Bodhidharma Quotes About Understanding

Quotes about: Understanding

• 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. . . . The mind and the world are opposites, and vision arises where they meet. 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

  Reality, Opposites, Understanding

• . . . the fools of this world prefer to look for sages far away. They don't believe that the wisdom of their own mind is the sage . . . the sutras say, "Mind is the teaching." But people of no understanding don't believe in their own mind or that by understanding this teaching they can become a sage. They prefer to look for distant knowledge and long for things in space, buddha-images, light, incense, and colors. They fall prey to falsehood and lose their minds to insanity.

  Bodhidharma

  Believe, Fall, Teaching

• The Buddha is your real body, your original mind. This mind has no form or characteristics, no cause or effect, no tendons or bones. It's like space. You can't hold it. It's not the mind of materialists or nihilists. If you don't see your own miraculously aware nature, you'll never find a Buddha, even if you break your body into atoms.

  Bodhidharma

  Wisdom, Real, Space

  Bodhidharma (2009). “The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma”, p.43, Macmillan

• 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.

  Bodhidharma

  People, Meditation, Understanding

  Bodhidharma (2009). “The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma”, p.71, Macmillan

• 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

  Understanding, Mind, Vision

  Bodhidharma (2009). “The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma”, p.55, Macmillan

• If you know that everything comes from the mind, don't become attached. Once attached, you're unaware. But once you see your own nature, the entire Canon becomes so much prose. It's thousands of sutras and shastras only amount to a clear mind. Understanding comes in midsentence. What good are doctrines? The ultimate Truth is beyond words. Doctrines are words. They're not the Way. The Way is wordless. Words are illusions. . . . Don't cling to appearances, and you'll break through all barriers. . . .

  Bodhidharma

  Truth, Break Through, Understanding

  Bodhidharma (2009). “The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma”, p.31, Macmillan

• 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.

  Bodhidharma

  Understanding, Way, Dharma

  Bodhidharma (2009). “The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma”, p.55, North Point Press

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin