Tian Zifang (3)

1 Yan Hui had been Confucius’ student for a long time. In the past many years, Yan Hui studied very hard and had never shown laches. However, to some key issues, he always felt lagged from his teacher. It is like a group of friends who are usually the same but each one’s attitude to handling things are very different in urgent or formal grand occasion.

2 Yan Hui found the difference. Someday he spoke to Confucius, “You walk, I can catch up with you. You walk fast, which I can catch up too. You trot, I manage to catch up. You rush at full speed, then, I am too far behind to catch up any more.”

3 Confucius detected that he wanted to speak of something else. Therefore, Confucius asked, “Yan Hui! What do you want to say on earth?”

4 Yan Hui replied, “Your common speech is compared to walk, which I can catch up with you. Your argument with other is compared to walk fast, which I can catch up too. Your narrating theories are compared to trot, which I manage to catch some. Sometime you, however, accomplish a thing just by a sight, a shaking hands or a nod. Your appetence is so natural and fierce. For example, without advertisement and mobilization, so many people flock around you and agree on your ideals. Your aptitude for it is far beyond me. No matter how hard I am trying I still can’t get it. Could I know why?”

5 Doing a frown, Confucius said in earnest, “Well! This is really important. We who learn and practice are good at digesting knowledge and cases so as to employ them flexibly. It is bad to be as the parrot speaks who has no its own thought.

6 A man without his own thought is like the dead man. Perhaps he is worse than the dead man.

7 The sun rises east. It moves slowly. At last it set west. Lives of creatures all go like this track, from life to death.

8 Our lives are the combination of self-nature and flesh body. Self nature enters into flesh body; we come into living. Self-nature leaves, we die. Like the sun, self-nature can’t stay on one fixed point, so transmigration of birth and death is an inevitable phenomenon. All things will transmigrate without exception.

9 You can’t evade the destiny of birth and death despite who you are, how mighty you are and how lucky you are. Once you become a certain creature due to self-nature combining with the flesh body. You conserve the form until self-nature leaves and flesh body dies and becomes ash.

10 In the time between birth and death, people all live a day-after-day life with others in a certain life style. People bustle all days, thinking everything. When they are idle, they are confused with the problems before birth and after death.

11 A man of perfect practice knows that our body is from the combination of self-nature and flesh body which is confined between birth and death. In this time and space, people are impossible to touch the affairs before life and after death. For this reason, I don’t need to have over care about what I can’t obtain. So, I take “live in present time” as the highest principle and “mirror theory” as the living principle. I am of no-self, being flexibility and no care. By this practice my heart becomes sound, tranquil and peaceful, wisdom which emitted by self-nature arises and I become a free man of prefect practice.

12 Yan Hui. I have been both your teacher and friend for more than a half life. If you can’t understand the essence of my thought yet, it is a great pity. Now what you think worse than I is my merit and exquisiteness. These concept, idea and practice are super organic, touchless and wordless. If you want to seek for the practice in the way you do on common thing, it is impossible to get it; like that you seek fish on the tree or buy horse in the food market.

13 Yan Hui. My present practice really is far beyond yours. Your view and concept are obsolete long time ago by me. Though it is so, you needn’t feel too bad. It is good to know the direction and goal. From now on, you should throw off the stiff knowledge from me in the past and seek for my philosophy of no-self, being flexibility and the empty five aggregates. You still have the chance to reach my level because being the younger generation, you has more time and opportunity to surpass the older one.”