百喻經 義疏通講Sūtra of One Hundred Parables · Exposition Throughout

This fascicle has twenty-one parables, and each parable has two parts. The first part tells of a foolish man who does something, and mostly someone laughs at him; the second part says “it is just the same,” and turns the laughter round to point at someone. Those pointed at are of three kinds: followers of other paths, bhikṣus, and worldly people. Read first who is pointed at, then what he did wrong, and last why the people were able to laugh. They can laugh because in the story the fault is plain at a glance; carried over to the Dharma, everyone commits the same fault and no one finds it laughable. This fascicle sets the thing that is plain at a glance in front, so that one laughs first and recognizes afterward.

At the end of the fascicle there is a preface. Five hundred brāhmaṇa students ask the Buddha “whether the world exists or does not exist,” and they question him to the end, until they reach nirvāṇa. The Buddha’s last sentence: “You are not yet dead, and yet you know that death is suffering; I have seen the buddhas of the ten directions, who are neither born nor die, and so I know that nirvāṇa is everlasting bliss.” Their minds opened, and only then did the Buddha say: “Listen well! I shall now set out the many parables for you at length.” The base text places this passage after the fascicle title; the Song, Yuan, and Ming editions move it to the head of the fascicle. The way of reading is the same: the parables are told for those whose minds have already opened. If the mind has not opened, one laughs and passes on; if it has, one laughs and knows that the one laughed at is oneself.

I. Seven Parables of the Followers of Other Paths (Parables 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 19)

The application of each of these seven parables points at followers of other paths. The applications say: “Like those followers of other paths who hear that moderating one’s food can lead to attaining the Way, and so stop eating altogether, for seven days or fifteen, starving themselves to no purpose and with no benefit to the Way.” “Like those followers of other paths who hear the wrong teachings of others and are bewildered and attached to them, taking them to be true and never to be changed, so that even when they hear the right teaching they do not accept and keep it.” “Like followers of other paths who take the principle perversely: because they cannot keep the Buddha’s precepts in full, they do not accept them at all, so that in the future they have no share in attaining the Way and wander on through birth and death.” “Like those followers of other paths who hear the Buddha’s good words, covet and steal them, and use them as their own, and yet when others teach them to practice, they will not practice.” “The foolish hill tribesman is like the followers of other paths: they listen in secret to the Buddha’s Dharma and set it among their own teachings as if it were theirs; but because they do not understand it, they arrange the Buddha’s Dharma in confusion, upper for lower, and do not know the marks of the Dharma.” “Like followers of other paths who do not put out the blazing fire of the afflictions but perform a few austerities, lying on thorns and scorching the body with the five fires, hoping for the way of coolness and quiet; there is no such possibility.” “Like followers of other paths who do not cultivate right practice, but in what merely resembles the good reckon up hardship and toil, seeking liberation thereby.”

Put together, the seven parables are a profile of one man. He has heard the Buddha’s Dharma: that moderating food can lead to the Way, the good words, the marks of the Dharma; he has heard all of it. His fault is not that he did not hear, but that he heard askew. The fool of the salt parable hears “the reason it tastes good is that there is salt in it; if a little does so much, how much more a lot,” and the reasoning is not wrong, for salt does make food taste good; the error is to hear “salt makes food good” as “salt is the good,” and so he “ate salt by itself, and having eaten it his palate was spoiled, and it became his affliction.” Moderating food is an aid to the Way; he heard it as “fasting is the Way.” This is the first way of hearing askew: hearing the condition as the thing itself.

The parable of the thirsty man who sees water is the second. The fool reaches the bank of the Sindhu River and “stares at it and does not drink,” his reason being “this water is so much that it can never all be drunk; therefore I do not drink.” The application says: “because they cannot keep the Buddha’s precepts in full, they do not accept them at all.” The precepts are many and cannot all be kept, so he keeps none. The water is too much to drink dry, so he takes not a sip. The people laugh because a thirsty man wants his thirst quenched, not a river drunk dry. One who keeps the precepts wants to be free of fault, not to perfect every precept in a single day. Make “all of it” the condition for “beginning,” and one never begins.

The parable of the hill tribesman is the third and the subtlest. The hill tribesman steals the king’s garments; the king makes him put them on, and “what belonged on the hands he put on his feet, and what belonged at the waist he put back on his head.” The king says: “If these garments had been your family’s since your grandfather’s time, you would know how to put them on; how is it that you wear them upside down, the upper for the lower? Because you do not understand, I know for certain that your garments were stolen and are not your old possessions.” The application spells it out item by item: “the king is like the Buddha, the treasury is like the Dharma, and the foolish hill tribesman is like the followers of other paths.” Remember how the case is decided here: not by asking where he got it, but by seeing whether he knows how to wear it. Worn upside down, it is plainly not his. The order of the Buddha’s Dharma is the way of wearing it. Whoever “arranges the Buddha’s Dharma in confusion, upper for lower” has not come up through the order. The parable of claiming a stranger as elder brother is the same matter: when there is money he calls him brother, when debts are to be paid he calls him no brother; “for the sake of gain and offerings they take the Buddha’s words to convert and guide living beings, and there is nothing real in it; how can that be practice?” To take the Buddha’s words and not take up the practice is to take only the garments without knowing how to wear them.

The parable of the wife who feigned death and the parable of the bowl lost from the boat are the obstinacy that follows hearing askew. The husband has seen the corpse, burned the bones, and carries them about; when his real wife comes back, “my wife died long ago; who are you, to claim falsely that you are my wife?” and “even at the second and third telling he still did not believe.” The man who lost his bowl draws a mark on the water and two months later searches for it in another river: “the water I marked then is no different from this; therefore I search for it here.” Each man has a sign: a corpse, a line in the water. The sign is not false; what is mistaken is what the sign is taken to point to. The applications use two words: “bewildered and attached,” and “what merely resembles the good.” To be bewildered and attached is to clutch the sign and not let go; what merely resembles the good is to take what looks like the thing for the thing. The people ask well: “Though the water is no different, when you lost it then, it was over there; how could searching here now ever find it?”

The parable of boiling black-sugar syrup closes this group. “If you do not put out the fire below, how will fanning without end ever make it cool?” The application: “do not put out the blazing fire of the afflictions,” and “hope for the way of coolness and quiet.” The fire is underneath; the fan is on top. Austerity is the fan; the afflictions are the fire. The application ends: “suffering now, and the calamity flows on into kalpas to come”: the suffering of fanning on top is received now, and the calamity of the unextinguished fire flows on into the kalpas to come. This one sentence says everything about the seven parables of the followers of other paths: all that they do is on top, and all that is wrong is underneath.

II. Four Parables of Bhikṣus (Parables 3, 6, 10, 11)

The applications of these four parables point at bhikṣus or at the four kinds of disciples. The fool struck on the head says that the one who struck him is the stupid one, who “saw that there was no hair on my head and took it for a stone”; a bystander says: “If you are not stupid, how is it that when he struck you, you did not know to get away even when your head was broken?” The application: “So too the bhikṣu who cannot cultivate faith, precepts, learning, and wisdom in full, but only arranges his deportment to attract gain and offerings, is like that fool who, struck on the head, did not know to get away, and even when wounded and broken called the other stupid.” The gain and offerings he attracts are the pears. Not knowing to get away is not knowing that gain and offerings are the blow. To call the other stupid with a broken head is to be wounded by gain and offerings and call the donor stupid.

The parable of the dead son speaks of breaking a precept and concealing it. The fool’s one son dies and he will not bury him, but wants “to keep him in the house”; when people urge him to bury the boy, he thinks: “If I cannot keep him and must bury him, I shall have to kill another son, so that I can carry them one at each end of the pole.” The application first says that “one who has left home keeps and holds the precepts as one guards a bright pearl, letting none be lost,” and then that the bhikṣu “privately breaks one precept, and shrinking in his heart from repenting, keeps silent and conceals it, declaring himself pure”; the precepts are like pearls, and to lose one is to be short. When someone urges him to repent he says: “If I must repent, let me first go and break it again, and then come out.” One son dead is one precept broken. Keeping the corpse in the house is concealment. Killing the second son is to make the repentance “worth the trouble” by breaking the precept once more. The people “laughed deeply and marvelled at a thing never seen before”; what they marvel at is that he treats burial as something to be done only when the load is made up to full weight. Repentance is not carrying a load; it does not need to be balanced at both ends.

The parable of the three-storied tower speaks of order, and it is the longest parable in this fascicle. The fool wants a three-storied tower built: “I do not want the two lower floors; first build the top floor for me.” The carpenter answers: “How could there be building the second floor without first building the lowest? Without building the second, how could the third be built?” The application: “they cannot diligently cultivate reverence for the Three Jewels, but lazy and remiss they wish to obtain the fruits of the Way, and they say: ‘I have no use for the remaining three fruits; I seek only the fruit of arhatship.’” The base text does not say what the lower three fruits are; it says only “the remaining three fruits,” and this edition follows the base text and does not supply the names. This parable stands opposite the parable of the hill tribesman: the tribesman has the garments and cannot wear them; this man will not have even the two lower floors and wants the top directly. Both are faults of order: one disorders it, one skips it.

The parable of the brāhmaṇa who killed his son is the heaviest. The brāhmaṇa says his son will die in seven days; people do not believe him, and he says: “The sun and moon may go dark and the stars may fall, but what I have foretold will never fail.” On the seventh day “he killed his own son to prove his word,” and the people of the world instead said, “truly a wise man; what he says is never wrong.” The application: “Like the four kinds of the Buddha’s disciples who for gain and offerings claim to have attained the Way, having the way of fools: they kill a good man to display a false compassion, and so bring upon themselves suffering without end in the future.” To make the claim come true, he kills the one who could prove the claim false. In this parable there is no laughter from the crowd beforehand, only “their hearts believed, and all came to pay him reverence.” A parable at which no one can laugh is one in which the killing is already done and no one sees the fault.

III. Ten Parables of Worldly People (Parables 2, 9, 13–18, 20, 21)

The applications of the remaining ten parables point at worldly people, fools, and those without understanding. They fall into three small groups.

The first group reckon their accounts wrong: storing up milk, the debt of half a coin, climbing the tower to sharpen a knife, watering the sugarcane. The man who stores up milk thinks, “when the time of the feast comes I shall milk them all at once,” and the milk “had dried up and there was none”; the application: “they wish to practice giving, but say, ‘wait until I have a great deal, and then I shall give all at once.’ Before they have gathered it, it is seized by officials, by flood, fire, or thieves, or they die suddenly and do not give in time.” The man with the debt of half a coin “for a debt of half a coin lost four coins”; the application: “for a little fame and gain they ruin the great practice,” and “indulging themselves, heedless of propriety, they receive ill repute now and painful retribution afterward”: the half coin is fame and gain, the four coins are propriety, and what is lost is not only present ill repute but the pain to come. The man sharpening the knife “hoisted the camel up the tower to sharpen the knife on the stone”; the application: “they break the precepts and take much money to cultivate merit, hoping to be born in heaven,” and “much effort, very little gain.” The man watering the sugarcane “pressed the sugarcane for its juice and used it to water the cane, hoping for sweetness, and instead ruined the seed”; the application: “they oppress and coerce the people below them and rob them of their goods to make a root of merit, expecting good fruit, not knowing that in the future they will instead reap calamity.” The four parables share one way of reckoning: spending the capital as if it were the interest. The milk is the capital; the pressed juice is the capital; the precepts are the capital; the people are the capital. To spend the capital to get what the capital should have produced is to lose at both ends. “Like pressing the sugarcane: both are lost.” This one sentence can stand as the summary of all four.

The second group treat people as offerings: killing the caravan leader as a sacrifice to heaven, telling the king he is cruel, the woman who wanted yet another son. The merchants kill their guide as a sacrifice to heaven, and “lost their way, not knowing where to go, and perished in want, every one of them”; the application: “one should cultivate the practice of good dharmas as one’s guide. Ruining good conduct, on the broad road of birth and death there is never a way out,” and “passing through the three evil destinies, suffering long”: to lose the guide is not only to lose the road but to suffer long in the three evil destinies. The king has a hundred taels of flesh cut from a loyal minister, and when he regrets it “demands a thousand taels of flesh to mend his back”; a bystander says: “It is like cutting off a son’s head: though one obtained a thousand heads, the son would not escape death.” The application: “not fearing the next life, they thirst for present pleasure,” and “they torment living beings and levy heavily on the people to get much wealth, hoping to extinguish their offenses and gain the reward of merit”: the motive is in the first sentence, craving present pleasure without fear of the life to come. The woman, to get a son not yet born, would kill the son she has, and a wise man scolds her: “Can the son not yet born be had at all? And you would kill the son you have.” The application: “for a happiness not yet born they throw themselves into a pit of fire, harming the body in every way in order to be born in heaven.” These three parables push the first group’s accounting onto persons. The capital is not only goods; it is the guide, the loyal minister, the son one has, this very body. Spend these to buy merit, and the merit bought is only what is got by killing them; even when it is got, it does not make them good again. “Though he obtained ten times the flesh, he did not escape the pain.”

The third group misjudge a person: praising a father’s virtue, telling a man he is quick to anger, the physician’s medicine for the princess. The fool praising his father says, “from his youth my father cut off sexual desire and was never once defiled,” and the people ask: “If he cut off sexual desire, how did he beget you?” The application: “wishing to praise someone’s virtue without knowing the facts, one brings reproach on him instead.” The man quick to anger, hearing someone say he is quick to anger, strikes him at once, and a bystander says: “Your quickness to anger and your haste have shown themselves this very moment; how can you deny it?” The application points at the drinker who, “sunk in drink, given over to every heedlessness,” “when reproached, instead feels resentment and hatred”: first the drinking and heedlessness, then the hatred when reproached; the disease is in the first sentence. In the parable of the physician and the princess’s medicine, the one laughed at is the king, not the physician: the king waits twelve years, sees his daughter grown, and “thought it was the power of the medicine,” and the people laugh at the king; but the application turns round to speak of worldly people seeking the Way, whom a good friend “teaches to sit in meditation and contemplate the twelve links of dependent arising, gradually accumulating merits and attaining arhatship,” and the disciple says: “How wonderful, great teacher! So soon you have made me realize the most marvellous Dharma.” The application of this parable does not say “it is just the same”; it says only that worldly people are so too. The king does not know it was the work of months and years; the disciple does not know it was the work of gradual accumulation; both credit a slow labor to a sudden dose. Earlier the parable of boiling the syrup said that the fire is underneath; this parable says that the medicine is in the time. Read together: the work is neither in fanning on top nor in a single dose.

IV. The Preface (Thus It Was Heard)

The five hundred brāhmaṇa students rise from their seats and ask “whether the world exists or does not exist,” and the Buddha answers “it both exists and does not exist”: “what is born is said to exist, what dies is said not to exist; therefore it is said to exist or not to exist.” The students then ask what man is born from, and the Buddha answers along the chain of birth: man is born from grain, grain from the four great elements, the four great elements from space, space from nothingness, nothingness from what is so of itself, what is so of itself from nirvāṇa. When they ask “from what is nirvāṇa born,” the Buddha no longer answers along the chain, but says: “Why do you ask so deeply? Nirvāṇa is the dharma that is neither born nor dies.” The students change their question: “If you have not yet entered nirvāṇa, how do you know that nirvāṇa is everlasting bliss?” The Buddha asks them in return whether living beings suffer, and they answer, “we see that living beings at the time of death suffer pain hard to bear, and so we know that death is suffering.” The Buddha then answers them with their own words: “You are not yet dead, and yet you know that death is suffering; I have seen the buddhas of the ten directions, who are neither born nor die, and so I know that nirvāṇa is everlasting bliss.”

This exchange and the twenty-one parables are one body. The students, asking all the way “from what is it born,” treat nirvāṇa as one link in the chain; the Buddha cuts the chain and says that nirvāṇa is not within birth. The students then ask “how can one know it without having entered it,” treating knowing as something that counts only if one has been through it oneself; the Buddha says that knowing death to be suffering does not require dying. The fools before them mostly err at these two points: taking the condition for the thing itself, and taking the whole for the beginning. Salt makes food good; that does not make salt the good. The water is too much to drink dry; that does not make it undrinkable. “The five hundred brāhmaṇa students, their minds opened and their understanding freed, asked to receive the five precepts and awakened to the fruit of stream-entry,” and only then did the Buddha set out the many parables. The parables are for a mind that has opened.

V. How to Read the Fascicle

One parable, two parts. The first part is the story; the second is the Dharma. The fool in the story has no name, only “a foolish man,” “a man,” “one man”; the one pointed at in the Dharma has no name either, only followers of other paths, bhikṣus, worldly people. This is how a parable is written: it points not at one person, but at everyone who does this thing.

In reading each parable, first find the opening sentence of the application. The application usually begins with “it is just the same,” “so too,” “like,” or “as”; from that sentence, match backward: each thing in the story against which thing in the Dharma. Salt against moderating food, milk against giving, water against the precepts, garments against the Dharma, pears against gain and offerings, the dead son against the broken precept, the corpse against wrong teachings, the bowl against liberation, the syrup against quiet, the three-storied tower against the four fruits, the guide against good conduct, the hundred taels of flesh against living beings, the son one has against the body. Once matched, the laughter falls on oneself. Unmatched, it is only a story. In some parables the application names a thing the story does not contain; in some the story contains a thing the application does not name; the apparatus records these parable by parable, and the exposition does not supply the match for it.

Of the twenty-one parables, the base text writes of laughter in twelve: storing up milk, thirsty at the sight of water, the dead son, claiming a stranger as elder brother, praising a father, the three-storied tower, boiling the syrup, the physician and the princess, the debt of half a coin, sharpening the knife, the lost bowl, and wanting another son. Among these, in the physician and the princess the one laughed at is the king; in the parable of wanting another son the one who laughs is a single wise man standing by, who laughs and then scolds. The other nine do not write of laughter: the parable of the man quick to anger writes of wonder, “the people deeply wondered at his folly and delusion”; the brāhmaṇa who killed his son is revered; in the killing of the caravan leader the merchants all perish and no one sees. Laughter is the sound of onlookers seeing the fault; when the fault destroys the onlookers too, or when the onlookers themselves believe, there is no laughter. The last parable in this fascicle is the killing of a son to get a son; the wise man scolds, “so foolish and without understanding as this,” and with the scolding the fascicle ends. From laughter to scolding: that is the movement of this fascicle.

Carrying Forward — The Application as Its Own Commentary

This fascicle is covered by no commentary of the old masters; the Sūtra of One Hundred Parables has no running commentary in the canon. The application of each parable is that parable’s own interpretation; every scriptural proof cited in this exposition is drawn from the applications, and no further meaning is set up.

This fascicle has twenty parables and no preface; after the table of contents at its head come the parables themselves. The form is the same as in the first fascicle: first the story, then “it is just the same.” But those pointed at have changed. The first fascicle had seven parables pointing at followers of other paths and four at bhikṣus; in this fascicle the application names followers of other paths in only three, the poor man who burned his robe, the merchant who stole gold, and the piśāca demons, not one points at a bhikṣu, and all the rest point at worldly people, the fools of the world, ordinary people. The first fascicle was full of laughter, with twelve parables in which the base text writes of it; in this fascicle it writes of laughter in only one, the thief who wrapped rags in brocade, who “was laughed at by the wise.” The other fools are laughed at by no one. One is driven out of the country by the king, one is scolded by his teacher, one is watched by two demons as he flies away, and one kills his own body. The first fascicle asked why the people were able to laugh; this one asks why they cannot. They cannot, because the fault can no longer be mended. The aloeswood has been burnt to charcoal, the sesame has been roasted and sown, the tree has been felled, the whole herd has been killed, the eyes have been put out, the nose has been cut off. The fools of this fascicle mostly do a thing that, once done, cannot be undone.

In the parable of hiring a potter the teacher’s rebuke to his disciple could stand as the title of the fascicle: “This donkey can only break things now; give it a hundred years and it could not make one.” A pot is made over a long time; a donkey breaks it in a moment. What the disciple sees is how fast it breaks, and he takes that for a skill; what the teacher sees is how slowly it is made, and he knows that breaking is no skill. Nearly all the fools of these twenty parables stand on the disciple’s side: they take breaking for making, speed for accomplishment, not wanting for letting go. In reading this fascicle, first make out in each parable what is “made over a long time” and what “breaks in a moment.”

I. The Fruit of Buddhahood and the Fruit of the Hearers (Parables 22, 24, 34)

Three parables, one theme: great and small, hard and easy, long and quick. The elder’s son goes to sea for aloeswood and “after many years had gathered one cartload”; he takes it to market, and “because it was so costly, no one would buy it.” He sees a man selling charcoal and selling it fast, and thinks, “better to burn it into charcoal, then it will sell quickly”; he burns it, and “did not get even the price of half a cartload of charcoal.” The application: “With countless means they practice diligently and with vigor, aspiring to the fruit of buddhahood; because it is hard to attain a mind of retreat arises in them, and think it better to set their minds on the fruit of the hearers, to cut off birth and death quickly and become arhats.” The aloeswood is the fruit of buddhahood, the charcoal is the fruit of the hearers; it is not that charcoal is bad, but that aloeswood burnt into charcoal does not fetch even a cartload’s price of charcoal. The one who loses heart thinks that by stepping back he gets a cartload of charcoal’s price; the base text says he does not get even half.

The parable of planting roasted sesame says the same thing to the end. Raw sesame tastes poor, roasted tastes good; the fool thinks, “better to roast it and then sow it, and afterwards I shall have the good kind,” and “he roasted it and sowed it, and it never could grow.” The application: worldly people, “because the bodhisattva cultivates through vast kalpas and because the austerities hard to perform seem joyless,” say “better to become an arhat, cut off birth and death quickly, the effort is very easy”; “afterwards when they wish to seek the fruit of buddhahood it can never be had, like that scorched seed that can never grow again.” The aloeswood parable says the price was lowered; this one says the seed was killed. Roasting is for eating, not for sowing; to give up austerity because it is joyless is to give up not the hardship but the seed. The applications of both parables say “cut off birth and death quickly,” and the word quickly is the crux. He wants speed, so he burns; he wants speed, so he roasts.

The parable of delivering fine water turns the matter round. The villagers carry water day after day, grow weary, and want to leave; the headman says, “I shall change five yojanas to three, so that you find it near and are not wearied going back and forth,” and the king really does change it, and the people rejoice. Someone says, “this is still the original five yojanas, nothing has changed,” but the villagers, “though they heard this, because they trusted the king’s word, would not give it up.” The application: “The Tathāgata, the Dharma King, with great skill in means divides the one vehicle and teaches it as three”; those of the Lesser Vehicle hear it and rejoice that it is easy to practise, and “afterwards, hearing someone say that there are no three vehicles but only one path, because they trust the Buddha’s word they will not give it up.” In the first two parables the fool himself burnt the great down to the small; in this one the road has not grown shorter, the king has changed the name to make it short. The villagers are not wrong; they trust the king. The story ends with the villagers, who “because they trusted the king’s word would not give it up,” and the application takes up that sentence as “because they trust the Buddha’s word they will not give it up”; both are said in their favour. The application first speaks of those who cannot go on: “practising the right Dharma, crossing the five paths toward the city of nirvāṇa, they grow weary and wish to give it up, and stalled in birth and death they can advance no further”; the king changes the name of the road for them. Read the three together: the man who wants speed burns his own aloeswood, and that is retreat; the man who trusts the king’s word that the road is near, and is willing to walk, walks just as far and does not give up. The one retreats from great to small; the other walks the great road under the small road’s name. That this parable is in the fascicle leaves a way open for the people of the first two.

II. The Fire and the Water of the Precepts (Parables 23, 25, 33, 37)

The applications of all four parables speak of the precepts. A thief steals brocade and “used it to wrap coarse wool rags and all manner of goods, and was laughed at by the wise”; the application: having faith and entering the Buddha’s Dharma, cultivating good dharmas and merits, “out of greed for gain they break the pure precepts and all their merits.” The brocade is the precepts and merits, the coarse wool rags are gain. The thief is not ignorant that brocade is costly; he wraps the cheap in the costly. The one who breaks the precepts knows too that the precepts are pure; he spends the pure to buy gain.

The parable of water and fire tells how the loss happens. A man needs fire and needs cold water too; he sets the water over the fire, and “the fire and the cold water, both were lost.” The application: one leaves home to seek the Way, and “having left home, thinks again of his wife and children and kin, of the affairs of the world and the pleasures of the five desires,” and so “loses the fire of his merit and the water of keeping the precepts.” Fire and water each have their use; put together, each puts out the other. The application calls merit fire and the precepts water; thinking of wife and kin and the pleasures of the five desires is the hand that sets the water over the fire. He wants both, and both are gone. It is not to say that the precepts are cold, but to say that keeping the precepts while longing for the five desires heats the precepts through and quenches the fire of merit; to keep both the fire and the water, that hand has first to be drawn back.

The parable of felling the tree to get its fruit tells how breaking a precept cannot be undone. The king has a fine tree that is about to bear excellent fruit; a man says, “this tree is tall and broad; though I would eat of it, how could I reach it?” and “he cut the tree down hoping to get its fruit; he got nothing and laboured in vain; afterwards he wished to set it up again, but the tree was dead and could never grow.” The application: “The Tathāgata, the Dharma King, has the tree of keeping the precepts, which bears the excellent fruit”; wishing to eat the fruit, “not understanding the means, he destroys the precepts instead, like the man who felled the tree, and when he wishes to bring it back to life, it cannot be done.” In the first two parables the precepts were broken for gain and for the five desires; here they are broken for the fruit. What he wants is the fruit the precepts bear; what he destroys is the precepts. The application first gives the right road, “one should keep the precepts and cultivate merits”; that is how the fruit comes. A felled tree cannot be set up alive again, and this is the first place in the fascicle where not being able to go back is said plainly.

The parable of killing the whole herd says it most directly. Of two hundred and fifty cattle one is lost, and the owner thinks, “one is already lost, they are no longer the full number; what use are these cattle?” and kills all the rest. The application: having received the Tathāgata’s full precepts, “if he breaks one precept and feels no shame and remorse and does not purely repent,” he says, “I have already broken one precept; since they are no longer complete, what use is it to keep them?” and “breaks them all, leaving not one.” Two hundred and fifty is the number of the precepts; the base text does not say which one was broken, only one. In the first fascicle the fool who was thirsty at the sight of water would not keep a single precept because there were too many to keep them all, and that is not beginning; this fool breaks them all because he broke one, and that is not continuing. The reason in both is “not complete.” The crux of the application is in the eight characters “feels no shame and remorse and does not purely repent”: for a broken precept there is the road of repentance, for a lost cow there is none. The fool treats the precepts as cattle, thinking that to lose one is to be incomplete and to be incomplete is to be useless, and does not know that for a precept lost there is still the road of repentance while a cow killed does not come back. This parable uses a thing that cannot be undone to figure a thing that can, and the reader has to see that asymmetry.

III. Imitating and Stealing (Parables 26, 27, 28, 30, 31)

The fools of these five parables are all learning from others, and learning the wrong thing. The man who imitated the king’s twitching eye: someone tells him, “you should imitate the king’s features,” and seeing the king’s eye twitch he imitates the twitch; the king asks, “are you ill? have you caught a chill? why does your eye twitch?” and he answers, “my eye is not ill, nor have I caught a chill; I wanted to win the king’s favour, and seeing the king’s eye twitch I imitated the king,” and the king in his rage drives him out of the country. The application: wishing to draw near to the Buddha, the Dharma King, “he does not understand that the Tathāgata, the Dharma King, for the sake of living beings shows shortcomings by all manner of means, or hearing his Dharma and seeing some phrase that is not correct, gives rise to mockery and imitates what is not right.” The crux of the parable is the four characters “for the sake of living beings”: the king’s twitch is an ailment, the Tathāgata’s shortcomings are a means. The fool learns the ailment, not the king; the mocker learns the incorrect phrase, not the Dharma. The fool is driven out of the country; the mocker “loses his good for ever within the Buddha’s Dharma and falls into the three evil destinies.”

The parable of treating whip wounds learns the wrong medicine. A man flogged by the king puts horse dung on his back to heal it quickly; a fool sees it and thinks, “I have found the method for treating wounds,” and goes home and tells his son, “flog my back; I have found a good method and want to try it.” The application: “hearing someone say that by cultivating the contemplation of impurity one can remove the wound of the body of the five aggregates,” he says, “I shall look at female beauty and the five desires,” and “before he has seen their impurity he is deluded and disturbed by female beauty instead.” Horse dung treats a whip wound when there is a wound to treat; to have oneself flogged first so as to use the medicine is another thing. The contemplation of impurity is contemplating female beauty as impure; the fool hears it as having to go and look at women first. The medicine is right and the order is reversed: he takes the cure for the cause of the disease. The application says where he goes: “he turns in birth and death and falls into hell.”

The parable of trading noses for his wife learns the wrong “having.” The man sees another woman with a fine nose and thinks, “why not cut off her nose and set it on my wife’s face? would that not be good?”; he cuts off the other nose, cuts off his own wife’s, and “it would not stay on, and she had lost her own nose too.” The application: hearing that some elder ascetic or brāhmaṇa has great renown and virtue and much gain and offerings, he thinks, “now I and he are no different,” and “falsely calls himself so, lying that he has virtue; he loses that gain and damages his own conduct besides.” The nose is virtue, the face is conduct. Virtue grows on one’s own face and cannot be cut from elsewhere. What he wanted was another woman’s nose growing on his wife’s face; what the man who lies about his virtue wants is another man’s cultivated name growing on himself. The result is the same: the other nose did not grow on, and his own nose is gone.

The parable of the shepherd is about being learned from. The swindler tells the shepherd, “now you and I are the closest of friends, as one body, with no difference between us”; first he says he will find him a wife, then that the wife has borne a son, then “your son was born and has now died,” and the shepherd weeps aloud. The application: “having cultivated much learning, for the sake of fame and gain he hoards his Dharma and will not teach and expound it for others, and is deceived by this leaking body into vainly hoping for worldly pleasures.” The shepherd was grasping and would not spend his wealth outside, so a man emptied him with a wife who did not exist and a son who did not exist. The learned man hoards his Dharma and will not speak it, so this body empties him with worldly pleasures that do not exist. The application calls the deceiver a “leaking body”: what cheats the shepherd is another man outside him, what cheats the learned man is his own body. The application gives the order of the loss: “he loses the good dharmas, and afterwards loses his life and his goods too, and weeps aloud in his grief,” first the Dharma, then life and goods, and last the weeping. In the first three parables the fool learns from others and learns wrong; in this one he will not teach others, and so his body teaches him wrong.

The parable of hiring a potter closes the section. The teacher needs pots and sends his disciple to hire a potter; the disciple sees a donkey smash in a moment the pots a potter made over years, and says in delight, “this donkey is a fine thing; what took a long time to make it can break in a moment; I shall buy this donkey,” and buys it and brings it back, and answers his teacher, “this donkey is better than the potter: the pots the potter made over a long time, it can break in a short one.” The teacher says: “You great fool, without any wisdom! This donkey can only break things now; give it a hundred years and it could not make one.” The application: “though for a hundred or a thousand years they receive the offerings of others, they repay nothing, and do constant harm and never any good,” and such are those who turn their backs on kindness. The disciple took being able to break for better than being able to make. The fools of these five parables all see it that way: a twitch is easier to learn than the Dharma, a flogging is easier to get than the contemplation of impurity, a cut-off nose is easier to come by than cultivated virtue, hoarding is less trouble than expounding, a donkey is faster than a potter. Easy, cheap, fast are all on the side of breaking. The teacher’s words are about the other side: the potter “toiled for years before he could make a vessel,” and the donkey, given a hundred years, could not make one.

IV. Three Parables of the Followers of Other Paths (Parables 29, 32, 41)

Only three parables in this fascicle speak of followers of other paths directly, and the three tell three things: how they deceive, how they steal the Dharma, how they quarrel. The poor man who burned his coarse wool robe: someone says to him, “you are of upright lineage, a nobleman’s son; why do you wear this coarse and shabby wool?” and then, “now you may take off this coarse wool robe and put it in the fire; where it burns, I shall make you receive fine garments,” and the poor man burns his robe and gets nothing. The application: “from a past body he cultivated good dharmas and obtained this human body, and he should guard it and advance in virtue and cultivate his work,” but he is deceived by the wicked, bewitching women of other paths: “Now believe my words and practise austerities; throw yourself from a cliff, leap into the fire, cast off this body, and you shall be born in the Brahmā heaven and long enjoy happiness.” He casts off the body, and “having lost the human body, he gains nothing at all,” and “after the body dies he falls into hell and suffers every pain.” The coarse wool robe is the human body. The robe is coarse, but it is a robe; the body is painful, but it is a body. The deceiver’s speech has two layers: first, that you ought to have something better, then, that you must burn what you have to get it. In the story the “nobleman’s son” is the deceiver’s word, and the base text does not say whether it is true; in the application, “from a past body he cultivated good dharmas and obtained this human body” is the author’s word, and it is true. The second layer is false on both sides. The way the followers of other paths deceive is to carry a false sentence on a true one.

The parable of the merchant who stole gold tells of stealing the Dharma. Two merchants, one selling true gold, the other tūla cotton; a buyer heats the gold to test it, the second merchant steals the heated gold and wraps it in his cotton, and “because the gold was hot it burnt all the cotton; the matter came to light and both were lost.” The application: “like those followers of other paths who steal the Buddha’s Dharma and put it among their own teachings, falsely calling it their own and not the Buddha’s Dharma, and for that reason burn up their outer scriptures so that they do not circulate in the world.” In the first fascicle the hill tribesman stole the Dharma and could not wear it right, and was found out; here the follower of another path who steals the Dharma burns his own cotton. The gold is real and hot; the cotton cannot hold it. To put the Buddha’s Dharma inside one’s own teaching is not to cover the Buddha’s Dharma with one’s own, but to have one’s own burnt through by it. The story says “both were lost,” and the application says “their outer scriptures are burnt up and do not circulate in the world”: the thief lost his cotton and did not get the gold.

The parable of the piśāca demons closes the fascicle. Two demons quarrel over a chest, a staff, and a pair of sandals; a man asks, “what is so remarkable about this chest, staff, and sandals, that you quarrel and rage so?” and the demons tell him what the three things do; the man says, “step a little way off, and I shall divide them fairly between you”; the demons step back, and the man takes up the chest, grasps the staff, puts on the sandals and flies away, saying, “what you were quarrelling over I have taken; now you have nothing left to quarrel about.” The application is matched item by item: “The piśācas stand for the many demons and the followers of other paths.” “Giving is like the chest: the goods that sustain life in the five paths of humans and gods all come out of it. Meditation is like the staff: it subdues the enemy Māra and the thieves that are the afflictions. Keeping the precepts is like the sandals: one is sure to rise to the realms of men and gods.” “The demons and followers of other paths quarrelling over the chest stand for those who, within the realm of the outflows, force a quest for fruition and retribution and get nothing at all.” In this parable the fools are the demons and those pointed at are the demons; the man who takes the three things is no fool. In the story of this parable a man does a right thing. What he does right is this: the demons quarrel over whom the three things belong to, he asks what the three things are for; having found out their use, he uses them. Giving, precepts, and meditation in the hands of the quarrellers are things to quarrel over; in the hands of the man who uses them they are things to fly with. The application closes with what using them brings: “if one can cultivate good conduct, and giving, keeping the precepts, and meditation, one is freed from suffering and obtains the fruits of the Way.” He is the only one in the fascicle who gets off the ground, and he is placed at the end.

V. Seeing and Seeking (Parables 35, 36, 38, 39, 40)

The applications of all five parables speak of seeing. The parable of the mirror in the treasure chest speaks of the view of the body. The poor man flees his creditors to an empty place, finds a chest full of treasure with a mirror on top; he opens it, sees the man in the mirror, and in fright joins his hands and says, “I thought this chest was empty and had nothing in it; I did not know you were in the chest, sir; do not be angry with me.” The application: ordinary people, “pressed by countless afflictions and bound by the creditor Māra, king of birth and death,” enter the Buddha’s Dharma and cultivate good, and “as on finding the treasure chest, they are deluded and disturbed by the mirror of the view of the body, falsely see a self, and at once seal themselves to it and take it for real,” and so “meditation, the factors of the path, the many good dharmas without outflows, the fruits of the Way of the three vehicles, all are lost.” The chest is the Buddha’s Dharma, the treasure is merit, the mirror is the view of the body, the man in the mirror is the self. There is no one in the mirror; what is there is himself. He sees himself and thinks the chest has an owner, and does not dare take the treasure. The application says “falsely see a self,” not see someone else: the man in the mirror is the one looking, and the view of self is taking one’s own reflection for the owner who was there in the chest all along. Of all the fools in this fascicle, this one comes closest to the treasure and walks away fastest.

The parable of putting out the eyes of the sage with five powers speaks of destroying another’s eyes. The king asks his minister, “how can this man be made to stay always in my country and go nowhere else, so that my treasury may gain many jewels?” The foolish minister puts out the sage’s two eyes and reports, “I have put out his eyes, so he cannot go, and will stay always in this country.” The king says, “the reason I wanted the sage to stay was that he could see all the hidden treasures in the earth; now that you have destroyed his eyes, what is he good for?” The application: seeing another practising the austerities of dhūta in the forests and wilds, among the tombs and under the trees, cultivating the four stations of mindfulness and the contemplation of impurity, “he brings him by force into his own house and makes him all manner of offerings, destroying his good dharmas, so that the fruit of the Way is not accomplished and he loses the eye of the Way.” What was to be kept was the man, what was wanted was the man’s eyes; keep the man and destroy the eyes, and what is kept is not what was wanted. To make offerings to a practitioner and bring him home from the forest keeps the man and ruins his eye of the Way. The king wanted the hidden treasures, and with the eyes gone the treasures are gone too; the giver wanted merit, and with the eye of the Way gone the merit is gone too. In the parable before, the man falsely saw a self; in this one he destroyed another’s eyes.

The parable of drinking from the wooden pipe speaks of leaving desire behind. A man drinks his fill and says to the pipe, “I have finished drinking; water, come no more”; the water flows on, and he is angry. Someone says: “You great fool, without any wisdom! Why do you not go away, instead of telling it not to come?” The application: “for the thirsting craving of birth and death they drink the salt water of the five desires,” and when they are sick of it they say, “forms, sounds, odours, and tastes, come no more and let me see you no more,” and the five desires continue unbroken, and they are angry again. The wise man says: “If you wish to be free of them, you should gather in your six senses and shut your mind; when false thinking does not arise you will attain liberation. Why must you not see them, why must you make them not arise?” This is the plainest statement of the Dharma in the fascicle, and the one that says most concretely how to practise. To leave desire is not to tell forms, sounds, odours, and tastes not to come, but to walk away oneself. The way of walking away is called gathering in the six senses and shutting the mind. The application calls the five desires salt water: drink it and you are thirstier. The fool’s fault is not in drinking, but in giving orders to the water when he has done.

The parable of seeing another man’s plastered house speaks of killing one’s own body. The fool sees a wall well plastered and asks what was mixed into the mud; the host says the chaff of rice soaked in water, and he thinks that pure chaff is not as good as mixing in the rice grain itself, “and he mixed rice grain into the mud and plastered his wall with it, hoping for a smooth surface, and it came out more uneven than before, and the whole wall split.” Here the base text adds a sentence: “He wasted his rice for no benefit at all; better to have given it freely and gained merit.” The application: hearing the sages teach that by cultivating the many good dharmas one may, after casting off this body, be born in the heavens and attain liberation, “he kills his own body, hoping to be born in the heavens and attain liberation, and loses his life in vain and gains nothing at all.” Chaff can be mixed into mud; rice grain cannot. Casting off the body is what comes after cultivating good, not the way of cultivating it. The fool hears “after casting off this body” as casting off the body first. This parable is a pair with the poor man who burned his robe: there someone deceived him into casting off the body, here he misheard and killed it on his own. Both treat the body as a thing to be thrown away first. The base text’s sentence “better to have given it freely” is set inside the story: rather than plaster a wall with rice grain, give it away; rather than kill the body, cultivate good.

The parable of curing baldness closes the section. The bald man asks the physician, “I beg you, great master, treat me”; the physician takes off his hat, bald himself, and says, “I suffer from it too and find it painful; if I could cure it, I should first cure myself and be rid of my own affliction.” The application: pressed by birth, old age, sickness, and death, he seeks a place of long life without death, and goes to the ascetics and brāhmaṇas to have the affliction of impermanence and birth and death removed; the brāhmaṇas answer, “we too suffer from this impermanence, birth, old age, sickness, and death; we have sought by every means a place of lasting life and never found it. If we could make you attain it, we should first attain it ourselves and then let you attain it too,” and he is “like the bald man, wearying himself in vain and never cured.” In this parable no fool does a wrong thing. The bald man is not wrong to seek a physician, and the physician is not wrong to tell the truth. What is wrong is the thing sought: “a place of long life without death,” sought from men who are themselves inside old age and death. This parable is a pair with the Buddha’s words in the preface to the first fascicle, “you are not yet dead, and yet you know that death is suffering”: nirvāṇa is the dharma that is neither born nor dies, not a place of long life without death; a place of long life without death no one has, and so no one can give. Baldness is impermanence, and everyone has it. This parable stands second to last, and right after it comes the man in the parable of the piśāca demons who flies away: he does not seek a place of long life without death; he picks up giving, precepts, and meditation and goes.

VI. How to Read the Fascicle

In this fascicle the application opens with “it is just the same” in fifteen parables: nine with “worldly people,” three with “the fools of the world,” two with “ordinary people,” one with “ordinary fools”; three open with “so too with worldly people”; the merchant who stole gold opens with “like those followers of other paths,” and the piśāca demons with “the piśācas stand for,” and these two applications do not open with “it is just the same.” Seven parables do not close with “it is just the same”: fetching aloeswood from the sea ends at “cut off birth and death quickly and become arhats”; putting out the eyes of the sage, killing the whole herd, drinking from the wooden pipe, seeing another man’s plastered house, and curing baldness end with a “like that…” pointing back to the story; the piśāca demons ends at “freed from suffering and obtains the fruits of the Way.” In reading each parable, still find the first sentence of the application and match backward from it: aloeswood against the fruit of buddhahood, charcoal against the fruit of the hearers, sesame against austerity, brocade against the precepts, water and fire against merit and the precepts, the twitching eye against the Tathāgata’s shortcomings, horse dung against the contemplation of impurity, the nose against virtue, the coarse wool robe against the human body, the sheep against the Dharma, the donkey against turning one’s back on kindness, the tūla cotton against the outer scriptures, the tree against the precepts, the five yojanas against the one vehicle, the mirror against the view of the body, the sage’s eyes against the eye of the Way, the cattle against the precepts, the salt water against the five desires, the rice against the body, baldness against impermanence, the chest, staff, and sandals against giving, meditation, and the precepts. Where they match is the matter of this fascicle; where they do not, the apparatus records it parable by parable.

Three things in this fascicle are not in the first. First, no one laughs: the base text writes of laughter only in the parable of the thief who wrapped rags in brocade, and the other fools’ faults have no onlooker, or an onlooker who only scolds and does not laugh. Second, in two parables someone in the story does a right thing: in delivering fine water the villagers trust the king and do not give up, and in the piśāca demons the man asks what the things are for and picks them up and flies. These two stand in the very middle and at the very end of the fascicle, set there for the people of the other eighteen. Third, the application contains one sentence of method: “you should gather in your six senses and shut your mind; when false thinking does not arise you will attain liberation.” The first fascicle mostly said what not to do; this one says once what to do.

Carrying Forward — The Application as Its Own Commentary

This fascicle is not treated by any commentary of the ancient masters; the Sūtra of One Hundred Parables has no sentence-by-sentence ancient commentary in the canon. The application of each parable is that parable’s own commentary, and every scriptural proof cited in this exposition is taken from the story and its application; no further doctrine is set up.

This fascicle has twenty-four parables and no preface; after the table of contents at its head come the parables themselves. The form is the same as in the first two fascicles: first the story, then “it is just the same.” Those pointed at have changed once more. The first fascicle named followers of other paths in seven applications and bhikṣus or the four kinds of disciples in four; the second named followers of other paths in three and bhikṣus in none. In this fascicle the four that name followers of other paths all fall in the second half: the two sons dividing the estate, Brahmā’s disciple who tried to create things, the sick man who ate pheasant, and the five hundred joy pills. One names bhikṣus, the servant who guarded the door. Three name disciples or students, the jackal struck by a broken branch, the teacher’s sore legs and his two disciples, and the snake’s head and tail quarrelling over who goes first. The rest point at worldly people, the fools of the world, ordinary people. In the second fascicle the base text writes of onlookers laughing in only one parable; in this fascicle there are three: the boys who quarrelled over a tuft of hair, where the sage “was ridiculed by everyone”; asking to shave the king’s beard, where “such a fool is laughed at by the people of the world”; and the two sons dividing the estate, where “one who divides goods like this is ridiculed by people.” There is one more laugh, in the parable of demanding “nothing,” where of the two men “one of them said with a smile”; that is the speaker smiling himself, not others laughing at him.

Two things in this fascicle have no precedent in the first two. One is an application in verse: in the parables of watching the potter make pots and seeing the reflection of gold in the water, the application is in verse, where in the first two fascicles it was always prose. The other is the plain statement that there is no self in the aggregates: the second fascicle’s mirror in the treasure chest spoke of the view of the body, the false seeing of a self; this fascicle goes on to say that in the five aggregates there is no such self. Seeing the reflection of gold, “within the aggregates where there is no self they falsely conceive the notion of a self”; the players frightened by the rākṣasa costume, “only then do they know that in the five aggregates there is no true self”; the old house said to have a demon, “analysed one by one, which of them is the self?” Parables 60, 63 and 64 all fall before the end of the fascicle. The first two fascicles mostly spoke of fools taking hold of the Dharma wrongly; this one comes to fools mistaking themselves.

A sentence in the parable of the merchant whose camel died could stand as the title of the fascicle: “The price of the hide and the price of the cotton are by rights worlds apart, yet out of foolishness they covered the hide with the cotton.” The cotton was fine soft cloth of the best kind, and dear; the camel hide was a skin stripped from a carcass, and cheap. The two men used the dear thing to cover the cheap one; it rained, the cotton rotted, and the hide was not saved either. The application calls this “discarding the root and taking the branch, not seeking the source.” That is what most of the fools of these twenty-four parables do: they cover the cheap with the dear, trade the root for the branch, take for pleasure what is not pleasure, take for self what is not self. In reading this fascicle, first make out in each parable what is the cotton and what is the hide.

I. Root and Branch (Parables 42, 45, 46, 50)

The applications of all four speak of the precepts. The application of the merchant whose camel died matches item by item: “Not killing is the white cotton; the camel hide is wealth; the rain that soaked and rotted it is heedlessness that ruins wholesome conduct.” “The precept against killing is the supreme and wonderful cause of the Buddha’s Dharma-body,” yet people cannot practise it and “only use their wealth to build stupas and shrines and make offerings to the monks,” and so “drift through the five paths unable to get themselves out.” It is not that stupas and shrines should not be built; it is that the cotton is used to cover the hide. The application ends, “therefore practitioners should keep the precept against killing with a focused mind.” The root is here.

The servant who guarded the door tells how it is lost. The master going away charges him, “guard the door well, and watch the donkey and the rope”; the servant wants to hear the music, ties the door to the donkey with the rope, takes door and donkey off together to listen, and the goods are stolen clean. When the master comes back and asks, the servant answers, “the master gave the door, the donkey and the rope into my charge; beyond those, nothing is the servant’s concern.” The master says: “I left you to guard the door precisely for the sake of the goods; now the goods are lost, what use is the door?” The application: “The Tathāgata’s instruction is always to guard the doors of the senses, not to cling to the six objects, to watch the donkey of ignorance and keep an eye on the rope of craving.” But the bhikṣus, “seeking gain and offerings, feign purity and sit in quiet places,” while their minds run after the five desires, and “the treasures of right mindfulness, the factors of awakening and the factors of the path are all scattered and lost.” The servant did not lose the door, the donkey or the rope; he took all three with him; what he lost was the goods the door was guarding. The bhikṣus of the application did not lose the look of sitting in a quiet place either; what they lost were the factors of the path that the sitting was meant to guard. The door is guarded for the sake of the goods; the precepts are kept and one sits still for the sake of the path. To guard the door and take the door away is to forget that the door is not the goods, just as to sit while the mind runs is to forget that sitting is not the path. This parable pairs with the camel: that one uses the dear to cover the cheap; this one takes the guard for the thing guarded.

Stealing the yak tells of hiding. A whole village steals a yak and eats it together; the owner asks, and the thieves answer, “in truth we have no village,” no pond, no tree, no east, no noon; only when asked “granted there may be no village and no tree, how can there be no east and no time in all the world?” do they answer, “in truth we ate it.” The application: those who break the precepts “conceal their offences and will not disclose them, and at death fall into hell; the devas and good spirits see with the divine eye and nothing can be concealed, just as those who ate the ox could not deny it.” To hide one thing, the thieves denied the village, the pond and the tree, and in the end denied the east and midday. An offence may go unspoken; the east cannot cease to exist. The point of the application is in the words “will not disclose them”: disclosure is a road the discipline itself provides; the ox was eaten, and saying so is all. To hide it until one denies that the world has an east is the folly of this parable.

Treating a hunched back tells of loss. The physician smears the back with ghee, puts boards above and below and presses hard, and “before anyone knew it both eyes popped out at once.” The application: the fools of the world “for the sake of making merit trade and deal and do all manner of unlawful things”; “though the business succeeds, the gain does not make good the harm,” and in the life to come they enter hell, “which is the eyes popping out.” The back needed treating; the eyes were pressed out. Merit needs making; the unlawful deeds are what was done. To do unlawful things for the sake of merit is the same as to press out both eyes for the sake of a back: the back is straightened, and what is lost is the eyes. Taken together, the four parables say: the precepts are the root, the goods, the thing to be disclosed, the eyes; wealth and stupas, door and donkey and rope, denying the east, trading and dealing, are all the branch.

II. Learning and Reputation (Parables 43, 48, 49, 53, 54, 58)

The fools of all six are at learning: study, teacher and disciple, preaching, analysis. Grinding a great stone opens the set: a man grinds a great stone for days and months and makes a little toy ox, “the labour spent was heavy and the thing hoped for was slight.” The application: “Grinding the great stone is learning pursued with diligence and toil; making the little ox is reputation and quarrelling over who is right.” One who studies and attains wide knowledge “ought to put it into practice and seek the excellent fruit afar,” yet instead “seeks fame, grows arrogant and proud, and increases his faults.” Learning is not the error; the stone really was ground. The error is that what came out of it was a toy. The application does not call learning the branch; it calls reputation the branch.

The jackal struck by a broken branch tells of a disciple leaving his teacher. A jackal under a tree is struck on the back by a branch the wind has broken; “he shut his eyes at once, not wanting to look at the tree,” and ran off into the open; at dusk he saw the great branches swaying in the wind, said they were calling him, and came back under the tree. The application: the foolish disciple who has drawn near his teacher, “at a small rebuke runs away at once,” and “later, when troubled without end by bad friends, goes back to the place he left”; “such going and coming is delusion.” The branch broke because of the wind, not because the tree struck him; the rebuke was the teacher teaching, not the teacher harming. The jackal blames the tree; the disciple blames the teacher. He comes back not because he has understood but because outside he has been harried by bad friends. Neither the leaving nor the returning was right; the application’s word is “going and coming.”

The boys who quarrelled over a tuft of hair tells of answering beside the question. Two boys quarrel over whether a tuft of hair is a sage’s beard or a bear’s fur and go to ask a sage; the sage chews rice and sesame, spits them into his palm and says, “what is in my palm looks like peacock droppings.” The application: the fools of the world, “when preaching the Dharma, indulge in frivolous talk about dharmas and do not answer according to right principle,” like that sage who did not answer what was asked, and are “ridiculed by everyone; loose and empty talk is just the same.” The boys’ question was small; the sage’s answer was smaller. The application calls not answering according to principle frivolous talk, and frivolous talk loose and empty; the one laughed at is not the boys but the sage. Of the three fools laughed at in this fascicle he is the first, and those who laugh at him are “everyone.”

The teacher’s sore legs and his two disciples tells of condemning each other. The teacher’s legs ache, and two disciples each massage one; they hate each other, and one takes the leg the other tends and breaks it with a stone; the other comes back and breaks the leg the first was tending. The application: “Those who study the Vaipulya reject and condemn the Lesser Vehicle, and those who study the Lesser Vehicle in turn condemn the Vaipulya, and so both paths of the Great Sage’s Dharma are lost.” The two legs belong to one teacher. Each disciple thinks he has broken the other’s leg; he has broken the teacher’s. The application’s word is “both lost”: it is not that the Vaipulya beat the Lesser Vehicle; both paths are gone.

The snake’s head and tail quarrelling over who goes first tells of order. The tail wants to go first; the head says, “I have always gone first; why this all of a sudden?” When the tail is let go first, “it fell straight into a fire pit and was burned to death.” The application: teachers and disciples are just the same; the disciples “say the teacher is old and always goes first, and we who are young should be the leaders,” and “such young men, unversed in the discipline, commit many offences and so drag one another into hell.” The head going first is not the head defeating the tail; the base text says only that when the tail was let go first it fell into the fire pit, and the reader can match the rest himself: the head can see the road, and the tail cannot. The young leading is not the young defeating the old; it is the young being unversed in the discipline. The application names “the discipline”: the teacher goes first because the teacher knows the discipline. The two parables before this one say a disciple must not leave his teacher and must not condemn his fellow; this one says he must not go ahead of his teacher. Read together, the three are three faces of one thing.

The two sons dividing the estate closes the set. The foolish old man teaches them to divide: cut the garments down the middle, break the dishes and jars down the middle, break the coins in two as well, and “one who divides goods like this is ridiculed by people.” The application: “like the followers of other paths who cultivate only the analytical mode of answering; there are four modes of answering,” the categorical, the analytical, the counter-question, and the set-aside. The base text gives an example of each: “there is the categorical mode of answering,” that all who exist die; the analytical, that whoever dies is reborn, which calls for analysis, since “one whose craving is exhausted is not reborn, and one who has craving must be reborn”; the counter-question, that when asked whether humans are supreme one first asks whether the comparison is with the three evil paths or with the devas; and the set-aside, “if one is asked the fourteen difficult questions,” whether the world and beings are finite or infinite, with or without beginning and end, which are set aside and not answered. The followers of other paths “destroy the four modes and make one analytical mode, like the fool who divided the goods and broke the coins in two.” This application is the most fully formed stretch of teaching in the whole fascicle. The old man’s error is not dividing but dividing every single thing: garments can be divided; a coin broken is no longer a coin. Among the four modes the analytical is one; the error of the followers of other paths is not that they use the analytical answer but that they answer every question analytically: what should be answered categorically they analyse, what should be met with a counter-question they analyse, what should be set aside they analyse. This pairs with the boys and the tuft of hair: there, what should be answered goes unanswered; here, what should not be divided is divided. With this the matter of learning is told through: learning for fame, leaving the teacher, not answering according to principle, condemning each other, going ahead of the teacher, clinging to one mode. None of the six is a failure to learn; all six are learning that came out as a toy ox.

III. Pleasure (Parables 44, 51, 52, 55)

The applications of all four speak of pleasure, and say that pleasure is not pleasure. Wanting to eat half a cake: a man is full after six and a half cakes, and in vexation and regret says, “my fullness now comes from this half cake,” and the six before it were thrown away for nothing. The application: the people of the world “from the very beginning have never had any pleasure, yet in their deluded inversion they falsely conceive the notion of pleasure,” as that fool conceived the notion of fullness from half a cake, and the people of the world in their ignorance take wealth and rank for pleasure. “As for wealth and rank, they are great suffering when sought; once obtained, guarding them is suffering too; and when later they are lost, the grief and longing are suffering again; in all three times there is no pleasure at all.” “It is as with food and clothing: because they shelter us, they are called pleasure.” Clothing and food shelter us from cold and hunger, and the sheltering is called pleasure. The application ends by citing the Buddhas: “The three realms have no safety; all is great suffering; ordinary beings, inverted and deluded, falsely conceive the notion of pleasure.” The fullness is not in the half cake but in the six and a half; the pleasure is not in wealth and rank but in suffering sheltered for a while. The words “falsely conceive the notion of pleasure” come three times in this one application.

Five men who bought one slave girl tells where suffering comes from. Five men buy a slave girl together; each tells her to wash his clothes; she washes for the first, and the next says, “I bought you together with the man before me; why only him?” and whips her ten times, and all five whip her ten times each. The application: “The five aggregates are likewise; the body is compounded by the causes and conditions of the afflictions,” and the five aggregates “constantly flog beings with birth, old age, sickness, death and countless sufferings.” This application is a single sentence. The slave girl is the beings; the five men are the five aggregates. The girl did nothing wrong, and each of her five masters had a reason to beat her. The parable before says pleasure is suffering sheltered; this one says who does the beating: not people outside, but the five parts of this very body.

The musician’s performance tells of the substance of pleasure. A musician plays before the king, the king promises a thousand coins, and afterwards will not pay, saying, “just now your music was only pleasing my ears for nothing; my promise to give you money also only gave pleasure to your ears.” The application: “The slight pleasures of reward among humans and in the heavens are likewise without substance; impermanent, they decay and cannot last, like that empty music.” The king’s words are the words of a man reneging, yet within the parable they hold: the pleasure passed through the ear and left nothing behind. The application takes the words of a reneging king to speak of the rewards of humans and devas: their pleasure too is gone once it has passed the ear. The half cake says the world has no pleasure; this one says that among humans and in the heavens too it is “likewise without substance,” which reaches further than the half cake.

Asking to shave the king’s beard closes the set. A trusted man saves the king at the risk of his life; the king grants him whatever he wishes, and he asks, “when the king shaves his beard, let me be the one to shave it.” “Half the kingdom to rule, the office of great minister or chancellor, all were his for the asking, and he asked for a menial trade.” The application: the Buddhas attained buddhahood through hard practice over measureless kalpas; to meet a buddha or his surviving Dharma, and to obtain a human body, are as rare as “a blind turtle finding the hole in a floating log”; “these two hard things to meet have now been met, yet their resolve is weak,” and “keeping a few precepts they count themselves content,” and “do not seek the excellent and wonderful Dharma of nirvāṇa; with no mind to advance, they practise wrong things, and count themselves content.” Content with a few precepts is one layer; not advancing, practising wrong things, and still content is another. This fool did not ask for the wrong thing; he asked for too small a thing, so small that even wrong things count as enough. The three parables before say that the pleasures of the world and the heavens have no substance; this one says that meeting the Buddha’s Dharma and gaining a human body is a thing of real value, hard to come by, and people trade it for a menial trade. The words “count themselves content” come twice in the application. The man of the half cake was content with half a cake; this man is content with a few precepts; the one takes for pleasure what is not pleasure, the other takes what could truly be traded for something great and trades it for something small.

IV. Time (Parables 47, 57, 59)

The applications of all three speak of time. The poor man who cried like a mandarin duck: he goes into the king’s pond crying like a mandarin duck to steal flowers; the keeper asks “who is in the pond,” and he blurts out, “I am a mandarin duck.” On the way to the king he cries like a mandarin duck again, and the keeper says: “You did not do it before; what good is doing it now?” The application: the fools of the world “all their lives do harm and pile up evil deeds, and do not train their minds and make them good”; at the point of death they say, “now I want to practise good,” and the hell wardens take them to King Yama, and “though they wish to practise good, it is beyond their reach.” The duck’s cry was something he could do all along; in the pond, when he should have cried, he blurted out human speech; on the road, when crying was useless, he cried. Doing good was something they could do all along; through a whole life, when they should have practised, they did not; at death, when it is beyond reach, they want to. “You did not do it before; what good is doing it now” is the title of this section.

Kicking the elder’s mouth tells of being too early. The attendants wait for the elder’s spittle to reach the ground before they wipe it away with a foot; the fool is always too late, and thinks, “when he spits on the ground the others wipe it away; when he is about to spit, I will be first to kick.” As the elder is about to cough and spit, he raises his foot and kicks the elder in the mouth, splitting his lip and breaking his teeth. What he wanted, he says, was “to win your favour.” The application: “Everything needs its time; when the time has not yet come, to force one’s effort brings suffering instead”; “therefore people of the world should know what is timely and what is not.” The mandarin duck is too late; this is too early. What the fool wanted was to please the elder, like the flatterers; the difference was only in the timing. The application does not say he wanted the wrong thing; it says “the time had not yet come.” This is one of the five parables in the fascicle whose application does not open with “it is just the same”; it does not say “the people of the world are just the same,” but goes straight to “everything needs its time,” as if the author himself were speaking.

Watching the potter make pots closes the set. Two men watch a potter making pots; one leaves and goes to a great gathering where he gets fine food and precious things; the other says, “wait till I have finished watching,” and watches until sunset, and “watching the pots without end, he lost his food and clothing.” The application: “Fools are likewise; they attend to the business of the household and do not perceive impermanence.” Then the verse: “today they manage this affair, tomorrow they make that undertaking”; “the Buddhas, the great dragons, appear, their thunderous voice fills the world, the rain of Dharma falls without hindrance, yet because of their affairs they do not hear it”; “not knowing that death comes suddenly, they miss this assembly of the Buddhas, do not obtain the treasure of the Dharma, and dwell always in the poverty of the evil paths”; “turning their backs on the true Dharma, they watch the pot of their affairs, and it never comes to an end; therefore they lose the benefit of the Dharma, and there is never a time of liberation.” The pot is the household; the great gathering is the assembly of the Buddhas. The man watching the pot did not refuse to go to the gathering; he said he would go when he had finished watching, and household business has no moment of being finished: the verse says “it never comes to an end.” The loss has three layers: the assembly of the Buddhas, the treasure of the Dharma, the benefit of the Dharma; where they dwell is the evil paths, and what they turn from is the true Dharma. The verse does not say they do not want the Dharma; it says they “turn their backs,” turning away to watch the pot. The duck’s cry came after its time; the kick came before its time; the watching let the time go by. Put the three together and you have “people of the world should know what is timely and what is not.”

V. Self and Demon (Parables 56, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64)

The applications of all six speak of views. Demanding “nothing” opens the set. Two men help push a cart up to level ground and ask for something; the owner answers, “nothing.” One says, “give me nothing,” and again, “give me nothing; there must be a nothing.” The other says: “‘Nothing’ is two words joined together; it is a provisional name.” The application has two sentences: “Worldly ordinary people who take ‘nothing’ as a thing are born in the Station of Nothingness”; “the ‘nothing’ of which the second man spoke is signlessness, wishlessness and non-action.” Neither of the two men in this parable is laughed at: one demands “nothing” as though it were an object; the other says that “nothing” is a name made of two words. The application too has two sides: the ordinary person who grasps at nothing is born in the Station of Nothingness; the nothing of which the second man spoke is the three gates of liberation. In this parable someone in the story itself gets the Dharma right, and the one who gets it right is the one who “said with a smile.”

Seeing the reflection of gold in the water tells of mistaking a reflection. A fool sees the reflection of real gold at the bottom of a pond, goes into the water and churns the mud looking for it, wears himself out and finds nothing; when the water clears he sees it again and goes in again. His father looks and “knew that the gold was up in the tree, and knew it because its reflection appeared in the water,” and says, “a bird must have carried the gold and set it in the tree”; the son “did as his father said, climbed the tree and found it.” The verse: “Ordinary people in their folly, lacking wisdom, are just the same: within the aggregates where there is no self, they falsely conceive the notion of a self; like that man who saw the gold’s reflection, they toil and search and gain nothing for their labour.” The gold is real; there is no gold at the bottom of the water. The notion of a self is there; there is no self in the aggregates. In the story there is a father, and the father sees the same reflection and says: the reflection is here, the gold is not here. The verse tells only the fool’s half; the father’s half the reader must match for himself: know the reflection for a reflection, and the gold can be found.

Brahmā’s disciple who tried to create things tells of who made it. The brāhmaṇas say, “the Great Brahmā King is the father of the world and can create all things.” Brahmā’s disciple says he too can create; Brahmā says he cannot; he does not listen, and what he makes has “a head too big and a neck too small, hands too big and arms too small, feet too small and heels too big, like a piśāca demon.” The application: “From this it should be known that each is made by his own deeds, and not something Brahmā can create.” “The Buddhas teach the Dharma without clinging to the two extremes, neither to annihilation nor to permanence, in the way of the eightfold right path.” The followers of other paths see annihilation and permanence and cling to them, and “deceive the world with a semblance of Dharma; what they teach is in truth not Dharma.” What the disciple made was the shape of a demon; the application says the shape of each being is made by his own deeds. The point is in the words “not something Brahmā can create”: not that the disciple falls short of Brahmā, but that there is no such thing as a creator at all. From there the application turns to the two extremes: a creator is one end of the view of permanence. This application too does not open with “it is just the same,” but with “from this it should be known.”

The sick man who ate pheasant tells of the one consciousness. The physician tells him to eat pheasant constantly; he eats one and eats no more; the physician asks: “How can you hope to be cured by eating just one pheasant?” The application: all followers of other paths, hearing the Buddhas and bodhisattvas say “understand the mind and consciousness,” cling to the view of permanence and “hold that past, future and present are only one consciousness, with no passing away,” like eating one pheasant. The Buddhas teach them to remove the view of permanence: “all dharmas arise and cease moment by moment; how could there be one consciousness constant and unchanging?” The Buddha teaches beings so that they understand that “because dharmas decay they are not permanent, and because they continue they are not annihilated,” and so the sickness of the view of permanence is uprooted. One pheasant and one consciousness are the same mistake: the physician said eat constantly, meaning one after another; the patient heard one pheasant to the end. The Buddha said understand the mind and consciousness, meaning arising and ceasing moment by moment in continuity; the followers of other paths heard one unchanging consciousness. “Because they decay they are not permanent; because they continue they are not annihilated” takes up the previous parable’s “neither to annihilation nor to permanence”: that one says do not cling; this one says why.

The players frightened by the rākṣasa costume tells who the demon is. Players spend the night in the mountains; one, feeling cold, puts on the rākṣasa costume from the play and sits by the fire; a companion wakes, sees a rākṣasa by the fire, and “without looking closely abandons everything and runs,” and the whole troupe flees; the one in the costume runs after them too, and the companions, seeing him behind, think he means to harm them and are more frightened still, crossing mountains and rivers and plunging into ravines, wounded and exhausted, “until at daybreak they knew at last that it was no demon.” The application: all ordinary people, “dwelling amid the afflictions, in famine of wholesome dharmas, want to seek far off the supreme Dharma-food of permanence, bliss, self and purity, and so falsely posit a self within the five aggregates”; “through the view of self they run through birth and death” and fall into the ravines of the three evil destinies; “the daybreak is the end of the night of birth and death and the dawning of wisdom, when they know at last that in the five aggregates there is no true self.” The rākṣasa is a costume one of their own has put on; the pursuer is the very one who is fleeing. The application matches closely: famine to famine, ravines to ravines, daybreak to the dawning of wisdom. The point is in the words “without looking closely”: one look would have shown it was no demon, and no one looked. The view of self is the same: the self in the five aggregates is a costume put on, and one look at daybreak shows it.

The old house said to have a demon closes the set. People say the old house has a demon; one man, thinking himself bold, goes in to spend the night; a second, thinking himself bolder, goes in too and pushes at the door; the first takes him for the demon and pushes back to keep him out; the second thinks there is a demon too, and the two fight until daybreak, and “when they saw each other they knew at last that it was no demon.” The application: all the people of the world are just the same; “causes and conditions come together for a moment and there is no master; analysed one by one, which of them is the self?” Yet beings “falsely reckon right and wrong and force quarrels upon one another, no different from those two men.” In the previous parable the demon was a costume; in this one the demon is the man on the other side; both stories close with “they knew at last that it was no demon.” This one adds a layer: there was no demon, but the fight was fought in earnest all night long. When beings quarrel over right and wrong, each side takes there to be a master on the other side; analysed one by one, none of them is. Read the six together: “nothing” is not a thing, the reflection of gold is not gold, there is no creator, there is no one consciousness, the rākṣasa is a costume, the demon is the man opposite. All six say one thing: what is seen is not what it seems.

VI. How to Read the Fascicle

Of the twenty-four parables of this fascicle, fifteen have applications that open with “it is just the same”: the people of the world three times, the fools of the world three times, and once each the fool in birth and death who is a slave of craving, those who break the precepts, the foolish disciple, the rewards of the world, students of the Buddha’s teaching, teachers and disciples, all followers of other paths, all ordinary people, and all people of the world. Three open with “likewise”: the five aggregates once, fools twice. Seeing the reflection of gold opens with the verse’s “lacking wisdom, are just the same.” Five open with none of these: demanding “nothing” goes straight to “worldly ordinary people who take ‘nothing’ as a thing”; kicking the elder’s mouth goes straight to “everything needs its time”; the two sons dividing the estate opens with “like the followers of other paths”; Brahmā’s disciple opens with “from this it should be known”; the five hundred joy pills opens with “the wife’s joy pills stand for.” The two whose applications are in verse are watching the potter and seeing the reflection of gold; in the first two fascicles every application was prose, and verse begins with this fascicle. In reading each parable, still find the first sentence of the application and match backwards from it: the cotton to the precept against killing, the door and donkey and rope to the doors of the senses, no east and no time to not disclosing, the eyes to hell, the little ox to reputation, the broken branch to the rebuke, the peacock droppings to frivolous talk, the two legs to the Vaipulya and the Lesser Vehicle, head and tail to old and young, the broken coins to the analytical mode, the half cake to the notion of pleasure, the five men to the five aggregates, the empty music to the rewards of humans and devas, shaving the beard to a few precepts, the duck’s cry to doing good at death, the kick to the time not yet come, the pot to the household, “nothing” to signlessness, wishlessness and non-action, the gold’s reflection to the notion of self, the demon shape to one’s own deeds, the one pheasant to the one consciousness, the rākṣasa costume to the view of self, the demon in the old house to a master, and the joy pills to impure giving. Where they match, that is the business of this fascicle; where they do not, the notes record it parable by parable.

The five hundred joy pills stands at the end of the fascicle; it is the longest parable of the fascicle, and it is a kind the first two fascicles do not have: the fool in it comes to a good reward. A wife makes poisoned pills to kill her husband; he forgets them under a tree; five hundred bandits eat them and all die; he claims to have killed the bandits and is richly rewarded by the king; the old ministers are jealous, and he says no one dares match him; the king sends him to kill a lion, and he is so frightened he climbs a tree, and “in his terror the man dropped the knife he was holding; it fell into the lion’s mouth, and the lion died.” The application matches item by item: “the wife’s joy pills stand for impure giving; the king who sent him as an envoy stands for the good friend”; “reaching the other country stands for the devas”; “killing the bandits stands for attaining the fruit of stream-entry, forcibly cutting off the five desires and the afflictions”; “meeting that king stands for encountering the noble ones”; the old ministers’ jealousy “stands for the followers of other paths who, seeing a wise man able to cut off the afflictions and the five desires, slander him and say there is no such thing”; the newcomer’s word that none of the old ministers can match him “stands for the followers of other paths being unable to withstand him”; “killing the lion stands for defeating Māra; having cut off the afflictions and subdued the evil Māra, one receives the fruit of the Way of non-attachment as one’s reward”; “his constant fearfulness stands for the weak overcoming the strong.” The ten items line up: giving, the good friend, the devas, stream-entry, the noble ones, the slander of other paths, other paths unable to withstand, the defeat of Māra, the fruit of the path, the weak overcoming the strong, a single road from impure giving to the fruit without attachment. The close: “Though at the start he had no pure mind, that giving of his met a good friend and gained an excellent reward; if impure giving is like this, how much more giving with a wholesome and joyful mind?” “Therefore one should give with a diligent mind in the field of merit.” The pills were made to kill, and once given away they became joy pills. Not one thing in this parable did the man bring about himself: the pills were his wife’s making, the bandits were killed by the poison, the lion died of a knife that fell into its mouth; the only thing he did with his own hands was to claim falsely that he had killed the bandits. The application calls this “impure giving” that nonetheless “met a good friend”: the giver’s mind was not pure, and the giving itself arrived where it should. The twenty-three parables before it mostly tell of fools covering the cheap with the dear; the last tells that even the cheap can become dear, on the condition that it meets a good friend. Set at the end of the fascicle, it leaves a road open for the people of the twenty-three before: the cotton covered the hide and the hide rotted, and still an impure gift is a gift.

Carrying Forward — The Application as Its Own Commentary

This fascicle is not treated by any commentary of the ancient masters; the Sūtra of One Hundred Parables has no sentence-by-sentence ancient commentary in the canon. The application of each parable is that parable’s own commentary, and every scriptural proof cited in this exposition is taken from the story and its application; no further doctrine is set up.

This fascicle has thirty-three parables. It is the last of the four, and the one with the most parables. There is no preface; after the table of contents at its head come the parables themselves. When the thirty-three are told, the author adds twelve lines of verse of his own, saying how this treatise was written and how it should be read, and ends with one line: “The Venerable Sengqiesina has finished composing the Garland of Fools.” The first three fascicles end with nothing but the fascicle title; this one has that closing section besides. The form is the same as before: first the story, then “it is just the same.” Those pointed at have changed once more. The third fascicle named followers of other paths in four applications, bhikṣus in one, disciples in three. In this fascicle only one application names followers of other paths, milking the donkey: “ordinary people on other paths are just the same.” Followers of other paths appear in the application of the child who caught a great tortoise too, “followers of other paths with wrong views, the heavenly Māra Pāpīyān, and bad friends say to him,” but there they are the ones speaking, and the one pointed at is still the ordinary person. Six applications name those who have left home: the renunciant who craved gain and offerings, telling his son to set out early, the father who took his son’s earrings, the monkey with a fistful of beans, the poor man who wanted wealth equal to the rich, the child who got a joy pill. That is the most of any of the four fascicles. Finding gold coins on the ground points at “those who meet the Buddha’s Dharma are just the same,” a name the first three fascicles never used. The base text writes plainly of onlookers laughing in eleven parables: the husband and wife and the cake, “everyone in the world who heard of it laughed at him”; falsely claiming the horse had died, “he was laughed at by people”; losing both the camel and the jar, “such a fool is laughed at by the world”; milking the donkey, “he was ridiculed by all the people of the world”; telling his son to set out early, where it is the father scolding his son who says “ridiculed by all the people of the world”; carrying the king’s stool, the enema taken the wrong way and the old woman who caught a bear, all “laughed at by the world”; imitating the sowing of a field, “ridiculed by people”; the father who took his son’s earrings, “laughed at by the world”; feigning blindness, “laughed at by the people of the world.” Twice the fool laughs himself: the husband with the cake “clapped his hands and laughed,” and the farmer, told the princess was his, “laughed with delight, thinking he was sure to have her.” These two laughs are the exact opposite of the eleven before them. The onlookers laugh because they have seen; the fool laughs because he has not.

A sentence in the closing verses could stand as the title of this fascicle, or of the whole sūtra: “Like the agada medicine, wrapped in a leaf: once the medicine has been taken and put on the poison, the leaf is thrown away.” The next verse explains it: “Jests are like the leaf that wraps; the real meaning lies within it. The wise take the right meaning, and the jests should then be discarded.” The doings of thirty-three fools are the leaf; the thirty-three applications, “it is just the same,” are the medicine. The expositions of the first three fascicles taught the reader to find the first sentence of the application and match the story back against it. At the end of this fascicle the author says that reading out himself. The leaf is needed: without the wrapping, the medicine never reaches the hand. The leaf is also to be thrown away: to hold the medicine and still clutch the leaf is to be one more fool.

One. Not Understanding the Means (Parables 66, 78, 80, 82, 98)

The five applications all say that learning the Dharma needs a teacher and needs the means. Reciting the art of steering a boat stands at the head of the fascicle. The elder’s son “was good at reciting the method of entering the sea and handling a boat”: where the water eddies and swirls, “hold it so, steer it so, keep it so,” and he told everyone, “the method of entering the sea, I know it all.” The helmsman fell ill and died; he took the helmsman’s place, and in the rushing current “he cried out: ‘Hold it so, steer it so.’” The boat only went round and round, and “all the merchants on board sank in the water and died.” The application: the ordinary person “has a little practice in the methods of meditation, ānāpāna, counting the breath and the contemplation of impurity, and though he recites the text he does not understand its meaning,” and “wrongly teaches the methods of meditation, so that the one before him grows confused and loses his mind, and the marks of the Dharma are turned upside down.” “Hold it so, steer it so” comes twice, once recited on dry land, once cried out in the whirlpool, and not a word differs; what differs is that when he recited it there was no water under his feet. It is not that he could not recite; it is that reciting was all he could do. Nor does the application say he failed to recite; it says the four characters “does not understand its meaning.” The fool of this parable harms not himself alone but a whole boat; what the application matches is “wrongly teaches,” teaching others wrongly.

Telling his son to set out early tells of having no teacher. In the night the father said, “tomorrow you and I will go together to that village to fetch something,” and at dawn the son “went off there alone without asking his father at all.” He got nothing there, nearly starved, and came back. The father scolded him: “Why did you not wait for me? You went and came back for nothing, and suffered for nothing.” The application: the ordinary person, “if he manages to leave home, shaves his hair and beard and puts on the three Dharma robes, but does not seek an enlightened teacher to receive the Dharma of the Way,” loses meditation and the factors of the path, and “looks like an ascetic but has gained nothing at all.” The son knew where the village was; he took the right road; he went and he came back. All that was missing was the father, and the father knew what was to be fetched there. The one who leaves home has shaved his head, put on the robe, arrived at that place; what is missing is the enlightened teacher, who knows what is to be fetched there.

The enema taken the wrong way tells of inversion. The physician said, “you must have an enema; only then will you recover,” and the sick man “took it by mouth before the physician had come,” and his belly swelled till he nearly died. The physician scolded him, “you great fool, you do not understand the means,” gave him another medicine, and only when he had vomited did he recover. The application: the ordinary person practising meditative contemplation, “where he should practise the impure, practises counting the breath instead, and where he should count the breath, practises the contemplation of the six elements; above and below are inverted, and there is no root,” and “he does not consult a good teacher, and inverts the methods of meditation.” The medicine was right; the opening was wrong. The application calls this “above and below inverted,” and the word matches “the wrong way” exactly: what should go in below goes in above; the one who should contemplate impurity counts the breath; the one who should count the breath contemplates the six elements. Read this parable with the boat: there, the words were recited rightly and could not be used; here, he had the right medicine but did not know how to use it. Both applications speak of the methods of meditation.

Imitating the sowing of a field tells of adding a rule of one’s own. The countryman asked the owner of the wheat, who answered, “level the ground and add manure and water.” He did so, and then “feared that his own feet treading the ground would harden it and his wheat would not sprout,” so he had four men carry a bed and sat on it to scatter the seed, and “the ground was harder than ever, and people ridiculed him, for in fearing his own two feet he had added eight more.” The application: the ordinary person, “once he has cultivated the field of the precepts and the good sprout is about to come up, should consult a teacher and receive his practice and instruction, so that the sprout of the Dharma may grow,” but “instead he violates them and does much evil, so that the sprout of the precepts does not grow.” This man asked the right person; not a word the wheat-owner said was wrong; he did as he was told. The error was in the one rule he thought up himself. The two parables before were of not asking a teacher; this one asked the teacher, and then added his own to what the teacher said.

The child who caught a great tortoise closes this section, and closes the whole sūtra. The child caught a tortoise and wanted to kill it, and asked someone, “how can I kill it?” The man said, “just throw it into the water and it will die at once,” and he believed him, and “once the tortoise had the water it swam away.” The application: the ordinary person, “wishing to guard the six sense faculties and cultivate merit, does not understand the means,” and asks how liberation is gained; the ones who answer are followers of other paths, the heavenly Māra and bad friends: “just give the six sense objects free rein and indulge the five desires to your heart’s content; do as I say and you will surely gain liberation,” and “such a fool does not consider carefully, but acts on their words.” Set the five together: the art of the boat, the road to the village, the enema, the manure and water, the killing of the tortoise. In the first four the Dharma was right, and each man wanted to do the right thing; the error was that something was missing between the man and the Dharma. The boatman lacked experience on the water, the early riser lacked his father, the sick man lacked the physician, the sower added a rule of his own. The killing of the tortoise is different: the child wanted the tortoise killed, and the ordinary person wants to guard the six sense faculties, and what they want is right; but the one asked was wrong, and so the Dharma that came to hand was wrong too. What the applications match is: not understanding the meaning, not seeking an enlightened teacher, not consulting a good teacher, not receiving instruction, not considering carefully. “Does not understand the means”: the physician says it once to the sick man, and the application says it once to the ordinary person. The fools of the first three fascicles mostly took hold of the Dharma wrongly; in this fascicle the first parable takes hold of it rightly and cannot use it, and the last wants the right thing and asks the wrong person.

Two. Pretence (Parables 67, 73, 74, 86, 96)

The fools of these five are all putting on a show. The husband and wife who made a wager over a cake: of three cakes they ate one each and one was left, and they agreed, “whoever speaks shall not have the cake.” A thief came in and carried off everything, and the couple said nothing; the thief “assaulted the wife in front of her husband, and the husband saw it with his own eyes and still said nothing.” The wife cried thief and scolded him, “what kind of fool are you, that for one cake you see a thief and do not call out?” The husband clapped his hands and laughed: “Ha, you slave, I have got the cake for certain, and I will not give it to you.” The application: ordinary people, “for the sake of some small fame and gain, feign silence, and are assailed by the false afflictions, bandits of every kind, lose their good dharmas and fall into the three evil destinies,” and “cling to the five desires and play in them, and though they meet great suffering they do not take it for harm.” He won; the cake was his. What the application points at is “feign silence”: the silence was not concentration, it was a show. A show for whom? For that one cake. The thief in this parable is a real thief; the application changes him into “bandits of every kind,” and while the afflictions are inside carrying things off, the one feigning silence watches with his own eyes and says nothing.

Falsely claiming the horse had died tells of playing dead. Riding a black horse into battle, he was afraid, “smeared his face with blood, put on the look of death and lay among the dead,” and the horse was taken. When the army dispersed and he went home, he “cut off the tail of another man’s white horse,” said the horse had died, and brought the tail back. A bystander asked: “Your horse was black. Why is the tail white?” The application: people of the world “claim that they are good and cultivate a mind of kindness and eat no meat and drink no wine, yet they kill living beings and inflict every cruelty, and falsely call themselves good while there is no evil they do not do.” One question broke it: the tail was white. The mind of kindness and no meat or wine are the black horse; killing living beings is the white tail. Hang the two on one man, and one question shows they do not match.

The renunciant who craved gain and offerings tells of feigning a wash. The king ordered the brāhmaṇas to wash themselves clean, and whoever did not was driven to hard labour. “A brāhmaṇa held an empty washing jug and claimed he had washed, and when someone put water in it for him he poured it straight out,” saying, “I shall not wash; let the king wash himself.” The application: the ordinary person who has left home “shaves his head and dyes his robe while inwardly breaking the prohibitions, feigns keeping the precepts in hope of gain and offerings,” and is “outwardly like an ascetic and inwardly all deceit, like one who holds an empty jar that has nothing but its outside.” This is the only parable in the fascicle whose application says plainly “the ordinary person who has left home” without a single word of laughter: no one in the story laughs at him, and the application does not either. The empty jar is the point of this section: the jar is a real jar, really held in the hand, and there is no water in it. The two parables before feigned something that was not; this one feigns the look of something that is.

The father who took his son’s earrings tells of one lie. Meeting bandits on the road, the father feared to lose the gold earrings on his son’s ears, and when he could not pull them off, “for the sake of the earrings he cut off his son’s head.” When the bandits had gone, he “put the son’s head back on his shoulders, and it could not be made whole again.” The application: the ordinary person, “for the sake of fame and gain, makes up idle play, saying the two worlds exist, the two worlds do not; the intermediate existence exists, it does not; mental factors exist, they do not,” and when someone refutes him according to the Dharma he says, “there is no such statement anywhere in my treatise,” and “such a fool, for a little fame and gain, deliberately lies and loses the fruit of the ascetic’s Way.” A head cut off cannot be put back; a word spoken cannot be taken back. The one lie the application matches is ‘I never said that’: to save the face of one sentence, he cuts off everything he said. The earrings are a small gain and the head is his son; face is a small gain and the fruit of the ascetic’s Way is the head.

Feigning blindness closes this section. A craftsman could not bear the king’s labour and “claimed to be blind, and so escaped the hardship”; “another craftsman heard of it and wanted to destroy his own eyes to escape the labour.” The application: the ordinary person, “for a little reputation and for gain and offerings, deliberately lies and destroys the pure precepts.” The first man told a lie; the second made the lie come true, and was the greater fool. The five together: feigning silence, feigning death, feigning a wash, feigning not to have said it, feigning blindness. What the applications match is a show put on for fame and gain: silence, a mind of kindness, keeping the precepts, being without fault, escaping hardship. Every look that is feigned is a good look the Dharma really has, which is why it can be feigned; and whether the feigning passes, one question tests: why is the tail white?

Three. Anger (Parables 68, 81, 83, 84)

The fools of these four are all in hatred, and the arrow of hatred never reaches the one it should. Harming each other out of hatred: a man was slandered, could not pay it back, and was in anguish. Someone said, “only the vetāla spell can harm him, but it has one drawback: before it reaches him it will harm you yourself first,” and he was overjoyed: “Only teach it to me; though I must harm myself, I hope to injure him.” The application: people of the world “out of anger seek the vetāla spell to afflict another, and before they have harmed the other they are first afflicted and harmed by their own anger.” In this parable the one who teaches the spell says the whole of it: first yourself, then him. The man heard it, and still wanted it. What the application speaks of is that order: anger reaches one’s own body first, and whether it ever reaches the other is unknown.

Bitten by a bear tells of shooting wrong. The son went into the woods and was mauled by a bear, and said, “a kind of creature with long shaggy hair came and hurt me.” The father took his bow into the woods, “saw a sage with long deep hair, and was about to shoot him.” A bystander said: “Why shoot him? This man did no harm; punish the one at fault.” The application: the fool of the world, “because he has been abused by those who wear the Dharma robe without practising the Way, does wanton harm to good and virtuous people.” The bear has hair and so has the sage; the one who abused him wears the Dharma robe and so does the virtuous man. Hatred recognises the hair and not the person.

The monkey tells of hating at the wrong time. Beaten by a grown man, the monkey “could do nothing about it, and turned its resentment on a child instead.” The application: the foolish ordinary person, “the one he was angry at before has passed away in the ceaseless change and is gone into the past, and he takes the dharmas that arise afterward in continuity to be that former person, and wrongly gives rise to anger, and the venom of his hatred grows deeper.” The parable is three lines long, and its application says something the first three fascicles never said: the one who struck you has already passed; the one before you now is “the dharmas that arise afterward in continuity,” not the former one. The monkey that resents the child has mistaken the person; the ordinary person who hates the one before him, the application says, has also mistaken the person, because the person of a moment ago is already gone.

Beating the dog for the eclipse of the moon closes this section. “Of old the king of the asuras, seeing the sun and moon bright and clear, covered them with his hand; and people without wisdom, when the dog has done no wrong, wantonly do it harm.” The application: “Ordinary people are the same: through greed, anger and delusion they wantonly torment their own bodies, lying on beds of thorns and roasting themselves at five fires.” The moon was covered by the asura’s hand, and the people beat the dog. The four together: the spell harms oneself, the arrow aims at the sage, the resentment falls on the child, the stick falls on the dog; not once did it reach where it should. The last application says “wantonly torment their own bodies”: in the end it is one’s own body that takes what hatred gives. The first three parables say it separately, and the fourth says it in one sentence: lying on thorns, roasting the body, the austerities of other paths are the last stop of anger.

Four. Faith and Giving (Parables 70, 85, 87, 89, 90, 91)

The six applications all speak of cause and effect, and of giving. Tasting the āmra fruit opens it. The owner said, “the fruit of this tree of mine is all fine and good, not one is bad; taste one and you will know,” and the buyer said, “I shall taste each one and then take them; if I taste only one, how can I know?” He tasted them all and brought them home, and “when the elder saw them he was disgusted and would not eat, and threw them all away.” The application: people of the world “hear that keeping the precepts and giving bring great wealth and happiness, that the body is ever at ease and free of all ills, and will not believe it,” saying, “giving brings blessings; when I get them myself, then I shall believe,” and though they see with their own eyes that high and low, rich and poor, are all the fruition of former deeds, “they do not know how to infer from one to seek the cause and effect, but harbour disbelief and must pass through it themselves.” The point is in the two characters “infer from one”: one fruit tells of the whole tree, and the rank of one person before your eyes tells of cause and effect. To insist on tasting every one yourself is to leave every fruit you have tasted unfit to eat. This parable is not about disbelief; it is about the method of believing. Belief infers from one; disbelief tastes one by one.

The woman with aching eyes tells of fear. A woman’s eyes ached, and another woman said, “whoever has eyes must ache; though mine do not ache yet, I mean to gouge them out for fear they will ache later.” A bystander said: “If the eyes are there, they may ache or they may not; if the eyes are gone, there is lifelong pain.” The application: foolish ordinary people “hear that wealth and rank are the root of decline and misfortune, are afraid and will not give, fearing that later they will receive the reward, that their goods will overflow and they will suffer greatly for it,” and someone says to them, “if you give, there may be suffering or there may be joy; if you do not give, there is the great suffering of poverty.” With the eyes, aching or not aching; without them, pain for certain. With giving, suffering or joy; without it, poverty for certain. To want to gouge out the eyes now for fear of pain to come, and to withhold giving now for fear of the misfortune of wealth, is one and the same sum: to be rid of “may,” they chose “must.”

The robbers dividing their loot tells of giving little. A band of robbers shared out what they had taken, and “only a deer-park kambala robe, its colour not pure and fine, was reckoned the worst share and given to the least of them.” He resented it, took it to the city to sell, and “the noble elders paid him a great price, so that what one man got was twice what his companions had.” The application: “It is like people of the world who do not know whether giving brings reward or not, and give a little, and are born in heaven and receive measureless happiness, and only then regret it, regretting that they did not give widely,” and “having done little and gained much, only then do they rejoice and regret that they did not do more.” Of the thirty-three parables in this fascicle, this is the only one whose application speaks of giving little and gaining much; and still the application sets that man among the regretful: having gained a great reward for a little giving, what he regrets at that moment is not having given more. This parable and the āmra fruit are a pair: there, he would not believe and would not infer from a single fruit; here, he believed late, and only in heaven learned what the kambala was worth.

Finding a golden weasel tells of the mind. A man found a golden weasel, and when he took off his clothes to cross a stream, “in a moment the golden weasel turned into a venomous snake.” He thought, “better to be stung to death by the snake than not carry it,” and “his mind reached so far that it was answered, and it turned back into gold.” A fool beside him saw it, “thought it was always so,” put a venomous snake into his bosom, and was stung to death. The application: the fool of the world “sees the good gaining benefit, and with no true mind within, attaches himself to the Dharma only for gain and offerings.” The first man held a snake to his breast and the snake became gold; the second also held a snake, and the snake stayed a snake. The difference is in the two characters “mind reached.” What the application calls “attaches himself to the Dharma” is to see another gain benefit in the Dharma and do the same thing over: the same deed, without that mind. The man stung to death in this parable is the only one in the fascicle who dies of doing the right thing in imitation.

Finding gold coins on the ground tells of meeting. A poor man found a bag of gold coins, and “before he had finished counting them, the owner of the gold came suddenly and took back every coin.” The application: “Those who meet the Buddha’s Dharma are just the same: though they chance to meet the Three Jewels, the field of merit, they do not diligently apply the means and cultivate good deeds, and suddenly their life ends.” After the application comes the first verse of the fascicle: “Today attending to this business, tomorrow doing that; delighting in attachment and not seeing the suffering, they do not notice the thief that is death arriving.” “Hurrying about their many affairs, no ordinary person is otherwise; like the man counting coins, the matter is just the same.” He did not spend; he was counting. Counting is attending to business; when the count was done he meant to use it, and the owner came. The “thief that is death” of the verse is, of all the bandits in this fascicle, the only one no one escapes.

The poor man who wanted wealth equal to the rich closes this section. A poor man with a little property wanted to be the equal of the rich, could not be, and “though he had a little property, wanted to throw it in the water.” A bystander said: “Though this is small, it could keep you alive a few days; why throw it away into the water?” The application: the fool of the world, “having left home and gained a little in gain and offerings, has hopes in his heart and is forever discontented, cannot equal the men of high virtue,” and seeing the venerable elders with many offerings, “wishes to be their equal and cannot, and in grief and distress wants to give up the Way.” The six together are six moments of one thing: not believing in cause and effect and insisting on tasting; fearing the future and not giving; giving a little and regretting it only in heaven; seeing another’s gain and attaching oneself to the Dharma; meeting it and only counting, never using; having a little and throwing it away because it is less than another’s. The “infer from one” of the āmra fruit is the door to all six: one fruit tells of the tree, a little giving tells of a great reward, a little property keeps a man alive a few days. The one who will not infer from one must pass through every one himself, and by then every fruit has been tasted to ruin.

Five. Precepts and Bandits (Parables 71, 72, 75, 79, 88, 92, 95, 97)

The eight applications all speak of the precepts, of how they are broken and what follows. Losing both eyes on account of two wives: a man married two wives, and when he drew near one the other was angry; “unable to decide, he lay flat on his back between the two of them,” and when the roof leaked, “water and mud fell together into his eyes, and because of his earlier promise he dared not get up and move, and so both his eyes lost their sight.” The application: the ordinary person of the world “keeps company with wrong friends and practises what is not the Dharma, makes karma that binds and falls into the three evil paths, and dwelling long in birth and death loses the eye of wisdom.” It is not that he did not know the water was falling into his eyes; he had promised, and dared not rise. That is the harm of wrong friends: it is not that the wrong friend harms him, but that he has a promise with the wrong friend.

The mouthful of rice and the cut cheek tells of hiding. A man stole rice and held it in his mouth, and when his wife came and spoke he did not answer, “ashamed before his wife, he would not spit it out, and so said nothing.” The wife thought his mouth was swollen, the father called a physician, and the physician said, “this illness is most serious; cut it open with a knife and he may recover,” cut it open, and the rice came out. The application: people of the world “do evil deeds and break the pure precepts, and cover up their faults and will not bring them to light,” and “like that fool who for a little shame would not spit out the rice, and whose fault was shown only when his cheek was cut, they fall into hell and the realms of animals and hungry ghosts.” Spat out, it is a mouthful of rice; hidden to the end, it is a knife. The stolen yak of the third fascicle said that hiding means denying the east; this says that hiding means cutting the mouth. “Will not bring them to light” is used in both fascicles.

Losing both the camel and the jar tells of one broken, all given up. The camel’s head went into the jar and could not come out; an old man told him, “cut off its head and you will get it out,” and he “killed the camel and then broke the jar as well.” The application: the foolish ordinary person, “aspiring to bodhi and seeking the three vehicles, should keep the precepts and guard against every evil, yet for the five desires he destroys the pure precepts, and having broken the prohibitions he abandons the three vehicles,” and “the vehicle and the pure precepts are both thrown away.” The jar is the precepts; the camel is the vehicle. Having broken the precepts, he no longer wants the vehicle he was seeking.

Carrying the king’s stool tells of one and thirty-six. The king told a minister to bring one stool into the garden, and the minister, ashamed, said, “I cannot carry it in my hand; I would rather carry it on my back,” and “the king then set thirty-six stools on his back.” The application: the ordinary person, “if he sees a single hair of a woman on the ground, says he keeps the precepts and will not pick it up; afterwards, deluded by the afflictions, he finds nothing ugly in the thirty-six impure things, hair, nails, teeth, excrement and urine, and takes hold of all thirty-six at once without shame.” One stool he would not carry in his hand, and he carried thirty-six on his back; one hair he would not pick up, and he took hold of all thirty-six things. The application calls this keeping the precepts, and means keeping only the one that can be seen.

The monkey with a fistful of beans tells of one and everything. The monkey dropped one bean from its fistful, and “let go of the beans in its hand to look for the one, and before it had found that one bean, the chickens and ducks had eaten all it had let go.” The application: the ordinary person who has left home “first breaks one precept and cannot repent, and because he does not repent, heedlessness spreads and he gives up everything.” This parable and the camel and jar are a pair; both are one broken and all given up. The difference is that this one says “cannot repent.” The monkey did not not want the one bean; for the sake of that one bean it opened its hand. What the application speaks of is not breaking one precept but breaking it and not repenting; without repentance, the hand opens.

The two pigeons tells of repenting late. The cock pigeon saw that the fruit had shrunk to half the nest and said the hen had eaten it alone; the hen said, “I did not eat it alone; the fruit shrank by itself,” and the cock would not believe her and pecked her to death. Then the rains came, the fruit swelled with moisture and filled the nest again, and the cock pigeon “only then felt remorse: ‘She truly did not eat it; I killed her wrongly.’” The application: the ordinary person, “with inversion in his heart, wrongly seizes the pleasures of desire and does not contemplate impermanence, and breaks the grave prohibitions, and what use is it to repent afterwards?” Read the four places in this fascicle that speak of regret together: the robbers dividing their loot regret not having given widely; finding gold coins, not having gone quickly; the fistful of beans, not being able to repent; the two pigeons, repenting afterwards. Of the four, only one is the right time for repentance: at the monkey’s one bean, the application says he should repent and does not. In the other three, the regret comes after the deed. The application’s “what use is it” says that repentance has its time.

The child who got a joy pill tells of bandits. The nurse, exhausted, fell asleep holding the child; a man gave the child a joy pill, and “the child took it and craved its sweet taste and paid no heed to what he wore, and the man at once undid his neck ring and lock and his necklaces and carried off every garment.” The application: “Bhikṣus are the same: delighting in the bustle and clamour of many affairs, they crave a little gain and offerings, and the thieves of the afflictions rob them of the jewelled necklace of merit and the precepts.” In the third fascicle five hundred joy pills killed five hundred bandits; in this one, a single joy pill is the bandit’s tool. The bit of sweetness the bandit gives buys everything on the body.

Robbed of his fine cotton by bandits closes this section. Two men crossed a wilderness together; one was robbed, and in the hem of his fine cotton cloth he had wrapped a gold coin, and he said to the bandit, “this cloth is worth just one gold coin; I now ask to redeem it with one gold coin.” The bandit asked where the coin was; he undid the hem and showed it to the bandit, and went on, “in this grass here is a fine goldsmith; you may go and ask him,” and the goldsmith was the companion hiding in the grass. “Such a fool lost the fine cotton cloth and the gold coin alike; he lost his own gain and made the other lose too.” The application: the ordinary person, “cultivating the factors of the path and doing meritorious deeds, is plundered by the thieves of the afflictions, loses his good dharmas and all his merit, and not only loses his own gain but makes others lose their practice of the Way.” He meant to redeem the fine cotton cloth, and in the end he handed the bandit the fine cotton cloth, the coin and his companion, every one of them by his own mouth. Read the eight together: the promise of the two wives, the shame of the mouthful of rice, the cutting in the camel and jar, the shame of the stool that would not be carried, the opened hand of the beans, the disbelief of the pigeons, the sweetness of the joy pill, the ransom of the fine cotton cloth. The door by which the precepts are broken differs each time; what goes out through it is the same: the eyes, the mouth, the vehicle, shame, everything, the hen, the necklace, the fine cotton cloth. This fascicle is full of bandits: the thief of the cake, the bandits of the earrings, the robbers dividing loot, the battle against the enemy, the bandits of the fine cotton cloth, five times in the stories; three times in the applications, always the thieves of the afflictions, the false thieves; and the thief that is death of the verse besides. When the bandit comes in from outside, the door was opened by the one inside.

Six. Misunderstanding (Parables 69, 76, 77, 93, 94)

The fools of these five each heard one sentence as another. Eating fast in imitation of his ancestors: a man of north India married a wife from the south, and ate in a rush, swallowing without waiting for the food to cool. When his wife asked, he said, “there is a fine secret that I cannot tell you,” and only when she had pressed him long did he answer, “from my grandfather’s time our rule has always been to eat fast; I am imitating it, and that is why I am quick.” The application: ordinary people of the world “do not reach the right principle and do not know good from evil, practise every wrong deed and are not ashamed of it, and say, from my grandfather’s time we have done thus, and they hold to it till death and never give it up.” The grandfather’s fast eating was true, but the grandfather’s fast eating was not a rule; he heard a fact as a law, and called it a secret.

The farmer who pined for the princess tells of hearing half. The farmer saw the princess and fell sick, and his kinsmen said, “we shall contrive a fine means for you to get her; do not grieve,” and some days later said, “we have arranged it for you, and it is done; only the princess is unwilling,” and he “laughed with delight, thinking he was sure to have her.” The application: the fool of the world “does not distinguish the seasons, spring, autumn, winter and summer, and in winter throws seed into the ground and hopes for fruit,” and “having cultivated a little merit takes it for complete, and says that bodhi can already be attained.” “It is done; only the princess is unwilling”: the first half is consolation and the second is the truth, and he heard only the first half. The man who sows in winter has likewise heard only ‘sow and reap,’ and not ‘in spring.’ This is the second place in the fascicle where the fool laughs himself.

Milking the donkey tells of never having seen. The people of a border country did not know the donkey; “they heard others say that donkey’s milk was very fine, and none of them knew it.” They got a male donkey, and “some held its head, some its ears, some its tail, some its legs, and others held the vessel,” and “the one who held the donkey’s member thought that this was the milk.” The application: ordinary people on other paths, “hearing talk of the Way, seek it where it is not to be sought, give rise to false notions and wrong views of every kind, go naked, starve themselves, throw themselves from cliffs and into fire.” Donkey’s milk exists; a male donkey has none. The Way exists; sought there, it is not. This application is the only place in the fascicle that names followers of other paths as the ones pointed at, and what it names is austerity: going naked, starving, leaping from cliffs, into fire, all of it milking a male donkey.

The old woman who caught a bear tells of taking over. An old woman chased by a bear ran round a tree and pinned the bear’s two paws against the trunk; when a man came she said, “hold it with me, and we will kill it and share the meat,” and he believed her and took hold with her; “the old woman then let go of the bear and ran, and afterwards the man was caught by the bear.” The application: the ordinary person “composes various treatises that are not well done, wordy and burdensome and full of faults, and before they are finished he abandons them and dies; and later people take them up and try to explain them, and not reaching their meaning are caught by them instead.” The man caught in this parable did nothing wrong; he only took over another’s hold. The application speaks of taking over another’s unfinished treatise: the author has gone, and the one who explains it is caught by it. Two applications in this fascicle speak of treatises: the earrings, where idle play is refuted and denied, and this one, where a treatise is left unfinished and someone later takes it up. Both come before the closing verses, and the first line of those verses is “This treatise is my composition.”

Maṇi and the water drain closes this section. A man lay with another’s wife; the husband came home and waited at the door, and the wife said, “my husband has found out; there is no other way out; only by the maṇi can you get out.” Beneath that sentence the base text sets a note within the line, “maṇi is what in the Qi tongue is called a water-drain hole,” the only note inside the text in all four fascicles of the base text. “The man misunderstood and took it for the maṇi jewel, and searched for it everywhere and did not know where it was,” saying, “until I see the maṇi jewel I will not leave,” and he was killed. The application: someone says, “in birth and death all is impermanent, suffering, empty and without self; leave the two extremes of annihilation and permanence, dwell in the middle way, and by passing through this middle liberation can be gained,” and “the ordinary person misunderstands, and seeks whether the world has a limit or has none, and whether beings have a self or have none, and in the end cannot contemplate the principle of the middle way.” One word, maṇi: on one side a drain, on the other a pearl. He heard the pearl, searched the room for the pearl, and the way out was right there. One sentence, the middle way: on one side, to dwell in it and pass through; on the other, the questions of limit and no limit, self and no self. The ordinary person hears the questions, seeks inside the questions, and does not get through. “Misunderstood” comes once in the story and once in the application. The base text added its note to that line for fear the reader too would hear the pearl. The five together: the grandfather’s habit heard as a law, consolation heard as truth, hearsay of milk taken for the thing, another’s treatise taken into one’s hands, the drain heard as the pearl. Misunderstanding is not failing to listen; it is listening to half.

Seven. How to Read This Fascicle — The Garland of Fools

Of the thirty-three parables in this fascicle, thirty open their application with “is just the same”: the ordinary person thirteen times, people of the world four, the fool of the world four, the ordinary person of the world two, the foolish ordinary person two, and the ordinary person who has left home, the ordinary person leaving home, ordinary people on other paths, foolish ordinary people and those who meet the Buddha’s Dharma once each. Two open with “the same”: ordinary people are the same, bhikṣus are the same. The robbers dividing their loot opens with “it is like people of the world.” “The ordinary person is just the same” thirteen times is the most that sentence is used in any of the four fascicles. To read each parable, still find the first sentence of the application and match the story back against it: the art of the boat against the methods of meditation; one cake against a little fame and gain; the vetāla spell against anger; eating fast against the grandfather’s rule; tasting the fruit against inferring from one; two wives against wrong friends; the mouthful of rice against covering up; the white tail against falsely calling oneself good; the empty washing jug against feigning the precepts; the camel and jar against the vehicle and the precepts; the princess against bodhi; donkey’s milk against seeking where it is not to be sought; going alone against not seeking an enlightened teacher; thirty-six stools against the thirty-six things; the enema against inverted meditation; shooting the sage against wanton harm to the good; eight feet against violating instruction; resenting the child against the dharma that arises later; beating the dog against tormenting one’s own body; gouging the eyes against not giving; the son’s head against lying; the kambala against giving little; one bean against one precept; the venomous snake against no true mind; counting coins against not practising diligently; throwing away property against giving up the Way; the joy pill against a little gain and offerings; holding the bear against the treatises of others; the maṇi against the middle way; killing the hen against repenting afterwards; destroying the eyes against lying and breaking the precepts; the fine cotton cloth against the good dharmas; throwing the tortoise against the six sense faculties. Where they match is the business of this fascicle; where they do not, the apparatus records it parable by parable.

After the thirty-three parables come twelve lines of closing verse, the author speaking of this treatise himself. “This treatise is my composition; I have mixed in words to make you laugh, and much of it detracts from true and right speech; look to the meaning, what should be kept and what should not.” The first line admits it: words for laughing detract from right speech, and the reader must see for himself which sentence to take. Then four comparisons: “Like a bitter poisonous medicine mixed with sugar: the medicine is to break the illness, and this treatise is just the same.” “Jests in the true Dharma are like that maddening drug; the Buddha’s true Dharma is tranquil concentration, and shines upon the world.” “Like a purge taken and then ghee to soothe the body within: so I now with this meaning bring to light that tranquil concentration.” “Like the agada medicine, wrapped in a leaf: once the medicine has been taken and put on the poison, the leaf is thrown away.” Three of the four say the laughter is what wraps the medicine, sugar, ghee, a leaf; one says the laughter is a maddening drug. The author did not smooth the contradiction away: laughter in the true Dharma is a dangerous thing, and so it is to be used; once used, it is to be thrown away. The last verse fixes the reading: “Jests are like the leaf that wraps; the real meaning lies within it. The wise take the right meaning, and the jests should then be discarded.” Four fascicles, ninety-eight parables, and the name the author gives them is not “a hundred parables” but “the Garland of Fools”: ninety-eight fools strung on one thread. A garland is for wearing, not for looking at. It is strung to be set on someone’s shoulders, and which flower the wearer is, the wearer matches for himself. The last section of each of the first three expositions said ‘where they match is the business of this fascicle’; by the time this fascicle reaches the closing verses, the reader knows that this matching is exactly what the author wanted. Once it is matched, the leaf can be thrown away.

Carrying Forward — The Application as Its Own Commentary

This fascicle is not treated by any commentary of the ancient masters; the Sūtra of One Hundred Parables has no sentence-by-sentence ancient commentary in the canon. The application of each parable is that parable’s own commentary, and the closing verses are the author’s own account of why the treatise was made; every scriptural proof cited in this exposition is taken from the story, its application and the closing verses, and no further doctrine is set up.