"Words are illusions"
About this Quote
"Words are illusions" lands like a Zen slap: not a poetic flourish, but a warning about how quickly language hardens into a substitute for reality. Coming from Bodhidharma, the semi-mythic transmitter of Chan (later Zen) Buddhism to China, the line carries the authority of a teacher trying to cut through a culture of doctrinal accumulation. In the world he’s entering, Buddhism is already thick with sutras, commentaries, and merit-making pieties. His intervention is radical: stop treating the map as the territory.
The intent isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-clinging. Words can point, but they also seduce. They invite us to mistake naming for knowing, to build a palace of concepts and call it insight. Bodhidharma’s subtext is psychological: the mind loves handles. Give it a term - enlightenment, emptiness, self - and it will grip it, defend it, and argue over it. That grasping is precisely what practice is meant to expose.
As a leader, Bodhidharma is also managing power. Language creates hierarchies: the learned versus the ignorant, the orthodox versus the heretic. Declaring words illusory undermines the priestly economy of explanations. It shifts authority away from those who can speak well and toward direct experience: meditation, discipline, the unglamorous work of seeing the mind’s tricks in real time.
The line works because it doesn’t offer a new slogan to believe. It booby-traps the reader. If you turn it into a doctrine, you’ve already proven the point.
The intent isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-clinging. Words can point, but they also seduce. They invite us to mistake naming for knowing, to build a palace of concepts and call it insight. Bodhidharma’s subtext is psychological: the mind loves handles. Give it a term - enlightenment, emptiness, self - and it will grip it, defend it, and argue over it. That grasping is precisely what practice is meant to expose.
As a leader, Bodhidharma is also managing power. Language creates hierarchies: the learned versus the ignorant, the orthodox versus the heretic. Declaring words illusory undermines the priestly economy of explanations. It shifts authority away from those who can speak well and toward direct experience: meditation, discipline, the unglamorous work of seeing the mind’s tricks in real time.
The line works because it doesn’t offer a new slogan to believe. It booby-traps the reader. If you turn it into a doctrine, you’ve already proven the point.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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