馳求

What This Concept Is Actually Saying

The classical term 馳求 names something we recognize the instant it is pointed out, even though in everyday language we have no clean word for it. Literally it means "racing-and-seeking." The two characters are not redundant; they name two distinct moments of a single continuous activity.

馳 (chí) is the racing — the way the heart bolts outward the moment a stimulus appears. It describes the *motion*, the sudden lurch of attention toward an object. You feel it in your body: the shoulders lifting, the breath quickening, the eyes locking on, before you have even decided whether you want anything.

求 (qiú) is the seeking — the underlying tendency to grasp, to need, to treat something *over there* as the condition for being okay *over here*. It describes the *posture*, the felt sense of incompleteness that the racing is trying to patch over.

Together they form one event: the mind runs toward objects, all day long, never finding rest. This is 馳求.

The classical material's most concise formulation comes from Chan master 義端 (Yìduān) in the **《景德傳燈錄》(Jǐngdé Chuándēnglù, *Records of the Transmission of the Lamp Compiled in the Jingde Era*):**

「終日馳求有什麼休歇。」 *"Racing-and-seeking all day long — what rest could there possibly be?"*

This sentence is built to do two things at once. 終日 ("all day long") tells us this is not an occasional lapse but a continuous state, a default mode of the untrained heart. The phrase 有什麼休歇 ("what rest is there?") is not a complaint — it is a diagnostic. The implied answer is: none. The pursuit itself is what prevents the rest. You cannot find rest by running; running is the very thing that makes rest impossible.

This is where the concept sits in the wider map of the path. 馳求 is the everyday face of what the early teachings call 愛 (craving) feeding 取 (grasping) feeding 有 (becoming) — the middle stretch of dependent origination. It is the experiential texture of being stuck in saṃsāra: not a philosophical error but a chronic agitation of the heart. In the 唯識 (Consciousness-Only) tradition, it is the constant 攀緣 (clinging-conditions) of the 第七末那識 (seventh, mano-consciousness) running after the 第八阿賴耶識 (eighth, ālaya-consciousness). In Chan language it is the heart's 住 (abiding) — always lodging somewhere — instead of its 無住 (non-abiding).

The Chan material, however, pushes further than these doctrinal formulations by making one devastating observation about the *object* of 馳求:

「佛是塵，法亦是塵。」 *"The Buddha is dust; the Dharma is dust."*

This is not a rejection of Buddhism. It is a precise observation about how attachment works. 馳求 is not restricted to ordinary sense-objects — money, status, sensory pleasures, the next notification. It can include the highest spiritual goals. The moment the heart takes "Buddha" or "Dharma" as something to chase, to grasp, to possess — the moment these become the *target* of 奔逐之相 rather than something recognized within — they have become 塵, dust, something external that gets in the eyes. This is a sobering sentence for anyone on a spiritual path. The very things we revere can become fuel for the same endless pursuit. (The classical material notes this carefully: it is the *falling-into-pursuit* that makes them dust, not their nature as teachings.)

The text then offers its counter-formula, a three-clause diagnosis-and-cure:

「時中不用挂情，情不挂物。無善可取，無惡可棄。莫教被他籠罩著。」 *"In the midst of things, don't hang up your feelings; let feelings not stick to objects. There's no good to grasp, no evil to discard. Don't let yourself be caged/covered by them."*

Three distinct moves are folded into this. They must not be flattened into one.

1. 不用挂情 / 情不挂物. Don't let feeling attach to objects; don't let objects draw feeling out of you. The classical material explicitly frames this as the *coupled* relation of 馳求: 心 (mind) and 境物 (objects) cling to each other. The prescription is symmetric. The cure is not "feel nothing"; it is "let the two not stick."

2. 無善可取，無惡可棄. Nothing good to take up; nothing evil to throw away. This is often missed. 馳求 does not only run toward what we want — it also runs *away* from what we don't want. Aversion is itself a form of pursuit; you are still chasing, just in the opposite direction. The text refuses the escape hatch: you cannot cure 馳求 by replacing one chase with its mirror-image. (This is why it places 取 and 棄 on the same line. They are the same disease.)

3. 莫教被他籠罩著. Don't be caged/covered by them. The image is specific. 籠罩 suggests something external settling *over* the heart, closing it in — like a net, like a lid, like weather. This is what 馳求 looks like from the inside: not only the outward running but the inward trapping. You feel it as the world narrowing down to the one thing the heart has fixed on.

Another passage in the same tradition describes the same disease from the seeker's own side:

「無端起知解，著相求菩提，情存一念悟……枉遷流……茫然趣兩頭。」 *"Arising groundlessly in discriminative knowing, clinging to forms to seek bodhi, preserving in the heart a single thought of wanting-awakening… pointlessly drifting on… confusedly running toward both ends."*

Although the word 馳求 is not directly used here, the description is unmistakable, and it adds three pieces that the earlier line did not:

- 無端起知解 — discrimination arises without genuine cause. The mind manufactures a problem where there was none. - 著相求菩提 — bodhi is sought through clinging to forms. Liberation is taken as a thing with a shape that can be grasped. - 情存一念悟 — a single thought of "I want to awaken" is preserved in the heart. Even this most subtle wish, if held, becomes fuel.

The result: 枉遷流 (pointless wandering) and 茫然趣兩頭 (confusedly running toward both ends). The image of being pulled between two heads of the same snake is important: "liberation" and "delusion" can both be objects of 馳求, and the heart that runs between them is the same heart.

義端禪師 then brings 馳求 down to a very practical matter: our relationship to words and teachers:

「終不代得自己見解……轉加煩亂……更從我覓什麼……重重剝得淨盡。」 *"It will never substitute for your own seeing… only adds to your disturbance… what more are you looking for from me… even when peeled clean, layer after layer."*

Even if you learn "all kinds of differentiated doctrinal paths" (種種差別義路), the texts you collect will never substitute for your own insight (自己見解). If you only memorize the clever turns of others' speech, you will only become more disturbed (轉加煩亂). When a monk asks the master a question, he retorts: "What more are you looking for from me?" — directly cutting the 馳求 tendency to externalize, to run to the teacher, the book, the formulation for something outside itself. And even when the teaching has "peeled away layer after layer until clean" (重重剝得淨盡), if there is still something the mind *stops on* — some final foothold — the setup is only a provisional device (施設終究只是接人方便).

This is why the classical material uses the verbs 停留 (to stop and rest on) and 覓 (to seek, to look-for) as the diagnostic vocabulary around 馳求. 停留 is the moment the running pauses into a fixed object; 覓 is the looking that immediately precedes another run.

Finally, the material makes a distinction that is essential and easy to lose. Not all "seeking" is 馳求. The same text preserves:

「尋牛須訪迹，學道訪無心。迹在牛還在，無心道易尋。」 *"Seeking the ox, you must follow its traces; studying the Way, you trace back to no-mind. The trace remains, the ox remains; no-mind makes the Way easy to seek."*

Here 尋 and 訪 are kept — but their motion is the opposite. The ox-seeker follows tracks *back to* the ox; the Way-seeker traces *back to* 無心 (no-mind). The direction is inward, toward source. 馳求 runs *out*; 訪無心 returns. The classical material honors the verb "seeking" — does not abolish it — but distinguishes between seeking as endless flight outward, and seeking as tracing back. Conflating these two is one of the most common mistakes a contemporary reader can make.

A Walk-Through of 馳求 in Contemporary Life

Let's take this classical description and run it through a few scenes that almost anyone alive today will recognize. The point is not to add new ideas but to let the classical definition do its diagnostic work — strictly, without softening.

Scene 1 — The first ten minutes after waking

You open your eyes. Before your feet touch the floor, a hand reaches for the phone. The screen is already lit with notifications. Within thirty seconds the heart is somewhere else — in a group chat argument, in a news headline, in a friend's vacation photo, in the day's first micro-dose of outrage. You have not chosen any of this. The heart has simply *bolted* (馳). Underneath the bolt is the felt sense — almost never named — that *this* moment, this body, this bed, this room is not quite enough; that something more interesting, more necessary, more real is happening out there. That felt sense is 求.

Notice that this is not "wanting a phone." The phone is just the current vehicle. The structure was there before phones: it showed up in the morning newspaper, the radio alarm, the cup of coffee paired with the day's anxieties. The technology didn't invent 馳求. It engineered a vastly more efficient delivery system for it — which is something we will return to.

Where this gets mis-mapped: Many people, looking at this scene, diagnose it as "addiction to the phone." Addiction-language is not wrong, but it skips the classical point. The classical point is that *the racing-and-seeking is the prior condition*. The phone is the object of the moment, but the *posture* of the heart — incomplete, looking outward — would simply find another object if the phone vanished. You can scroll through the same mental feed in a silent meditation hall. The cure is not to remove the object; it is to recognize the posture.

Scene 2 — The workday

A project is due. You sit down to work. Within minutes you are checking email, switching tabs, opening a chat. When you finally return to the project, your mind has already constructed an entire *future* in which the project is finished, acknowledged, praised, or, alternatively, failed, criticized, suffered. You are running toward (or away from) imagined outcomes that do not yet exist. The hands are typing; the heart is somewhere else entirely.

This is 馳求 in its more socially acceptable form. The classical diagnosis fits perfectly: the heart is not *at* the keyboard; it has bolted toward (馳) a future object (the outcome), driven by the underlying sense (求) that "things will only be okay when…". Notice the futility built into the structure: when the outcome arrives, the heart does not stay there to rest. It immediately runs toward the next one.

Where this gets mis-mapped: Productivity culture tells you the problem is "focus" — that you need better attention, better tools, better discipline. The classical diagnosis is deeper: the problem is not that focus is poor; it is that the heart has *already* chosen where it wants to be (somewhere other than here), and "focus" is just a polite word for dragging it back against its will. That is why focus is exhausting. You are trying to win an argument with your own 馳求 using willpower — and 馳求 is the one that has all day.

Scene 3 — Closeness

Someone you love says something slightly off. Or doesn't say something. Or you imagine they are thinking something. The heart bolts. It constructs an entire narrative — about being neglected, about being seen, about what they really meant, about what you should say back, about whether you should say anything at all, about whether this relationship is right, about whether *you* are the kind of person who gets this kind of treatment. In seconds, the dinner table is a thousand miles away.

Here the classical material is especially sharp. Recall that 馳求 runs in *two* directions: toward what we want, and away from what we don't want. Closeness activates both at once. We chase the loved one's approval, attention, presence; we flee their judgment, withdrawal, distance. Either way, the heart is not at the table. Either way, the racing is the same racing.

Where this gets mis-mapped: Modern relationship advice tends to call this "anxious attachment" or "insecurity." These are useful clinical descriptions. But the classical description adds something: the *felt experience* of being slightly out of step with the person in front of you, of needing the next moment to land differently, is itself the agitation that prevents the rest you say you want. You are not in fact trying to be closer to that person; you are trying to be free of the racing. The two feel similar but they are not the same project.

Scene 4 — The spiritual seeker

You read a teaching. It resonates. You start collecting — books, teachers, retreats, podcasts, frameworks. You compare translations. You build a vocabulary of "the path." You can speak fluently about non-attachment, emptiness, no-self, beginner's mind. Your bookshelf is impressive. And some part of you still feels just as restless as it did before any of it began — perhaps more so, because now you also feel you are *failing* at not being restless.

義端禪師's voice is exact for this case:

「終不代得自己見解……轉加煩亂。」 *"It will never substitute for your own insight… only adds to your disturbance."*

This is the heart of the 佛是塵, 法亦是塵 warning. The teaching itself, taken as something to acquire, has become an object of 馳求. You are now racing toward (馳) the experience called "awakening" or "understanding" (求), and the racing looks exactly like diligent practice. The classical image 茫然趣兩頭 — confusedly running between both ends — describes this precisely: you alternate between chasing insight and fleeing your own lack of it, but you are on the same treadmill.

The further hazard: even reading *this* essay can become 馳求. You may feel a small brightening — "ah, I see what 馳求 is" — and that brightening itself becomes a thing to chase again. The classical material, very gently, does not let you off this hook either.

Scene 5 — Outrage, doomscrolling, the news feed

Something terrible has happened, or something has been claimed to have happened, somewhere. You read. You read more. Your shoulders are up near your ears. You compose responses in your head. You feel righteous. You feel exhausted. You go to bed; the phone is on the pillow.

This is 馳求 running on the negative track — and the classical material explicitly refuses to grant that this is any less 馳求 than chasing pleasure. 無善可取, 無惡可棄. The structure is identical: the heart has bolted (馳) toward a target (the injustice, the threat, the insult, the stupidity of the other side), driven by the underlying sense (求) that "this must not stand / I must get this out / I cannot rest until this is resolved." The chasing *feels* like moral seriousness. But the felt experience — the racing pulse, the clenched jaw, the inability to think about anything else — is the same agitation that the seeker feels about their stalled awakening.

Where this gets mis-mapped: People often say "but this is *important* — how can I be detached from injustice?" The classical answer is not detachment in the sense of apathy. 情不挂物 is not "feel nothing." It is the particular quality of feeling that does not turn into a project, a campaign, a hunt. You can be fully engaged with the world and the heart can be unagitated; the heart can also be "fully engaged" and entirely consumed. The Chan material is interested in which of these is true.

Scene 6 — Parenting, and the optimization of children

A child is doing something — a school assignment, a friendship, a choice of instrument. You find yourself running ahead: toward the outcome you imagine for them, away from the outcome you fear. You are exhausted. The child, meanwhile, is playing with their cereal.

This is 馳求 wearing a face of love. The classical diagnosis is uncomfortable because the love is not the problem — the love is real. The problem is the *shape* the love has taken: a project, a future, an object to be brought into being. The child has become a thing the heart runs toward, and that running feels like devotion. But the felt experience on both sides — the racing heart, the pressured child — is the same experience as the office worker chasing metrics, the seeker chasing awakening, the news-reader chasing outrage. The objects differ. The 馳求 is identical.

Where this gets mis-mapped: It is very hard, in this scene, to see 馳求 for what it is, because the love is genuine and the stakes feel real. The classical material is not asking you to love less. It is asking whether your love can be present at the table or whether it has already bolted to a future cereal-future-instrument-future-admission-letter. The diagnosis is of the *direction*, not the *intensity*.

Scene 7 — Even rest

You sit down to rest. Within a few minutes, you are thinking about the rest — how well you are resting, whether you are doing it right, whether you should be doing something else, what rest is supposed to feel like, whether other people rest better. The very act of trying to be at rest becomes another run.

This is the deepest diagnostic scene, and the one the 景德傳燈錄 material is really about. 終日馳求有什麼休歇. The answer is given by the structure of the question itself: rest cannot be found by running toward it, because the running *is* the unrest. 馳求 is so total that it can even co-opt the attempt to stop it. This is why the cure cannot be a project of stopping — that would just be 馳求 in reverse, running *away* from running, which is the 茫然趣兩頭 of which the text warns.

Why Contemporaries Need This Concept Especially

A few features of the present moment make 馳求 worth naming carefully now, in a way the Chan masters did not need to do, because their environment did not amplify the problem as ours does.

The attention economy is engineered 馳求. The business model of most digital platforms is, precisely, to keep the heart running outward toward the next object and never letting it settle. Variable-reward schedules (the slot-machine logic of infinite feeds) exploit the same dopaminergic prediction-error loops that neuroscientists have identified in lab studies. There is a tempting move here to say "neuroscience has proven the Buddhist diagnosis," but that overstates. Neuroscience has shown that the brain has circuits that *resemble* the structure of 馳求 — circuits that fire when anticipated reward is delayed or uncertain. This is a structural analogy, not a proof of the Buddhist claim. What it does confirm is that 馳求 is not a moral failing or a personal quirk; it is the natural behavior of a nervous system that has not been otherwise trained. The classical diagnosis and the neurobiological description are looking at the same phenomenon from different angles, and each can illuminate the other without collapsing into it.

The self-optimization culture has spiritualized 馳求. Many contemporary readers will recognize the move of taking a spiritual concept (presence, awakening, alignment, purpose) and turning it into the next thing to optimize — a project, a metric, an identity. The Chan warning 佛是塵, 法亦是塵 was written for exactly this hazard. The form it takes today is different from the eighth-century form, but the structure is the same: the very thing proposed as the cure has become the next object of pursuit.

The paradox has become acute. It is now extremely common for people to *want to want less* — to feel anxious about their anxiety, to feel guilty about their restlessness, to be exhausted by their own striving. The Chan material addresses this with the simplest possible move: there is nowhere the heart has to *get to*. The racing itself is the unrest. There is no improved version of yourself waiting on the other side of enough striving. When this is heard, even provisionally, the whole project of self-improvement-by-running starts to lose its grip.

The 訪無心 distinction is exactly what is missing in much contemporary spiritual language. A great deal of what is offered as "letting go" today actually *is* a kind of 馳求 — a seeking toward a state, a pushing-away of experience, a chasing of "non-attachment" as an identity. The Chan material preserves a different kind of seeking: 學道訪無心 — *tracing back* to no-mind. The motion is not toward an object, however refined; it is back toward the source. This distinction is not decorative. It is the difference between an exhausting spiritual treadmill and something that actually loosens the racing.

Common Misreadings, and Where the Classical Material Cuts Against Them

A few standard ways of reading this concept flatten or distort it. Each one is worth naming because the classical material is precise on each point.

Misreading 1: "馳求 means attachment to worldly things, so the cure is to be spiritual." This is the reading the 景德傳燈錄 most directly dismantles. 佛法 can become 塵. The spiritual-path version of 馳求 is not less 馳求; it is 馳求 in a subtler and more seductive form. The cure is not *what* you chase but *whether the heart is running*. A heart running toward awakening is not more awake than a heart running toward a notification.

Misreading 2: "馳求 means desire, so the cure is to suppress desire." This misreads the counter-formula. 無善可取, 無惡可棄 does not say "kill desire." It says there is no good to take hold of *and* no evil to push away — because both are forms of the same grasping posture. Suppression is itself 馳求 running in the opposite direction. This is the 茫然趣兩頭 the text warns against: bouncing between wanting and not-wanting is not freedom, it is the same treadmill.

Misreading 3: "馳求 is about external objects, so I just need to remove external distractions." The classical diagnosis is of the heart's *direction*, not the object's presence. You can 馳求 in a quiet room, on a meditation cushion, in a silent forest. The fact that the felt experience of racing persists in the absence of any obvious external target is, in fact, the most telling diagnostic that the racing is not caused by the object. Removing the object may help for a while, but if the heart's posture has not changed, the next object — perhaps an internal one, like the project of "no longer having objects" — will appear.

Misreading 4: "So don't seek, then. Don't practice. Just stop." This misreads the 訪無心 distinction. The text does not abolish seeking; it distinguishes *two kinds*. 終日馳求 runs outward toward objects, looking for rest *there*. 學道訪無心 traces back, follows signs *inward*, returns to the source. The motion is genuinely different. The first is exhausting because the goal keeps receding; the second is lightened by 無心 — by the fact that you are not chasing a thing but uncovering what was already the case. Conflating these — hearing "馳求 is bad" and concluding "therefore don't seek" — produces either paralysis or a kind of forced blankness, neither of which is what the classical material is pointing at.

Misreading 5: "情不挂物 means don't feel anything." 情不挂物 is not absence of feeling. It is feeling that does not stick — feeling that meets the world fully and does not turn into a project, a hunt, a future. The classical material is unusually explicit on this: 時中不用挂情 — in the midst of things, don't *hang up* your feelings. "Hanging up" (挂) is a specific image: you don't put feeling on a hook and leave it dangling on an object. You let feeling pass through the moment without lodging there. There is a warmth and responsiveness preserved in this that is very far from cold detachment.

Misreading 6: "If 馳求 is the problem, then stillness is the goal." Stillness taken as a goal is itself an object of 馳求. The Chan tradition is pointedly uninterested in stillness as a state to acquire. What it points at is something more like the *release of the racing* — which is not a state but the cessation of a particular compulsive motion. This is why the cure is given as a verb-pair (挂 / 不挂) and as paired negations (無取, 無棄) rather than as a positive attainment. The classical material is not telling you what to be; it is telling you which activity to release.

Where to Sit with This

If the classical diagnosis is correct — that 馳求 is a continuous default mode, that it can co-opt the very attempt to cure it, and that even the highest objects can become its fuel — then there is something almost comic about trying to *finish* the problem.義端禪師's question is not a command; it is an invitation to notice what is already happening. 終日馳求 — all day long, the running. 有什麼休歇 — and yet, somewhere in there, rest is not impossible; it is being prevented by the very running that seems to be searching for it.

The invitation, then, is not to a project but to a noticing. The motion that has been running outward for years does not need to be defeated. It needs to be *seen*. The 訪無心 the text mentions is not another goal to chase but a different direction — back toward what was never actually missing. The 情不挂物 is not a state to attain but a release of a particular adhesion — a letting of feeling meet the world without becoming a hunt.

This is why a concept as simple as 馳求, two characters, can sit quietly at the center of an entire path: it names the most ordinary and most total of our activities, and it offers, in the same breath, the diagnostic that lets it be seen.