Floating Clouds and the Pure Reality Body

Greetings Patrons,

Here is another excerpt from Dahui's Shobogenzo. Master Ciming was a 17th generation successor of Bodhidharma in the Linji lineage known for his innovative teaching style. Although a monk, it seems that he had a wife who lived near the temple. You can read more about him in The Record of Empty Hall, Case 71: Ciming's Four Awe-Inspiring Manners."

#19 Master Ciming also said, "The floating clouds of form, sensation, perception, habits, and consciousness go and come for naught; the bubbles of greed, hatred, and folly appear and disappear in vain. If you realize this, you cross over all miseries; boundless emotionally afflicted intellectual interpretations are all purified. This is the pure reality body.

"If you reach this state, then you can emerge in one place and disappear in another, discard one embodiment and take on another. Free at will in all ways in hell or heaven, this world or another, floating and sinking, shedding light in response to people, setting down teachings according to potentials. This is called the hundred thousand million projection bodies.

"A speech like this could be called talking about a dream where there is no dream, mixing with mud and water, scattering crap and piss, not knowing good and bad.

"Ha, ha, ha! If you turn to the Chan school, even ten myriad eight thousand is still not enough to dream of sensing the smell of Chan sweat. Even so, we shouldn’t be one-sided in this matter. We just use temporary terms to guide people. Ha!"