From Cultivating the Empty Field: The Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi

With Total Trust Roam and Play in Samādhi

Empty and desireless, cold and thin, simple and genuine, this is how to strike down and fold up the remaining habits of many lives. When the stains from old habits are exhausted, the original light appears, blazing through your skull, not admitting any other matters. Vast and spacious, like sky and water merging during autumn, like snow and moon having the same color, this field is without boundary, beyond direction, magnificently one entity without edge or seam. Further, when you turn within and drop off everything completely, realization occurs. Right at the time of entirely dropping off, deliberation and discussion are one thousand or ten thousand miles away. Still no principle is discernible, so what could there be to point to or explain? People with the bottom of the bucket fallen out immediately find total trust. So we are told simply to realize mutual response and explore mutual response, then turn around and enter the world. Roam and play in samādhi. Every detail clearly appears before you. Sound and form, echo and shadow, happen instantly without leaving traces. The outside and myself do not dominate each other, only because no perceiving [of objects] comes between us. Only this non-perceiving encloses the empty space of the dharma realm’s majestic ten thousand forms. People with the original face should enact and fully investigate [the field] without neglecting a single fragment.

The translator, Taigen Dan Leighton, adds – “The bottom of the bucket falling out” is a Zen image for the experience of one’s preconceptions and fixed world view suddenly and completely evaporating. After such experience one’s attitudes are transformed irrevocably, although ingrained habitual responses may still govern one’s conduct to varying extents in the context of further activity in the world.