From _Zen Lessons: The Art of Leadership_

161. Some Bad Habits

Wanan said:

Recently we see students fondly clinging to prejudiced views, not
comprehending people's conditions, shallow in faith, recalcitrant, liking
people to flatter them, admiring those who follow them while estranging
those who differ from them. Even if they have one bit of knowledge or half
an understanding, yet it is covered by these kinds of bad habits. Many are
those who grow old without attainment.

                                               Forest of Wisdom Collection

162. A False Teaching

Wanan said:

In the Chan communities wherever you go there is a false teaching rampant,
saying that discipline, meditation, and knowledge are unnecessary, and
that it is unnecessary to cultivate virtue or to get rid of craving. Talk
like this is not only creating harm to the Chan communities in the present
day, it is actually the bane of the teaching for ten thousand ages.

Ordinary people have cravings, they love and hate and desire, they are
selfish and ignorant, their every thought is attached to things, like
bubbles in one boiling pot. How can they be cleared and cooled? Much of
what the ancient sages had to think about pertained to this. So it was
that they set up the three studies of discipline, meditation, and
knowledge, in order to control people so that they might be reformed and
restored.

Nowadays younger students do not uphold the precepts, do not practice
meditation, cultivate knowledge, and develop virtue. They just rely on
wide learning and powerful intellect, acting in common, vulgar ways, so
that they are impossible to reform. This is what I mean when I say that
such talk is the bane of the Chan communities for ten thousand ages.

Only those lofty-minded people who travel on the correct basis, keeping
sincere and faithful to understanding and clarifying the issue of life and
death, will not be dragged in by this type. They say that such talk cannot
be believed in and is like poisonous bird droppings, like water drunk and
passed by a viper. It is not good even to read or hear of such talk, much
less ingest it, for it will undoubtedly kill people. Those who know will
naturally stay far away from it.

                                                    letter to Caotang