"Not creating delusions is enlightenment"
About this Quote
Bodhidharma reduces enlightenment to a simple act of non-doing: stop manufacturing the stories that cloud the mind. Delusions here are not only wild fantasies but the everyday fabrications that turn raw experience into fixed identities, judgments, and fears. The mind habitually spins interpretations, clinging to what pleases and resisting what hurts. That spinning is what Buddhists call ignorance. When the mind does not add anything extra, reality appears as it is, vivid and unobstructed. Enlightenment, then, is not an exotic state you achieve but the mind free of the extra layer it keeps painting over things.
The phrasing matters. It does not say destroy delusions, as if they were solid objects to be smashed. It says do not create them. Delusion is an activity, moment by moment. Stop the activity and the problem ends at its root. This echoes Bodhidharma’s known teaching style: direct pointing beyond words and rituals, wall-gazing meditation that lets thoughts rise and fall without interference, and seeing one’s nature. He brought to China a form of practice shaped by texts like the Lankavatara Sutra, emphasizing mind’s empty, self-luminous nature. To that tradition, enlightenment is the recognition of what is already the case when you stop stirring the water.
Applied to daily life, the line invites a change in how attention works. Notice the instant you turn a sensation into a story about me and mine. Notice how quickly a thought becomes a verdict. In that noticing, refrain. Let the thought pass without building a house around it. Compassion and clarity are not added qualities; they emerge when the mind is not busy with its own projections. The world does not need to be perfected for awakening to occur. The mind needs to stop perfecting its illusions. When it does, there is nothing left between you and what is.
The phrasing matters. It does not say destroy delusions, as if they were solid objects to be smashed. It says do not create them. Delusion is an activity, moment by moment. Stop the activity and the problem ends at its root. This echoes Bodhidharma’s known teaching style: direct pointing beyond words and rituals, wall-gazing meditation that lets thoughts rise and fall without interference, and seeing one’s nature. He brought to China a form of practice shaped by texts like the Lankavatara Sutra, emphasizing mind’s empty, self-luminous nature. To that tradition, enlightenment is the recognition of what is already the case when you stop stirring the water.
Applied to daily life, the line invites a change in how attention works. Notice the instant you turn a sensation into a story about me and mine. Notice how quickly a thought becomes a verdict. In that noticing, refrain. Let the thought pass without building a house around it. Compassion and clarity are not added qualities; they emerge when the mind is not busy with its own projections. The world does not need to be perfected for awakening to occur. The mind needs to stop perfecting its illusions. When it does, there is nothing left between you and what is.
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| Topic | Wisdom |
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