Bodhidharma
Quotes
A Buddhist monk credited with transmitting Chan Buddhism to China, which later evolved into Zen Buddhism. He is also known for his contributions to the development of martial arts. Bodhidharma’s teachings focused on direct experience of truth through meditation and personal insight, bypassing doctrinal teachings. His influence on Chinese Buddhism and the Zen tradition continues to shape meditation practices and philosophical thought in East Asia.
Bodhidharma
Quotes
A Buddhist monk credited with transmitting Chan Buddhism to China, which later evolved into Zen Buddhism. He is also known for his contributions to the development of martial arts. Bodhidharma’s teachings focused on direct experience of truth through meditation and personal insight, bypassing doctrinal teachings. His influence on Chinese Buddhism and the Zen tradition continues to shape meditation practices and philosophical thought in East Asia.
As long as you're enthralled by a lifeless form, you're not free.
Life and death are important. Don't suffer them in vain.
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.
All Buddhas preach emptiness. Why? Because they wish to crush the concrete ideas of the students. If a student even clings to an idea of emptiness, he betrays all Buddhas.
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.
I never lost or fail, not yet conquered. If I fall seven times, I get up eight.
Buddhas don't practice nonsense.
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.
Only one person in a million becomes enlightened without a teacher's help.
Once you see your nature, sex is basically immaterial.
Without the mind there is no Buddha. Without the Buddha there's no mind.
To go from mortal to Buddha, you have to put an end to karma, nurture your awareness, and accept what life brings.
And the Buddha is the person who's free: free of plans, free of cares.
The mind is always present. You just don't see it.
A buddha is someone who finds freedom in good fortune and bad. Such is his power that karma can't hold him. No matter what kind of karma, a buddha transforms it. Heaven and hell are nothing to him. But the awareness of a mortal is dim compared to that of a buddha, who penetrates everything, inside and out.
The true Way is sublime. It can't be expressed in language. Of what use are scriptures? But someone who sees his own nature finds the Way, even if he can't read a word.
One clings to life although there is nothing to be called life; another clings to death although there is nothing to be called death. In reality, there is nothing to be born; consequently, there is nothing to perish.
Everything good and bad comes from your own mind. To find something beyond the mind is impossible.
...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.
