Not creating delusions is enlightenment.
BodhidharmaRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
True understanding arises from direct experience rather than intellectual analysis.
Bodhidharma's quote highlights the limitations of the mind in grasping the essence of reality. It suggests that purely intellectual study of reality does not lead to real understanding; rather, true comprehension comes from engaging with reality through direct experience, which allows one to see beyond the confines of thought and the mind's limitations.
Themes
MindRealityUnderstandingExperiencePhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
In a meditation class, one might say this quote to emphasize the importance of direct experience over conceptual thinking.
More from Bodhidharma
All quotes βThe Way is basically perfect. It doesn't require perfecting.
BodhidharmaRead
Buddhas move freely through birth and death, appearing and disappearing at will.
BodhidharmaRead
If we should be blessed by some great reward, such as fame or fortune, it's the fruit of a seed planted by us in the past.
BodhidharmaRead
Freeing oneself from words is liberation.
BodhidharmaRead
The Dharma is the truth that all natures are pure.
BodhidharmaRead
Similar quotes
I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter.
Stephen GreenblattRead
I believe there is something going on in a conscious being, which includes many animals, as well as ourselves, that is not a computational activity. And to be conscious at all is not a quality that a computer as such will ever possess - no matter how complicated, no matter how well it plays chess or any of these things.
Roger PenroseRead
Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
Marshall McluhanRead
As many arrows, loosed several ways, come to one mark...so many a thousand actions, once afoot, end in one purpose.
William ShakespeareRead
Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.
Donna J. HarawayRead
Just as I sit down to meditate, all the vilest subjects in the world come up. The whole thing is nauseating. Why should the mind think thoughts I do not want it to think? I am as it were a slave to the mind.
Swami VivekanandaRead