Secret of the Golden Flower

  • seeing and stopping are turning the light around to look back again and again into the source of mind
  • breathing drives the mind
  • when breath is subtle, mind is subtle
  • cause stillness by pure quietude
  • shallow to deep, coarse to fine
  • beware Oblivion and distraction, unclear spirit and racing spirit
  • 100 days of quiet focus, single pointed concentration
  • "When you are going to practice this doctrine, first see to it somehow that you don't have much on your mind, so that you can be alive and free. Make your mood gentle and your mind comfortable, then enter into quietude."
  • Find potential and find its opening. Don't sit inside nothingness or indifference.
  • Be intent but not willful.
  • To handle attainment, will the liberation of all beings.
  • "If you tend to fall into a deadness whenever you go into meditation and are relatively lacking in growth and creative energy, this means you have fallen into a shadow world. Your mood is cold, your breath sinking, and you have a number of other chilling and withering experiences. If you continue this way for a long time, you will degenerate into a blockhead or a rockhead."
  • Beware loose ends, they lead to form and desire. Beware deadness of creativity, they lead to blockheadedness or rockheadedness.
  • all is heard as distant echoes by the open spirit
  • a cloud's eyes open in the empty room producing light
  • silk soars buoyant from body ascending to heaven
  • "The essence of the great Way is to act purposefully without striving. Because of nonstriving, one does not cling to local conventions, forms, or images; but because of not striving yet acting purposefully, one does not full into indifferent emptiness, dead voidness."

Chinese proverbs

The lead in the homeland of water is just one flavor.

Pure thought is flight. Pure emotion is fall.

The light rays of the human body all flow upward into the aperture of space.

The mechanism is in the eyes.

There are many pitfalls in front of the cliffs of withered trees.

The hen embraces the egg, always mentally listening.

Student: "Having looked for my mind, I realize it cannot be grasped." Teacher: "I have pacified your mind for you."

Myriad pipes are all silent. The bright moon is in mid sky.

A grain, and then another grain, from vagueness to clarity.

The homeland of nothing whatsoever is the true abode.

Clouds filling the thousand mountains

the moon steeped in myriad waters

Chinese wisdom traditions:

Secret of the Golden Flower