Record of Teaching and Practice
Reply to Gu Dongqiao · Opening
Read in English. Switch to Original for word notes, or select text to ask a question.
130 · Addressing Outward Learning
Your letter says, “Recent learners attend to the outside and leave the inside behind, broad in learning but lacking its essential point. Thus you have particularly promoted the single meaning of making intention sincere, applying the needle to a deeply lodged illness. This is truly a great benefit.”
You see the age's defects so clearly. How, then, will you remedy them? You have already exhausted my intention in a single sentence. What more can I say? What more can I say?
As for making intention sincere, it has always been the first principle by which the sage's school teaches people to work. Recent learners have treated it as secondary, so I have merely drawn out its essential importance a little. It is not something I could specially invent or promote on my own.
131 · Practical Work and Sudden Awakening
Your letter says, “I only fear that the formulation is too lofty and the work too rapid. Younger followers and teachers may mistake echoes and shadows and fall into the Buddhists' devices of illuminating mind and seeing nature, concentrated stillness and wisdom, sudden awakening. No wonder hearers doubt.”
My explanations of investigation, extension, sincerity and rectification concern learners' original minds and the undertakings of everyday life. Personally examining and practicing them, working on real ground, how many stages and accumulations are involved! This is precisely the opposite of empty sudden-awakening theories.
Hearers originally have no resolve to become sages and have never investigated the details, so their doubts are no surprise. But with your illumination, surely a single sentence should make it clear. Why do you too call the formulation too lofty and the work too rapid?
Reading note
The deeply lodged illness in the preceding section reads the current 膏育 through the familiar medical metaphor; the source graph is unchanged. “Investigation, extension, sincerity and rectification” abbreviate investigating things, extending knowledge, making intention sincere and setting the mind right. The critique of sudden awakening is the correspondent's objection and the Master's answer, both retained.
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