Life & Mortality Quote by Bodhidharma

Freedom, here, isn’t a political condition or a pleasant mood. It’s metaphysical mobility. When Bodhidharma says “Buddhas move freely through birth and death,” he’s not offering comfort about an afterlife; he’s aiming a dagger at the basic human assumption that birth and death are the ultimate walls. In early Zen rhetoric, the boldness is deliberate: awakening isn’t a better explanation of the cage, it’s the discovery that the cage was misperceived from the start.

The line works because it speaks in the idiom of miracle while undermining the need for miracles. “Appearing and disappearing at will” sounds like divine superpowers, yet the subtext is anti-supernatural: if the self is not a fixed entity, then what we call “entering” life and “leaving” it are events in consciousness, not absolute transitions that define us. Bodhidharma leverages vivid, almost theatrical imagery to make a technical point about non-attachment land in the gut.

Context matters. Bodhidharma, the semi-legendary transmitter of Chan (Zen) to China, taught in a culture already steeped in rebirth cosmology and also in Daoist ideas of spontaneity and transformation. This sentence is a rhetorical bridge: it borrows the language of rebirth to pivot the listener toward emptiness and “no-self.” The intent isn’t to promise literal control over reincarnation; it’s to shame our fear-driven clinging by implying that liberation isn’t later. It’s available now, if the mind stops insisting on solidity.