Do You Want "Mindfulness" or Do You Want Zen?
A message from the founder of Zen:
A buddha is an idle person. He doesn’t run around after fortune and fame. Buddhas of the past and future only talk about seeing your nature. Unless they see their own nature, people who claim to have attained unexcelled, complete enlightenment are liars.
A buddha is someone who finds freedom in good fortune and in bad. Karma can’t hold him. No matter the karma, a buddha transforms it. A buddha is free of karma, free of cause and effect. To say he attains anything at all is to slander a buddha. What could he possibly attain?
To go from mortal to buddha you need to put an end to karma, nurture your awareness, and accept what life brings. Unless you see your own nature, all this talk about cause and effect is nonsense. Beyond this mind you will never see a buddha. The buddha is a product of your mind. So why look for buddha beyond this mind?
To find a buddha, all you need to do is see your own nature. If you don’t see your own nature, invoking buddhas, reciting sutras, making offerings, and keeping precepts are useless. If you don’t see your nature and run around all day looking somewhere else, you will never find a buddha. The fools of this world prefer to look for sages far away. They don’t believe that the clarity of their own mind is the sage.
If you attain anything at all by invoking buddhas, reciting sutras, making offerings, observing precepts, practicing devotions, or doing good works, it’s conditional, it’s karmic. It turns the wheel of cause and effect. As long as you are subject to birth and death, you will never attain enlightenment. To attain enlightenment you have to see your own nature.
Using the mind to look for reality is delusion.
Not using the mind to look for reality is awareness.
Act, don’t question. When you question, you’re wrong.
Wrong is the result of questioning.
If you understand anything, you don’t understand.
Only when you understand nothing is it true understanding.
Your real mind is like space. You can’t possess it and you can’t lose it. No karma can restrain this real mind. When the mind stops moving, it enters nirvana. Nirvana is an empty mind. The eternal bliss of nirvana comes from the mind at rest.
The mind is the buddha, and the buddha is the mind. Beyond this mind you’ll never find another buddha. To search for enlightenment or nirvana beyond this mind is impossible. The reality of your own nature, the absence of cause and effect, is what’s meant by mind. Your mind is nirvana.
When mortals are alive, they worry about death. When they’re full, they worry about hunger. But sages don’t consider the past and don’t worry about the future. Nor do they cling to the present. And from moment to moment they follow the path.
The path is fundamentally perfect. It doesn’t require perfecting. The path has no form or sound. It’s subtle and hard to perceive. The awareness of mortals falls short. By mistakenly clinging to the appearance of things, they lose the way.
Despite dwelling in a material body of four elements, your nature is fundamentally pure. It can’t be corrupted. Your real body is fundamentally pure. It can’t be corrupted. Your real body has no sensation, no hunger or thirst, no warmth or cold, no sickness, no love or attachment, no pleasure or pain, no good or bad, no shortness or length, no weakness or strength. Actually, there’s nothing here. It’s only because you cling to this material body that things like hunger and thirst, warmth and cold, and sickness appear.
If you know that everything comes from the mind, don’t hold on to anything. Once you cling, you become unaware. But once you see your own nature, the entire Canon becomes so much prose. What good are doctrines? Understanding comes in mid-sentence.
When you’re deluded, there’s a world to escape. When you’re aware, there is nothing to escape. When you’re deluded, buddhahood exists. When you’re aware, buddhahood doesn’t exist. That’s because buddhahood is awareness.
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—Adapted from The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, Red Pine (translator), 1987.
Posted Apr 8, 2025, 9:11 PM UTC