Daily Inspiration Quote by Bodhidharma

Bodhidharma drops a paradox like a trapdoor: the moment you go looking for a solid "mind", you discover you were chasing a story, not a thing. As a leader of a tradition built on direct experience rather than doctrinal comfort, his intent is disciplinary. He is not offering a clever metaphysical riddle for its own sake; he is trying to short-circuit the student’s addiction to certainty, especially the prestige kind that comes from having an answer.

The subtext is almost combative. If you declare, confidently, that "the mind is a fiction", you might think you’ve arrived at wisdom. Bodhidharma immediately pulls the rug: even that insight can harden into a new belief, a subtler ego project. Saying the mind "neither exists nor doesn't exist" refuses the two default options the intellect clings to: realism (there is a mind-thing inside me) and nihilism (there is nothing at all, so nothing matters). Both are still forms of grasping, just with different aesthetics.

Context matters here: early Chan/Zen forms itself partly against scholastic Buddhism, which could turn liberation into a library. Bodhidharma’s rhetoric has the weight of a founder trying to establish a style of practice: stop reifying, stop negating, stop making mental models into idols. The line works because it forces a lived pivot. You can’t solve it by thinking harder; you can only notice the impulse to pin experience down, and release it. That release is the point.