One Fart Blown Across the River

It is said that Su Dongpo, practicing Buddhism, one day suddenly grew arrogant, feeling he had attained realization and grasped the Buddha's profound and subtle Dharma. Delighted, he wrote a poem, two lines of which read: "Not stirred by the eight winds, / I sit upright on the purple-gold lotus." After writing it, he was so excited he needed someone to confide in and share with; so he sent his pageboy to show the poem to his good friend the monk Fo Yin. Master Fo Yin wrote below the poem a single character—"fart"—and had the pageboy bring it back to the great man of letters Su Dongpo.

Old Su, on seeing it, burned with rage and rushed that night to Jinshan Temple to argue with Fo Yin. When he arrived, the temple gate was shut, and a note was pasted on it: "Not stirred by the eight winds, / one fart has blown him across the river." At the sight, Su Dongpo's face flushed with shame, and he went home.

If this story is true, I truly envy Su Dongpo for having such a good friend and good teacher. Su Dongpo, who boasted he had cultivated to the point of being "not stirred by the eight winds," flew into a fury at the single word "fart." He was no leak-free arhat, yet he liked to complacently believe he had already attained such concentration.

Not only Su Dongpo—nearly all of us are inevitably prone, at stages, to complacently thinking we have grasped the profound and subtle Dharma and reached a lofty level of cultivation. Little do we know that the slightest trial will immediately lay us low.

Ten years ago I too was overweeningly proud, thinking myself a "wise man," believing I had mastered all under heaven and was remarkable, that my Buddhist cultivation had reached the highest realm and I could absolutely be counted as an accomplished practitioner. Yet on the slightest trial, the five poisons—greed, ill will, delusion, pride, and doubt—immediately rose like sludge from the bottom of a pond, churned up by a stick, surging upward; I would put on the wrathful-vajra face and leap up to compete. Even when I suppressed the immediate anger, my heart still harbored faint displeasure or resentment. I was utterly in the state of "one fart blown across the river": obvious to everyone else, while I myself remained deluded.

I often use this story to mock myself, to warn myself never to become a mere talker.