And we have neither things nor no-things;
Enlightened and not-enlightened—they are the same;
Neither mind nor thing there is.”[4.13]
The twenty-second patriarch, Manura, gave his view thus:
“The mind moveth with the ten thousand things:
Even when moving, it is serene.
Perceive its essence as it moveth on,
And neither joy nor sorrow there is.”[4.14]
In these gāthās we notice the teaching generally characteristic of Mahayana Buddhism as it prevailed in India. As I said before, as far as the doctrinal side of Buddhism was concerned, Zen had nothing particularly to offer as its own; for its raison d’être consists in its being a spiritual experience and not in its being a special system of philosophy or of certain dogmas conceptually synthesised. We have Zen only when the Mahayana Buddhist speculation is reduced to the actual things of life and becomes the direct expression of one’s inner life. And this did not come to pass until Buddhism was transplanted into China and made there to grow nourished by a people whose practical turn of mentality refused to swallow the Indian tradition undigested. The form of thought as adopted in the so-called patriarchal verses did not appeal to the Chinese mind. When they got into the thought itself, they wished to express it in their own way, they wished to live the thought as was natural to them, and not to hoard it as something imported from abroad and not inherently belonging to their psychology.
When Bodhi-Dharma gave his full sanction to his disciples, he is supposed to have composed the following gāthā: