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" "Even the multi-part scriptural teachings of the three vehicles are just old paper for wiping away dirt. Buddha is an illusion, an apparition. The ancestral teachers were just old monks.
Línjì Yìxuán (臨済義玄; Wade-Giles: Lin-chi I-hsüan; Japanese: Rinzai Gigen; died 866) was the founder of the Linji school of Chan Buddhism during the Tang Dynasty China.
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Someone asked: “What are enlightenment and delusion?”
Linji said: “A moment when your mind is in doubt is delusion. If you can comprehend that the myriad phenomena are unborn, that [deluded] mind is like an illusory transformation, so that you are everywhere pure, this is enlightenment. So enlightenment and delusion are the two objects, defilement and purity.”
Students do not understand because they cling to names and sayings. They are obstructed by the names ‘ordinary’ and ‘holy.’ Thus they block their eye for the Path and do not find clear understanding. The scriptural teachings are all openly revealed explanations, but students do not understand them. Instead, they go to the words and phrases to produce interpretations. All of this is being dependent and falling into cause and effect, so birth and death in the triple world are inevitable.
If you want to get the freedom to go or stay, to take off or put on birth and death, then right now try to recognize the person who is listening to the Dharma.
This person has no form, no marks, no basis, no root, nowhere it abides, but it is leaping with life. In all its many kinds of activities, it functions without location. Therefore, if you search for it, the farther away it is, and if you seek it, the more you go against it. It is called the esoteric secret.
People who study the Path genuinely do not grasp buddhas or bodhisattvas or arhats; they do not grasp attainments of special excellence within the triple world. They are transcendent and free and on their own—they are not constrained by things. Even if heaven and earth turn upside down, they are not in doubt. If all the buddhas of the ten directions appear before them, they feel no joy. If [all the torments of] the hungry ghosts, the animals, and the beings in hell appear before them, they feel no fear. Why are they like this? They see the emptiness of all phenomena, which exist through transformation and don’t exist without it. They see that the triple world is only mind, and the myriad things are only consciousness. Therefore, why bother to grasp [what are really] dreamlike illusions and apparitions?