Zen Teaching of Instantaneous Awakening

Zen teaching of instantaneous awakening a complete translation of the teaching of the chinese ch'an master hui hai by john blofeld, with a foreword by charles luk hui hai, was one of the great ch'an (zen) masters. he was a contemporary of both ma tsu and huang po, those early masters who established ch'an after the death of hui neng, the sixth patriarch. hui hai's direct teachings point immediately to this moment of truth and awakening, and the message of this classic eighth-century text is universal and timeless. a classic of zen (ch'an) buddhism the birth of this translationthereupon, my thoughts flew back to a temple secluded in a long, low valley in west china where, during the second world war, i had gone from my post at our embassy in chungking to recuperate from illness. today i do not even remember the temple's name, but i shall not easily forget what befell me there. it is strange (and no doubt a symptom of our need for books such as the great pearl's) how quickly the most delicious pleasures pall. living in that peaceful temple, with nothing to do all day long be­yond reading, sipping tea with friendly monks and gazing out at the beautiful pine-crowned ridges to either side of the fertile valley, i presently found myself bored! beauty and idleness, to which years of hard work and a month of illness had made me look forward with all my heart, had all too quickly lost their charm. the aged monk-librarian, noticing with his shrewd old eyes my need for distraction, took me to spend a morning with him in the library -a large pavilion almost as big as the main shrine hall of the temple. inside, i found most of it occupied not by books, but by thousands of delicately incised boards of the kind formerly used for printing chinese texts. many of them were centuries old and bore vertical rows of characters so exquisitely formed that i was able to pass several happy hours handling and admiring them; but my state of health had left me weak and presently i felt the need to seek my bedroom, which opened off the shrine hall on the other side of the courtyard. just as i turned to go, the old monk smilingly placed in my hands a copy of one of the ancient texts block-printed from the boards i had been examining. back in my room, which even at midday was rather dark, i lighted a red votive candle and began idly glancing through the pages of the old gentleman's gift. it proved to be a reprint of an eighth-century (t'ang dynasty) text com­posed by the ch'an master hui hai, together with a selection of his dialogues with his disciples. almost at once i came upon an arresting quotation to the effect that sages seek from mind and not from the buddha, whereas those who seek from the buddha and not from mind are fools! this sharply awakened my curiosity, for it seemed extra­ordinary that a pious buddhist writer should thus castigate those who seek something from the `teacher of gods and men'. anyone might be forgiven for finding such words blasphemous -as i did until i had read the whole book and begun to experience the first glimmer of under­standing. there and then, i decided to try my hand at translating this intriguing work. john blofeld from the inside flap the ancients had their unexcelled ways of teaching which seem strange to the people of this modern age of materialism, not only in the west but also in the east. for the human mind is now more concerned with material than with spiritual values; it seeks only the satisfaction of its ever-increasing desires -though these are the very cause of our sufferings -and it casts away `its own treasure house', which is its paradise of eternal bliss. so long as we allow our minds to discriminate and to grasp at illusions, the ancient teaching will seem strange, even stupid and silly, to us. however, if we succeed in disengaging our minds from externals -that is if we stop all our discrimi