"Mencius Tells the Son" says that "food color is also", which is the basic need of life and a major obstacle to life. Diet is materialistic desire, sound and color are lust, from ancient times to the present, it is the practitioner's heart demon, Confucianism is restrained by self-cultivation, Taoists are restrained by pure heart, and Zen Buddhism responds with visualization.
In order to deal with the temptation of lust, the Buddhists really came up with a proper way to eliminate inner desires through inner reflection, and the effect was good, but the side effects were amazing. According to buddhist scriptures, this practice even led to the tragedy of the death of sixty people in a monastic order.
It can be seen that the same method will have different results, looking at the side effects of Dharma practice.
Here is a story, which took place in the Tang Dynasty, and the protagonist is familiar to everyone. It is said that in Taiyuan, the tang dynasty and the prefecture (that is, Shanxi), there was a smart and studious young talent, surnamed Di Renjie, the character Huaiying. When he was a child, he once met a monk from Youfang, saying that he had a noble face and was the fate of the three dukes of the temple, but many temptations were inevitable in life, and in the final analysis, the words "wealth and color" were the most difficult to restrain, and a little carelessness would inevitably lead to ruin. In particular, young people see wealth and forget their feelings, wealth can be controlled from the outside, lust can be controlled internally, the most difficult to overcome, once lost in it, it can be destroyed.
Di Renjie was so clever that he heard that the old monk had something to say, and sincerely enlightened his future, so he asked the teacher to point out the mystery. The old monk, who called himself Shanzai, taught Di Renjie a set of exercises specifically to restrain lust. A few years later, Di Renjie succeeded in his studies and went to Beijing to take the exam, and on the way to the hotel to stay and rest. Late that night, he was reading in his room when he heard a knock at the door, opened the door and saw that it was a beautiful woman with a plain body. The beautiful woman said that she was also a guest of the hotel, her husband had just died, and when she saw Di Renjie handsome and single, she remembered her dead husband, so she came late at night to harass, the implication was "You look very similar to my husband, I want to sleep with you."
Di Renjie saw that she had an elegant temperament and should not be an ordinary person's home, so he advised her to abide by the woman's way and leave quickly. The beautiful woman did not listen, and the words of action were more like adultery. Di Renjie suddenly remembered that the old monk had taught him the Technique of the Heart Technique a few years ago, so he passed on this set of exercises to the woman, and advised the young woman to say, Your husband has just passed away, you should know how to self-deny and keep the festival, after learning this set of exercises, you can naturally restrain your lust. The woman listened to Di Renjie's words, immediately left, and the next morning came to thank her with shame on her face, saying that after seeing Di Renjie last night, she remembered her deceased husband Jun, and suddenly could not help herself, and now after practicing the Fa, her heart was like water, and she had calmed down a lot.
It is said that Di Renjie wrote a poem at that time and gave it to this beautiful woman:
"The beauty of the world is always like spring, I do not adulterous women and women, if you regard beauty as a dead woman, maggots all over your body will smell bad."
Hidden in this is the secret of eliminating lust and returning to nature.
Being able to eliminate the torment of lust overnight, what kind of exercises did Di Renjie teach to the beautiful woman?
Di Renjie's practice was taught by a wandering monk, so it must have come from the Zen Buddhist sect. Let's put down Di Renjie first, and then look at another story, which comes from the Buddhist classic "Za'a Han Sutra , 809 Volumes".
However, in all Buddhist scriptures, the beginning of the sentence "As I smell" begins. According to legend, after the Buddha's death, Abe was ordered to sort out the Buddha's last teachings. Why did Ananda do this, because he served with him when the Buddha was alive, and he heard every word of the Buddha the most and remembered it, so he was called the "first to hear" among His Holiness.
In order to reflect the authenticity, At the beginning of each Sutra, Ananda must write down the four words "As I smell", "I" is Ananda himself, this sentence means "the following are all my Ananda personally heard the Buddha said", in order to show the orthodoxy and correctness of the Buddhist scriptures he sorted out, not from him, true and infallible.
The story to be told here is extremely tragic, and it is also a rare tragedy in the Buddhist scriptures, but it is indeed His Holiness Ananda who "heard it as I heard.".
It is said that at that time, the Buddha stopped in the saro pear forest near the "Vajrayma River" and taught his disciples a kind of spiritual practice called "impure contemplation." As the first person in charge and the main leader at that time, the Buddha personally grasped the implementation, and of course the disciples all fell in love with each other.
This method of practice is said to have been invented by the Buddha, and his own attitude towards this method is recognized. So what will be the result of the bhikkhus' cultivation, the Buddhist scriptures say, "Great fruits and great welfare." However, there are two sides to everything, and there are actually side effects that accompany the Great Blessing, and the Buddhist scriptures record that many practitioners have the idea of "extremely disgusted with the body" after practicing, to put it bluntly, they are extremely disgusted with their own flesh, from the inside to the outside, to what extent, the original text of the Buddhist scriptures says, "Or commit suicide with a knife, or take poison, or hang yourself with a rope, and commit suicide by throwing rocks", which in the final analysis is "extremely disgusted with lochia and impure".
There were even more bhikkhus who asked other bhikkhus to kill themselves, and one of them went to Lulin to find a layman (non-Dharma practitioner) called Lu Lin Fan Zhizi, and said to this foreign monk, "Sage, ru can kill me, the mantle belongs to ru shi", call him a foreign sage, if you can kill me, my clothes and belongings will be given to you.
After killing the bhikkhus, he came to the Vaggitim river with a knife to clean the weapons, and then a heavenly demon (perhaps his own inner demon) said to him, "This is a great good deed, to help the monks to liberate themselves, and you can also harvest their possessions, which is a beautiful thing to kill two birds with one stone." With this "encouragement," Lu lin Fan Zhizi "heard the admiration and increased the evil and evil views", and under the expansion of evil thoughts, he did a terrible thing, just in the Vajrama River channel where the monks were practicing, "that is, to kill the bhikkhus with a sharp knife, the second stage, and even when he killed sixty people.".
Half a month later, the Buddha gathered the devotees again to investigate the progress of their practice, found that there were many fewer disciples, and asked His Holiness Ananda, "Why is it that the bhikkhus turn less, turn less, and turn to the end", Ananda told the situation, you can imagine Ananda's anxious and urgent mood at that time, and hoped that the Buddha would quickly find a way to solve the doubts in everyone's hearts, so that everyone could "enjoy receiving the Fa-rectification and living in the Fa-rectification" to avoid such a tragedy.
This practice of the Buddha is called "impure contemplation", why such a practice appears, from many Buddhist scriptures, it can be seen that the monks who first practiced, due to their low concentration, were easily disturbed by external objects, resulting in restlessness and affecting the results of the cultivation. Originally it was a solution to the problem, but it caused the practitioners to dislike themselves, disgusted to the point of ending their lives, sixty consecutive bhikkhus were killed, plus more than a hundred people who committed suicide before, what caused the unexpected side effects, so that the tragedy could be taken advantage of by the outside world?
In the 45th book of the Za'ahan Sutra, there is such an eloquent story, when Shakyamuni Buddha lived in a place called the Garden of Gion for Solitude in sheweiguo, and in the morning the disciples all went out to fast, and His Holiness Ananda walked with a Venerable named Brahma, and as a result, on the way, this junior Venerable saw a beautiful woman, and he actually had desire, "greed overwhelmed, burning my heart", and desire burned his heart like a fiery fire.
This is still a Venerable who has been following the Buddha's practice for a long time, and he cannot escape the temptation of desire. When he asked Ananda for help, Ananda told him, "When you cultivate impure contemplation, always receive it with one heart, quickly extinguish the fire of greed, and do not burn his heart." The "impure view" that Ananda recommended to Brahmacharya is the method that the Buddha came up with to help everyone solve such a dilemma.
What is the concept of impurity, the Specific Method is described in the Southern Transmission Branch Sutra as follows, "from the bottom up, spontaneously top down, with the skin as the edge, observing this body full of all kinds of impurities", to put it bluntly, this practice method is to regard the human body as an unclean and filthy body, and the body of others is the same, which produces a sense of disgust, and finally eliminates the temptation of lust and achieves the purpose of pure heart and desire, which is very symptomatic to say.
After the Buddha preached the view of impurity, the disciples practiced and had thoughts of getting tired of the flesh, or committing suicide, or asking others to kill themselves, which was not the original intention of the Buddha's "view of impurity." This abnormal situation was exploited by the evil gods, who took the opportunity to encourage the murderer Lu Lin Fanzhizi to do "merit" and kill 60 Buddhist disciples in a row. It can only be said that it is the evil gods and demons that have exploited the loopholes in the cultivation of the Buddha's disciples, killing people and breaking the Law is their real purpose, and liberating people is only a disguise for evil thoughts.
There is another story in the Zohar Sutra, Vol. 311, where fu lou na, one of the ten great disciples of the Buddha, wanted to go out on a missionary journey, and the Buddha said that the place was not friendly to the Dharma, and that there were often incidents of beating and even killing monks, what do you do? Fu Lou Na's answer was, "World Lord! If the West loses the Luna to kill me, as if it were a recitation——, there are disciples of the world who are sick of the body, or commit suicide with a knife, or take poison, or hang themselves with a rope, or throw themselves into a pit. He who loses the goodness and wisdom of the Luna in the West will be liberated from my decaying body, and with less convenience. Fu Lou Na said that there were once Buddhist disciples who were tired of their bodies and committed suicide in various ways (referring to the Vajraymor River massacre caused by the cultivation of impurity). If the people in that place really want to kill themselves, then they are great wisdom and great sages, and this decaying body can be liberated by borrowing their hands without asking for help.
What Fu Lou Na told the Buddha was another way of understanding his practice, which was allowed by the Buddha and the Law, so it was not suicide.
Because, taking the end of life as the way to achieve positive results is not all an extreme method of going into the fire, according to Buddhism, when the arhat fruit is attained, in the case of life expectancy, actively give up life expectancy to choose to enter and perish, called "(no remain) nirvana", which is the elevation of the fruit position, not suicide.
Of course, as a junior disciple, desire to tempt and nuisance is a demon, and it is also a demon to give up life at will, and the Vajrayma River massacre is not something that the Buddha wanted to see after all. It is normal to practice impure contemplation and lead to world-weariness, which is exactly the effect that needs to be achieved by practicing impure contemplation, but the purpose of practicing impure contemplation is to help practitioners work hard to eliminate infections, not to pursue negative suicide.
In fact, after the Vajrayma Massacre, the Buddha formulated the "killing vows" for the monks as a constraint, which became one of the precepts recognized by the various vinayas. According to the laws, helping others commit suicide, or encouraging or praising others to commit suicide, is equivalent to killing people with their own hands, which is a major sin of breaking the precepts.
Original works, copyright belongs to the headline number "Stone Lion's Jiao'ao Notes", welcome to pay attention.
The relevant graphic materials of the article are from Internet public resources.