This poem relates to the Sixth Patriarch’s mind when he spoke to his disciples whose faces had a weepy appearance. He knew their grief, but it didn’t work for him. He might have been thinking, “I know it’s real when you weep for me. When you weep, you feel sad. Your sadness is from your side to me, from my side to you. But more important is what I, myself, am experiencing, not just weeping” So he told his disciples, “When you finish weeping, think of this, feel this: I say that our nature is originally neither born nor produced nor annihilated. It neither comes nor goes.” Of course, it is natural for disciples to cry when their great master is dying. But there is another way to see it. I think of the dolphins popping in and out of the water when my boat slid into Hawaii from Japan. One jump up is breathing into Buddha’s world and the next jump is breathing into all sentient beings. The idea of the bodhisattva is like the dolphins. Bodhisattvas don’t become Buddha. Both Buddha and sentient beings are the life of the Bodhisattva. Eternal life. Our nature is neither produced nor annihilated, neither comes nor goes. That is the same expression as our chanting, “All dharmas are marked with emptiness.” They aren’t tainted, don’t need to be purified, either. Our nature is beyond the sense of pure and impure. Birth and decay affect limited aspects of this human mind. We are talking about something which we call our “nature,” human nature and the nature of all beings. Fa-hai and the Sixth Patriarch mean different things when speaking of the robe.