Translations
Magistrate title: Eighth court - King Deng Ping
Couplets to either side of magistrate:
Goodness and evil will be recompensed in the end;
It's only uncertain if the end comes too early so that your regret will be too late.
Document: Reward goodness
As the couplets here and elsewhere stress, the one element in this system that defies the mechanical retribution of karma is just when that retribution will occur. That uncertainty was thought to be the primary impetus to study and devotion, and because of that uncertainty, the great Tibetan Buddhist Tsong kha pa argued that we must remain ever mindful of death. As Donald Lopez translates:
Although everyone knows that death will come in the end, everyone thinks with each passing day, "I will not die today, I will not die today," mentally clinging until the moment of death to the belief that they will not die. If you are obstructed by such an attitude and do not take its antidote to mind, you will go on thinking that you will remain in this life and will continually think only of means of achieving happiness and removing suffering in this life alone: "I need such and such today."We tend to think only in the moment, but the moments inevitably accumulate, and just when the last moment will occur is an utter mystery. "We should be frightened by death now. We should be fearless at the time of death," he advised, but in fact, "we are the opposite; we are not afraid now, but at the time of death we dig our fingernails into our chests." These scrolls endeavor to magnify this same anxiety, or as the second scroll advised, we will surely regret that we did not cultivate ourselves as early as possible, long before we become responsible for an insurmountable volume of perverse behavior.