Hui Neng Quotes

Look within! The secret is inside you.

Know your mind and see your nature.

Never wants to what?” Meet anybody for a drink. Oh, he had to go out last night and meet this television writer for a drink downtown, in the Village and all. That’s what started it. He says the only people he ever really wants to meet for a drink somewhere are all either dead or unavailable. He says he never even wants to have lunch with anybody, even, unless he thinks there’s a good chance it’s going to turn out to be Jesus, the person – or the Buddha, or Hui-neng, or Shankaracharya, or somebody like that. You know.

When our mind works freely without any hindrance, and is at liberty to 'come' or to 'go', we attain Samadhi of Prajna, or liberation. Such a state is called the function of 'thoughtlessness'. But to refrain from thinking of anything, so that all thoughts are suppressed, is to be Dharma-ridden, and this is an erroneous view.

Emptiness constantly falls within our reach. It is always with us, and conditions all our knowledge, all our deeds and is our life itself. It is only when we attempt to pick it up and hold it forth as something before our eyes that it eludes us, frustrates all our efforts and vanishes like vapor.

菩提本无树，明镜亦非台，本来无一物，何处惹尘埃。

Just be true, and there are no barriers.

...no debéis asiros a la verdad, y no debéis asiros a la ausencia de verdad. En este sentido, el Realizado siempre os dice a los mendicantes que sepáis que la verdad que enseño es como una balsa; hasta la verdad hay que abandonarla, tanto más la ausencia de verdad.

No son los ojos, los oídos, la nariz ni la lengua los que son capaces de pensar; la realidad como tal tiene una naturaleza esencial en virtud de la cual produce el pensamiento. Si no hubiera ojos ni oídos ni formas ni sonidos en la realidad como tal, se descompondría de inmediato.

The Master said, “Fa-ta, when your mind practices, it reads the Lotus. When it doesn’t practice, the Lotus does the reading. When your mind is true, it reads the Lotus. When your mind is false, the Lotus does the reading. When you develop the understanding of a buddha, you read the Lotus. When you develop the understanding of an ordinary being, the Lotus reads you.

When I speak about zazen, what comes to mind first is the following passage from the Dan-gyo, a record of the life and sayings of the Sixth Patriarch of Zen Buddhism, Eno Daikan (Hui-neng Ta-chien):30 Za (sitting) means to not give rise to thoughts (no dualism) under any circumstance. Zen (meditation) means to see your original nature and not become confused.

The above difference between Eno and Jinshu later came to cause the division of Zen Buddhism into two branches: the Southern School, derived from Hui-neng, and the Northern School, stemming from Shenhsiu. The former advocated direct seeing into one’s original Buddha nature—that is, sudden awakening to one’s self-nature. The latter taught gradual awakening through perpetual endeavor to keep one’s mind clean.

By the time of the sixth patriarch, Hui-neng, it is recorded, monks were polishing rice as well as cutting firewood. That is to say, at this time manual labor had become an essential part of Zen training. The Zen master Pai-chang (720–814), whose Ching-kuei (Monastic Regulations) forms the model for Zen communal life, set the example himself for this kind of life by participating in manual labor with the other monks even in his old age. This was in accordance with his famous expression, "If one does not do any work for a day, one should not eat for a day." The Zen goal of living with an "ordinary mind" may be said to have been developed through a life such as this.

迷时师 度，悟了自度；度名虽一，用处不同。惠能生在边方，语音不

Zen particularly regards rational inquiry and academic scholarship as a hindrance along the way of enlightenment. The life story we told earlier of Hui-neng makes the Sixth Patriarch completely illiterate. Although this part of the story is contradicted by other reports giving testimony to his intimate knowledge of the sutras, this illiteracy is taken as a criterion for the authenticity of his way of Zen.

Thus, the Fifth Patriarch of Zen, Hui Neng, said twelve centuries before Bucky Fuller, "From the beginning there has never been a thing." This is easy to see, if you are thinking in Chinese, but very difficult if you are thinking in Indo-European. Einstein only got to that mode of apprehension by thinking in mathematics (and in pictures, as he once confessed).

We have manufactured all “material things” out of an ever-changing deluge of photons and electrons in an abysmal void. As Nietzsche first declared, “We are all greater artists than we realize.” (Or, as the Zen roshi Hui Neng said, “From the beginning, there has never been a ‘thing.’”)