when I first left home, I thought, "Left-home people are so numerous. Do they all understand the Buddhadharma? Do they all have a goal? When I investigated into this, I found that a great many left-home people had no wish to cultivate, and no wish to end birth and death; in fact, they didn't have much of a goal at all. They were just passing the time, "eating and waiting for death." Left-home people of this sort do nothing but add to the debts and burdens of Buddhism. They do not benefit Buddhism in any way.

      I further discovered that Chinese Buddhists do not even realize what Buddhism is all about. The Buddha expounded the Sutras and proclaimed the Dharma all for the sake of letting future generations understand the Buddha's teaching. How should Buddhist disciples propagate the Buddha's teaching? As I thought about this, I observed that Buddhism never really took root in China. Buddhism in China is actually rootless, and thus it has not stood firm in the face of tests and oppression. Why is it rootless? Because it failed to recognize the foundation. What is the foundation of Buddhism? The foundation of Buddhism is education! Education must start with the youngest children, instilling them with the knowledge of Buddhism, the wisdom of Buddhism, and the way of thinking of Buddhism. Then, at the very least, a child is raised to be a truly virtuous and fine citizen of the country and world. With a foundation for his thought and goals to guide his conduct, such a person will be able to vastly propagate Buddhism. In this way, the basic teaching of Buddhism will not be forgotten.
"People can propagate the Way; it is not the Way that propagates people." How can we propagate the Way? It is only when we have a goal, an ideal, that we can commit ourselves to do something. As for the rootless Buddhism of China, it has neither a root nor trunk, and is merely spinning at the branch tips. The Buddhism of China consists of performing ceremonies to save the souls of the deceased. This is the superficial appearance of Chinese Buddhism. They never foresaw that as this went on, it would create a class of jobless vagrants who became Buddhists in order to get food. How pathetic! All they know how to do is to make money by performing ceremonies to liberate the souls of the deceased. In performing such ceremonies, if you are a Sangha-member with real virtue, you don't need to recite Sutras or mantras. You simply tell the soul, "Go be reborn," and it will be reborn in the Land of Ultimate Bliss. However, if you have no virtue and you are not careful in your conduct, what power do you have to liberate people? Actually, you are just getting into the donor's debt. Furthermore, the practices established by the Buddha are no longer followed.

     For example, in China's Buddhism no one wears the precept sash on a daily basis. Why don't they wear the sash? Ah! If you ask them, they don't know why they don't wear it. Actually, Bhikshus and Bhikshunis should wear their sash at all times, and eat only one meal a day. But they have forgotten all of this. The idea is one hundred and eight thousand miles away from their memory, so they have no idea of the significance of wearing the sash and eating one meal a day. In Chinese Buddhism, no one understands this. There might be one or two people who still wear their sash or eat one meal a day, but again, there might not even be that many in ten thousand.

     You could say they're rarer than fur on a phoenix or a horn on a female unicorn. They are as few as can be. If you ask them what appearance a Bhikshu should have, they haven't the slightest idea. Nowadays, in China and other countries, the vast majority of left-home people in Mahayana Buddhism do not wear their sash. Ah! They feel it's very natural, that this is the way it should be. Little do they know that by not wearing the sash, they no longer have the appearance of a Bhikshu.
"Well," they say, "Mahayana Buddhism is about Bodhisattvas, and Bodhisattvas who don't wear the sash are still Bodhisattvas." Hah! Bodhisattvas also have to wear sashes, for they have to be especially adorned. You can see that Gwan Yin Bodhisattva, Universal Worthy Bodhisattva, Manjushri Bodhisattva, and Earth Treasury Bodhisattva all wear adornments on their bodies. Although these are just false marks, they represent something. Their adornments represent the adorning of Buddha-lands! So left-home cultivators should all abide by the rules. Don't drag your heels, or act in a crazy manner. You say, "But the Old Monk Ji Gung was really crazy." Ji Gung pretended to be that way because he wanted to influence people to give food to the lunatics. That is, he wanted to teach ordinary laypeople not to look down on insane people, not to scorn them. Among the mentally disturbed, there are also those who manifest expediently, hiding their true identity as they teach and transform living beings.

     Why is it that Mahayana Buddhists everywhere do not wear their sashes? It's because when Mahayana Buddhism spread northward, the northern climate was too cold for people to just wear the sash. They couldn't take the cold, so they had to wear clothing underneath the sash, right next to the skin. These undergarments kept out the cold, but when the sash was worn on top of them, it was easy for it to fall off. When Buddhism had just been transmitted to China, probably those Bhikshus weren't very agile. Being sort of clumsy, they would lose their sash every once in a while. Once they lost it, since they had no money to make a new one, they had to go around soliciting donations, and this frightened the laypeople. After a while, the left-home people held a meeting and decided, "This won't do. Our sashes frequently fall off, and it's hard to get new ones made. The Chinese people live frugally, and it's quite expensive to sew a new sash. If you lose your sash, it becomes a problem." Then, in their meeting, a rather unintelligent Patriarch thought of a solution. He said, "I have an idea. We can sew a clasp and a ring onto the sash, and hook them together so that the sash won't fall off." That's how the Chinese-style sash was invented. With the clasp and ring, the sash could now be worn without falling off. From then on, this became the model for the sash of left-home people. The sash originally had no clasp and ring. These were added on in China. You can see that monks from India wear the sash without a clasp and ring, they way they do in the Theravada tradition. From this, we know that when Buddhism is transmitted to a new place, many reforms are made according to the region and the customs of the people.
But in China, after the reforms were made, people regressed and stopped wearing the sash. This was because at that time, most of the left-home people of China farmed to sustain themselves. When they worked, it was rather inconvenient to wear the sash, so they took it off, and only wore the shirt. They set the sash aside when they worked, but after a while, they didn't wear it even when they