If you spend all your time analyzing sutras and sastras, or remembering and rehashing retreat experiences, you will never accomplish or complete anything. Do you know the story of the monkey in the peach orchard? A monkey climbed the first tree and plucked a peach. Then it saw another peach, so it put the first one under its arm and reached for the second one. Then the monkey saw another and another, and it kept putting the one it had just picked under its arm. Finally, it picked every peach from every tree in the orchard. The monkey thought it had all of them, but when it looked, all that remained was the one in its hand.

During the retreat, you may find yourself acting like a greedy monkey: "Oh! I've got something. What's that? There's more? What else can I get?" If you greedy monkeys do not come to your senses, you will pick tree after tree clean, and in the end collapse from exhaustion, without having eaten a single peach.

Look into yourself to see if you are a greedy monkey. The best thing to do is pick one peach and eat it slowly, carefully, mindfully. What peach am I talking about? The peach you pick and eat is the method of your practice.

With evil capacity and mistaken understanding,
One cannot penetrate the Tathagata's principle of complete sudden enlightenment.
Hinayana monks, though diligent, forget the mind of Tao.
Outer path practitioners may be clever, but they lack wisdom.