01/02/2026
Wisdom beyond learning.
Story of a direct experience of Insight from within.
One fantastic tale that nicely illustrates the difference between the second-hand doctrine of authority, the intellectual way of the masculine mind, and the feminine mystery of mounting your mystic vehicle of direct intuitive awareness, transcendent illumination directly from the Soul, is the ancient legend of Hui-Neng, who was an illiterate woodchopper.
He was standing one day at the door of a private home, waiting for an order when he overheard someone inside intoning the verses of the Heart Sutra 'All is emptiness,' is what he heard, 'the very form is emptiness, no clouds, no world.' And, immediately illuminated, he got it.
‘So he goes to a monastery, leaving his mother and all behind. Well, he can’t even read Chinese let alone Sanskrit, so he is put to work in the kitchen. The young monks are under the discipline of an abbot, and the abbot is getting old; it is time for him to retire. And so he sets up a little contest; anyone who can write four verses summing up Buddhism and give the most elucidating exposition of Buddhism will be the next abbot. So there was a young man in the monastery that everybody knew was going to be the great one, and he wrote on the wall;
'The body is the tree of illumination,
The mind is a mirror bright,
The mind is a mirror through which illumination is achieved.
Always keep it dusted clean lest dust on it alight.'
Hui-Neng comes out from the kitchen and asks his friend to read him that, and the friend reads it, and he says, “Now write this”;
'The body is not the Bodhi Tree.
The mind no mirror bright.
Since nothing is there,
On what should what dust alight?'
Well, this is really one step closer to the ultimate doctrine. When the abbot came down the next morning, all the monks were jabber, jabber, jabbering. No one knew who had written that on the wall. And the abbot pretended to be very angry, and he took his slipper and wiped it off. The young monks went through their day. Then that evening the abbot calls Hui-Neng to him and says. “Come up here. Here are the robes of office. Here is the begging bowl of the patriarch. Go away.”
‘Hui-Neng became the founder of a Southern School of ‘abrupt teaching’ based on the realization that Buddha-knowledge is achieved intuitively, by sudden insight. For this, however, the disciplines of a monastery are not only unnecessary but even possibly a hindrance, and such a doctrine, as the old abbot recognised, would discredit and finally undermine the entire monastic system. Hence his warning to disappear.’
image; speedpaint #80 BY Sylar113
