Chan Master Boshan Wuyi (1575-1630) admonishes, "In doing practice-work, the foremost essential is to have a rock-hard [resolve] to smash the mind of birth-death; to see right through your body-and-mind-in-the-world—which is entirely a set of nominal conditions, with no real agent. If you do not clarify your innate great principle, then the mind of birth-death will never be smashed. Furthermore, when the mind of birth-death has not been smashed, the killer demon of impermanence from thought-moment to thought-moment will be unceasing. But how do you go about thrusting all this aside?"
Mowing the field in late August is to experience " the great matter of birth and death." The mower cuts the grass, thousands of grasshoppers jump into the air and hundreds of swallows hunt. A beautiful wild scene. At one point a Meadow vole was running and screaming with a bloody paw. Time to pause and question "what is it?"