Success Quote by Bodhidharma

Bodhidharma cuts against the grain of ordinary selfhood: the part of you that cheers at “success” and crumples at “failure” is, in his view, the flimsiest layer of mind. The line is a corrective aimed at practitioners who treat spiritual life like a ledger - good days as proof, bad days as indictment. By calling success and failure “conditions,” he reframes them as weather, not verdicts. They arrive, they pass, they don’t belong to you in any permanent way.

The phrase “neither waxes nor wanes” carries the rhetorical weight of a leader setting discipline. It’s not motivational positivity; it’s a demand for a steadier identity than circumstance. In early Zen’s polemical context, this is also a strike against ritual or merit-based spirituality: if awakening were something the mind “gains,” it could also be “lost,” and then liberation would be just another status upgrade. Bodhidharma refuses that bargain. The mind he points to is not your moods, your thoughts, or your résumé - it’s the underlying awareness that can notice all of those without being improved or damaged by them.

Subtext: stop outsourcing your worth to outcomes. The more you chase external confirmation, the more you reinforce the illusion of a self that can be inflated or diminished. His intent is austerely practical: if you want freedom, you can’t build it on conditions, because conditions are precisely what you can’t control.