If you see your nature, you don’t need to read sutras or invoke buddhas. Erudition and knowledge are not only useless but also cloud your awareness. Doctrines are only for pointing to the mind. Once you see your mind, why pay attention to doctrines?
BODHIDHARMAWhen you don’t understand, you depend on reality. When you do understand, reality depends on you.
More Bodhidharma Quotes
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The ignorant mind, with its infinite afflictions, passions, and evils, is rooted in the three poisons. Greed, anger, and delusion.
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To give up yourself without regret is the greatest charity.
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People of this world are deluded. They’re always longing for something, always, in a word, seeking. But the wise wake up. They choose reason over custom. They fix their minds on the sublime and let their bodies change with the seasons.
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Externally keep yourself away from all relationships, and internally have no pantings in your heart; when your mind is like unto a straight-standing wall, you may enter into the Path.
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Leaving behind the false, return to the true: make no discriminations between self and others. In contemplation, one’s mind should be stable and unmoving, like a wall.
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To see nothing is to perceive the Way, and to understand nothing is to know the Dharma, because seeing is neither seeing nor not seeing, and because understanding is neither understanding nor not understanding.
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At every moment where language can’t go, that’s your mind.
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Once you stop clinging and let things be, you’ll be free, even of birth and death. You’ll transform everything.
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As mortals, we’re ruled by conditions, not by ourselves.
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As long as you’re enthralled by a lifeless form, you’re not free.
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But people of the deepest understanding look within, distracted by nothing. Since a clear mind is the Buddha, they attain the understanding of a Buddha without using the mind.
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Many roads lead to the Path, but basically there are only two: reason and practice.
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This one life has no form and is empty by nature. If you become attached by any form, you should reject it. If you see an ego, a soul, a birth, or a death, reject them all.
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The awareness of mortals falls short. As long as they’re attached to appearances, they’re unaware that their minds are empty. And by mistakenly clinging to the appearance of things they lose the Way.
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But while success and failure depend on conditions, the mind neither waxes nor wanes.
BODHIDHARMA