切莫揀人 Not Picking And Choosing
眾女子道：「長老，你出家人，切莫揀人佈施。」長老道：「怎敢，怎敢。我和尚奉大唐旨意，一路西來，微生不損，見苦就救；遇穀粒手拈入口，逢絲縷聯綴遮身。怎敢揀主佈施？」众女子道：「长老，你出家人，切莫拣人布施。」长老道：「怎敢，怎敢。我和尚奉大唐旨意，一路西来，微生不损，见苦就救；遇谷粒手拈入口，逢丝缕联缀遮身。怎敢拣主布施？」
逐句解 Line by line
The women said, "Elder, you are one who has left the household life. You must not pick and choose among those who give alms."
出家人 — one gone out from the house, the standard term for a monk. 佈施 is bù shī, almsgiving, one of the six perfections; 康熙 方部五畫 gives 施 at 式支切, 音詩, and the 設也 sense — to set out, to bestow. They are quoting his own rulebook at him.
The Elder said, "I would not dare, I would not dare."
怎敢 twice over. He is not conceding the argument; he is protesting that the charge does not apply to him, and the doubling is a man on the back foot.
"This monk travels west by the decree of the Great Tang, and along the whole road I have not harmed the smallest living thing, and have helped whatever suffering I met;"
微生不損 — not harming even minute life — is the first precept taken to its strictest reading. 見苦就救 pairs it with the positive duty: wherever he met suffering, he relieved it. Four clauses, each of four characters, laying out a standing rule of life.
"where I have come upon a grain of corn I have picked it up with my hand and eaten it, and where I have come upon a thread of silk I have stitched it together to cover myself."
Two matching clauses, 遇穀粒 against 逢絲縷 — a single grain, a single thread, three characters then four in each half. Where the sentence before it stated the rule, this one gives the evidence: a life lived on what is dropped.
"How should I dare pick and choose among those who give?"
He turns their own word back on them. 揀主 is choosing between donors, where they said 揀人, choosing between people — a small, precise adjustment that makes it about hosts rather than about worth.
They accuse him of being a fussy guest and they do it in the vocabulary of his own religion. Almsgiving is a formal virtue; refusing what is offered is a slight to the giver. On the face of it they have him.
His answer is one of the more affecting things in the chapter. He does not argue doctrine. He gives an account of how he lives: a single dropped grain picked up and eaten, a single thread of silk stitched into his clothes. It is a description of somebody who takes as little as it is possible to take.
And it is exactly the wrong argument to be making here, because it concedes their framing — that this is about his manners as a guest. It is not. The food is people. He has been manoeuvred into defending his humility when the objection he actually has is one nobody in the room will say out loud.