His Purity.
The lotus-flower,
Though growing in the marshy land,
By dirt, or mire, or filth
Is not defiled;
So is the Bodhisattva:
Though living in this world,
No form of passion
Ever touches him.
His Self-sacrifice.
There lived once a man
Who craftily and skillfully
Felled the trunks of trees,
But left the roots untouched,
That after due time
They might once more be growing;
’Tis even so with the Bodhisattva:
With the upâya that is excellent,
Desires and passions down he fells,
But leaves their seed unscathed
By reason of his all-embracing love,
And thereby ever and anon comes he on earth.[18]
THE BODHISATTVA’S HOMELESS LIFE.[19]
The homeless Bodhisat regards the home life [or the world at large]
As a hurricane that abates not awhile,
Or as the moon’s illusive image in water cast,
Which the imagination takes deliberately for the real.
The water in itself contains no lunar image [real];
The real moon, dependent on water clear, a shadow casts;
So are all beings unreal; only conditionally they exist;
Yet ’tis imagined by the vulgar that an Atman they have.
The Atman is the product of conditions, and real it is not;
But for a reality the imagination it takes.
Have the two prejudices[20] removed,
And we perceive Intelligence most high and peerless.
Our confused imagination is like unto a black storm,
Blowing over the woods of birth and death, stirs up the leaves of consciousness:
By the four winds of fallacy ’tis haunted all the time,
And five damnation-causes it produces,
Entwining are indeed the roots of evil, which are three,
Through birth and death doth transmigration ever onward move.