Valley sounds and mountain colours
Endeavour wholeheartedly to follow the path of earlier sages. You may have to climb mountains and cross oceans when you look for a teacher to inquire about the way. Look for a teacher and search for understanding with all-encompassing effort, as if you were coming down from heaving or emerging from the ground. When you encounter a true teacher, you invoke sentient beings as well as insentient beings. You hear with the body, you hear with the mind.
To hear with the ear is an everyday matter, but to hear with the eye is not always so. When you see buddha, you see self-buddha, other-buddha, a large buddha, a small buddha. Do not be frightened by a large buddha. Do not be put off by a small buddha. Just see large and small buddhas as valley sounds and mountain colours, as a broad, long tongue, and as eighty-four thousand verses. This is liberation, this is outstanding seeing.
There is a common saying that expresses this: “Totally superb, totally solid.” An earlier buddha said: “It covers heaven, it encompasses the earth.” This is the purity of a spring pine, the magnificence of an autumn chrysanthemum. Just this.
When you reach this realm, you are a master of humans and devas. If you teach others before arriving in this realm, you will do great harm to them. Without knowing the spring pine or the autumn chrysanthemum, how can you nourish others and how can you cut through their roots of confusion?
Dogen Kigen | Shobogebzo (Ed. Tanahashi) | Valley sounds and mountain colors pg.93