Читать книгу A Buddhist Bible. The Essential Scriptures of the Zen Buddhism онлайн

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"Who is it, then, that confronts me?" asked the Emperor.

"I do not know, Your Majesty."

There is a famous poem that refers to the above incident, that has for these present times a deep significance:

"I don't know," replied Bodhidharma,

Baffled by the classical speech of the Imperial Court;

But if the Emperor had been a man of insight and spirit

He would have chased after Bodhidharma,

Over the desert sand to Tien-mu."

Bodhidharma, finding in the North no interest in his presentation of Buddhism, returned to the South and shut himself in his own monastery of Shao-lin, to which few disciples ever came and where, tradition says, he practised for nine years a kind of concentrative dhyana that came to be called, "wall gazing." It consisted in an honest and earnest effort to definitely realise the oneness of one's true Buddha-nature with Universal Buddhahood, by the single method of mind-concentration on Mind-essence. To Bodhidharma, books, logical ideas, study, ritual, worship were useless; only simple but "seeking" and tireless "wall-gazing" was sufficient. All distinctions of self and not-self, comfort or discomfort, joy or suffering, desire or aversion, success or failure, and mental discrimination of all kinds must be ignored and left behind, in the sole effort to merge oneself with Mind-essence which alone is reality, Inasmuch as one's own inner conscience is Mind-essence, why seek for it elsewhere? This "treasure of the heart" is the only Buddha there ever was, or is, or ever will be. "There is no Buddha but your own. thoughts. Buddha is Tao. Tao is dhyana. Dhyana cannot be understood by the definitions of the wise. Dhyana is a man's successful seeing into his own fundamental nature." "I have come from India only to teach you that Buddha is thought. I have no interest in monastic rules, nor ascetic practises, nor miraculous powers, nor merely sitting in meditation."