To go from mortal to Buddha, you have to put an end to karma, nurture your awareness, and accept what life brings.
BODHIDHARMABut when you first embark on the Path, your awareness won’t be focused. You’re likely to see all sorts of strange, dreamlike scenes. But you shouldn’t doubt that all such scenes come from your own mind and nowhere else.
More Bodhidharma Quotes
-
-
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.
BODHIDHARMA -
The mind’s capacity is limitless, and its manifestations are inexhaustible. Seeing forms with your eyes, hearing sounds with your ears, smelling odors with your nose, tasting flavors with your tongue, every movement or state is all your mind.
BODHIDHARMA -
Whoever realizes that the six senses aren’t real, that the five aggregates are fictions, that no such things can be located anywhere in the body, understands the language of Buddhas.
BODHIDHARMA -
Once you stop clinging and let things be, you’ll be free, even of birth and death. You’ll transform everything.
BODHIDHARMA -
Those who worship don’t know, and those who know don’t worship.
BODHIDHARMA -
When your mind doesn’t stir inside, the world doesn’t arise outside. When the world and the mind are both transparent, this is true vision. And such understanding is true understanding.
BODHIDHARMA -
Don’t hate life and death or love life and death. Keep your every thought free of delusion, and in life you’ll witness the beginning of nirvana, and in death you’ll experience the assurance of no rebirth.
BODHIDHARMA -
As mortals, we’re ruled by conditions, not by ourselves.
BODHIDHARMA -
Worship means reverence and humility. It means revering your real self and humbling delusions. If you can wipe out evil desires and harbor good thoughts, even if nothing shows, it’s worship. Such form is its real form.
BODHIDHARMA -
The mind is always present. You just don’t see it.
BODHIDHARMA -
Buddhas move freely through birth and death, appearing and disappearing at will.
BODHIDHARMA -
But this mind isn’t somewhere outside the material body of the four elements. Without this mind we can’t move. The body has no awareness. Like a plant or a stone, the body has no nature. So how does it move? It’s the mind that moves.
BODHIDHARMA -
Once you see your nature, sex is basically immaterial.
BODHIDHARMA -
The essence of the Way is detachment.
BODHIDHARMA -
If you use your mind to study reality, you won’t understand either your mind or reality. If you study reality without using your mind, you’ll understand both.
BODHIDHARMA






