Wonhyo Quotes on Mind
Wonhyo's commentary on the Treatise on the Awakening of Faith (Ta-sheng ch'i-hsin lun) gave seventh-century East Asian Buddhism its most influential philosophy of mind. The principal teaching is the doctrine of One Mind: the ultimate reality is the single mind whose double aspect — the suchness aspect (the unconditioned ground of being) and the becoming aspect (the conditioned phenomenal world of samsara) — supplies the framework within which both the experience of enlightenment and the experience of ordinary unenlightened existence are to be understood. The framework integrated the diverse currents of East Asian Mahayana — Madhyamaka, Yogacara, Tathagatagarbha, Hua-yen — into the harmonized synthesis Wonhyo developed across more than eighty works, and shaped the subsequent Korean, Chinese, and Japanese Mahayana traditions.
Quotes
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Attributed to Wonhyo:
“All things are made by the mind alone; outside the mind there is nothing to be sought.”
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Attributed to Wonhyo:
“The Buddha and the ordinary mind are not two; only the recognition of this is two.”
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Attributed to Wonhyo:
“What you take for a pure spring in the dark may be a skull in the morning; the spring is in your mind.”
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“The mind of sentient beings as it is in itself has neither marks nor nature. It is like the ocean, like space. Since it is like space, there are no marks that are not subsumed within it. How could it contain a direction such as east or west? Since it is like the ocean, there is no nature that is preserved.”
佛說阿彌陀經疏 Bulseol Amitagyeong so (prolegomenon to the Commentary on the Amitabha Sutra Spoken by the Buddha ) | Translated by A. Charles Muller -
Attributed to Wonhyo:
“When mind arises, all things arise; when mind ceases, all things cease.”
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Attributed to Wonhyo:
“All things flow from the One Mind.”
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Attributed to Wonhyo:
“Skull water taught me that all is mind.”
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Attributed to Wonhyo:
“There is no path apart from mind; mind itself is the path.”
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“The mind of sentient beings as it is in itself has neither marks nor nature. It is like the ocean, like space. Since it is like space, there are no marks that are not subsumed within it. How could it contain a direction such as east or west? Since it is like the ocean, there is no nature that is preserved.”
佛說阿彌陀經疏 Bulseol Amitagyeong so (prolegomenon to the Commentary on the Amitabha Sutra Spoken by the Buddha ) | Translated by A. Charles Muller