◎Jade Tablet – 10 – 31
◎The Setup for Vertical Ascent – 31
◎The Great Reversal and Inversion – 10
◎The True Human Being Does Not Give a Second Thought to the Attributes of His Own Body
On the execution platform, while his limbs were being severed, Hallaj calmly evaluated what was happening to him, as if he felt nothing.
『Then his hands were cut off, and he grinned. “What is the meaning of this laughter?” he was asked. He said,
“It is easy to cut off the hands of a bound man. The true man is he who cuts off the hands of that thing called attribute, which snatches the crown of will from the tip of the throne.”
Then his feet were cut off. He smiled and said,
“With these feet I have journeyed over the earth, but I have yet another foot with which I am even now journeying through the two worlds. If you are able, cut off that foot.”
Then he rubbed his bloodied hands over his face, making his face and arms bloody.
“Why do you do that?”
“Blood is flowing in abundance from my body, and I know that my face is pale. I was afraid that you might think that I had turned pale from fear, so I smeared blood on my face so that I might appear rosy-cheeked.
The rouge of the true man is his blood.”』
(Ibid., pp. 357-358)
Even with his arms cut off, the true human being smiles, showing that he does not give a second thought to the attributes of his own body. Here, the likes and dislikes mentioned in the Faith Mind Inscription of the Third Zen Patriarch are expressed as attributes. Could this be called a highly liberated personality?
The other foot after his legs were cut off must be the subtle body, but it must be something that reaches the eternal and imperishable Sixth Body, which is the "now here" of another world.
Does the rouge of the true human being being their crimson blood mean that love, the ultimate form of encounter between people, cannot be achieved without blood?
