The Real Buddha

Huang-po Hsi-yün (?-849)

People perform a vast number of complex practices
hoping to gain spiritual merit as countless as the grains of sand on the riverbed of the Ganges:
but you are essentially already perfect in every way.

Don’t try and augment perfection with meaningless practice.
If it’s the right occasion to perform them, let practices happen.

When the time has passed, let them stop.

If you are not absolutely sure that mind is the Buddha, and if you are attached to the ideas of winning merit from spiritual practices, then your thinking is misguided and not in harmony with the Way.

To practice complex spiritual practices is to progress step by step:
but the eternal Buddha is not a Buddha of progressive stages.

Just awaken to the one Mind,
and there is absolutely nothing to be attained.

This is the real Buddha.


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Enlightenment

When practitioners of Zen fail to transcend the world of their senses and thoughts, all they do has no value.

Yet, when senses and thoughts are obliterated all the roads to universal mind are blocked and there is no entrance.

The primal mind has to be recognised along with the senses and thoughts. It neither belongs to them nor is independent of them.

Don’t build your understanding on your senses and thoughts,yet don’t look for the mind separate from your senses and thoughts.

Don’t attempt to grasp Reality by pushing away your senses and thoughts.

Unobstructed freedom is to be neither attached not detached.

This is enlightenment.


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Here it is – right now. Start thinking about it and you miss it.


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All Buddhas and all ordinary beings are nothing but the one mind. This mind is beginningless and endless, unborn and indestructible. It has no color or shape, neither exists nor doesn't exist, isn't old or new, long or short, large or small, since it transcends all measures, limits, names, and comparisons. It is what you see in front of you.

Start to think about it and immediately you are mistaken. It is like the boundless void, which can't be fathomed or measured.

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People are scared to empty their minds fearing that they will be engulfed by the void. What they don’t realize is that their own mind is the void.

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The Buddha and all sentient beings are nothing but expressions of the one mind. There is nothing else.


Huang Po