 is the original energy by which a person stands in communication with Heaven and Earth, and 混淆 is to stir it cloudy; 先天 borrows the Book of Changes (乾·文言) 「先天而天弗違，後天而奉天時」 and here means the uncontaminated portion a person begins with. Once the energy is clouded, one falls out of that original place — so a single abrupt remark costs more than a relationship. For people with posts in a hall this is a very concrete reminder: standing before the altar, one impatient tone can stir the air of an entire session.

Stand in the position that is actually yours comes from the Doctrine of the Mean: 「君子素其位而行，不願乎其外。素富貴，行乎富貴；素貧賤，行乎貧賤……君子無入而不自得焉」 — the noble person acts from the position he is actually in and does not hanker after what lies outside it. Said to a class of temple officers, the meaning is entirely concrete: whatever post you hold, stand in it — do not overstep it and do not leave it empty. This is not general counsel about humility; it is a job instruction. The weight is in the second half: do not let a class convened come to nothing but form. The class is opened, everyone has arrived, the programme is run through — and if each person is not standing in his own place, the whole session is empty pageantry. This is the least forgiving line in the teaching, because whether a class comes off is precisely their business.

Contemplative illumination returns once more to that sentence in the Platform Sutra (般若品): 「用自真如性，以智慧觀照，於一切法不取不捨」. Line 16 said never departing from true nature, and the ten thousand kinds of function; here it is illuminate with contemplation — true nature, function, illumination: the same three terms in the same order as in the sutra’s line. The teaching reaches for the Platform Sutra at least five times (the vast capacity of the heart, using one’s own true nature, opening a buddha’s knowing-and-seeing, contemplative illumination, knowing the heart and seeing the nature), which is no accident: what that sutra teaches is that the thing was there all along and has only been covered over — and that is this teaching’s position from beginning to end. Illuminate what? Every act and every stirring of thought — a single gesture, a single thought, a scale as small as it can be made; and the second half pulls the lens all the way out. The three-thousandfold great-thousand world is the Buddhist measure of a cosmos: what one sun and moon light is a small world, a thousand of those a small-thousand, a thousand of those a middling-thousand, a thousand of those a great-thousand — the reach of one buddha’s teaching. Set the two scales in one line and the force comes out: you think a thought is minute and that nobody can see it; on the three-thousandfold scale it is perfectly plain. This is not a threat. It states the specification of the examination hall — what this examination examines is exactly the thought nobody saw.

After so much about trials and danger, the teaching turns warm here and stops to say one thing: to have met the great Dao in this life is enormous good fortune, and the place you are standing in was reached only by great luck. The round of rebirth is ignorance making karma and karma pulling one along, continuing through birth and death like a turning wheel; only having met Dao is there any possibility of getting out, and only then do all those vexations have an end.

Return to your post and report back have their root in chapter 16 of the Daodejing: 「致虛極，守靜篤。萬物並作，吾以觀復。夫物芸芸，各復歸其根。歸根曰靜，是謂復命」 — reach utmost emptiness, hold to stillness; the ten thousand things all rise, and I watch them return; in all their multitude they each return to their own root, and returning to the root is called stillness, and this is called reporting back to the mandate. (The received text writes 復命; the teaching writes 覆命, a variant graph for the same word.) Laozi is describing a great cosmic circuit, and the teaching converts it into a present-tense act with one word, 隨時, at every moment: not returning to the root at the end of all things, but returning to your post moment by moment — and each return is a report made. And the result of returning is at once you are joined to Heaven above by a single thread — the thread of connection between Heaven and the human that this lineage speaks of. It is not connected once cultivation is finished; the instant you return to your post, the line is live.

Flowers in empty air is a Buddhist figure: someone with a diseased eye sees flowers hanging in clear air — the flowers were never there, the sick eye produced them (the 圓覺經 has 「知是空花，即無輪轉」, know them as flowers in empty air and there is no more turning in the round; the 楞嚴經 has 「見、聞如幻翳，三界若空花」. The sutras conventionally write 空花 and the teaching writes 空華 — the same word, a variant graph). And the teaching adds a very down-to-earth clause: they cannot fill the belly. A painted cake does not satisfy hunger. All the false surfaces before this, the empty pageantry, the merit that exists only in the imagination — all of it is flowers in empty air: good to look at, impossible to eat. What can be eaten, then? Mencius (離婁上) states the principle from its negative side: 「夫人必自侮，然後人侮之；家必自毀，而後人毀之」 — a person first holds himself cheap, and only then do others hold him cheap. So hold yourself in respect and in care is not feeling good about yourself; it is not doing the things that leave you without a footing. 涵 is to nourish slowly, to let a thing steep in what it is soaking in — which is precisely the opposite of a flower in empty air: the flower is seen at a glance, and the nature of virtue is grown.

This is where the teaching gathers itself, and it is a single connected chain of cause. The hundred rivers taken in by the sea comes from the Zhuangzi (秋水): 「天下之水，莫大於海，萬川歸之，不知何時止而不盈」 — of all the waters under Heaven none is greater than the sea; the ten thousand streams pour into it and it never stops or fills. Why is the sea great? Because it takes in every water there is. Widen your consciousness means enlarging first what you can see and hold — which loops back to line 3’s vast in substance, and back to the inverse of the opening verse’s third couplet: the one who makes master and slave is exactly the one who will take nothing in. Take in first, and only then is there anything to say about the second half, turning consciousness into wisdom. That is the core work of the Consciousness-Only teaching: in an ordinary person the eight consciousnesses are false discrimination and the source of affliction, and cultivation turns them so that they become the four wisdoms — the great perfect mirror wisdom, the wisdom of essential equality, the wisdom of marvellous observation, and the wisdom of accomplishing what is to be done (成唯識論). And that turning is itself the udumbara opening: the udumbara flower appears in the Lotus Sutra (方便品) — 「如是妙法，諸佛如來時乃說之，如優曇鉢華，時一現耳」, a marvellous dharma that the buddhas speak only when the time comes, like the udumbara flower, which shows itself once in an age — said to bloom once in three thousand years, the omen of a buddha’s appearing in the world. So this half of the line is not an extra simile tacked on: for a person actually to turn consciousness into wisdom is, between Heaven and Earth, a thing exactly that rare.

Enough has been said, and that is the examiner’s sense of measure: the questions are set, and to go on would be to answer them for the candidate. Know the heart, see the nature is Chan’s watchword, and the whole of the Platform Sutra is about recognizing one’s own heart and seeing one’s own nature (the four characters together appear in the colophon layer rather than in the sutra’s body, though the doctrine runs through the entire text). And the weight is on the last word, 參 — to ponder it through for yourself, not to have it explained. After thirty couplets, the teaching is handed back into your hands.

浮 is light and 躁 is hasty — which is exactly what the monkey and the horse of line 20 look like when they are not gathered in, and another form of the decorated face of line 6. And the consequence is the loss of Heaven’s helping strength. This does not mean punishment: a restless person simply cannot take hold of that thread. Line 25 said at every moment return to your post and make your report back; and at once you are joined to Heaven above by a single thread, and this line is its exact inverse — do not return to your post, let the heart go light and hasty, and the thread parts. Reward and punishment here are two faces of one thing: where you are standing decides whether the connection reaches you.

He does not depart on a cloud, and he does not return above to report the charge fulfilled — he withdraws and stands to one side. (The same office closed a teaching at another altar with this line word for word.) Nothing could suit the title Chief Examiner better: an invigilator never leaves the examination hall. He simply stops speaking and stands to the side, watching. The teaching is finished; the examination is still running. Each of you, hold to Dao and carry it out is the last thing left to every person in the room. 抱道 is to hold Dao in your arms (the 文子 has 「含德抱道，推誠樂施」 and 「抱道推誠，天下從之如響之應聲」), and having held it you must also carry it out — do it. Together the four characters answer the constancy the opening verse began with: the opposite of virtue held two ways and three is holding on and not letting go, and doing it day after day after day. And this is a sand-writing: the characters were set down stroke by stroke in a tray of sand. When he steps aside, what stops is the stylus.