There is a silence deeper than thought. A presence before words. A clarity so intimate it needs no explanation. Huang Po didn’t teach this with dogma or doctrine. He pointed to it, over and over, in the most direct and uncompromising way possible.

“That which is before you is it—in all its fullness, utterly complete. There is naught beside.”

To read Huang Po is to come face to face with a kind of spiritual lightning. His words crack open illusions. They leave no room for cleverness, no tolerance for self-deception. But at the same time, buried in his fierce clarity is a profound tenderness—a compassion that doesn’t coddle, but frees.

At the heart of his teaching is this: you are not separate from the truth you seek. There is no gap. No ladder to climb. No purity to attain. What you are, right now—messy, confused, radiant, tired—is already the One Mind. And the One Mind is all there is.

The Mind Is Buddha—But Don’t Cling Even to That

Huang Po’s core insight is simple and impossible: the One Mind is all things. Not a god. Not an idea. Not a feeling. It is what you are, and it is what everything else is too.

“This Mind is no mind of conceptual thought… it is nothingness. And yet it functions, it is the source of all activity.”

To recognize this Mind is to realize that everything—from a child’s laugh to the ache in your chest to the sound of wind through trees—is already sacred. You don’t have to seek it. You don’t have to wait. You only have to stop grasping, stop fabricating, stop dividing the world into “this” and “that.”

But beware: the mind is sneaky. It turns even wisdom into an idol. Huang Po saw this clearly and called it out with brutal kindness:

“To say that the Buddha exists is to miss the mark; to say that he does not exist is to miss it also.”

He wasn’t trying to be cryptic. He was forcing the listener out of the trap of dualistic thinking. If you think you’ve “understood” Huang Po, you haven’t. If you think you can explain him, you’re already off track. The truth is not in the words. It’s in the seeing.

The End of Seeking

Modern life runs on the fuel of dissatisfaction. We’re always reaching for more—more success, more peace, more knowledge, more awakening. Huang Po’s message cuts through this endless hunger:

“The moment you set your mind on seeking something, you become separated from it.”

The tragedy is that we keep looking for what we already are. We think enlightenment is some state, some experience, some secret. But Huang Po says: stop. Not because there’s nothing to find, but because there’s nothing missing.

There’s a beauty in this that goes beyond peace. It’s a kind of freedom that doesn’t depend on anything getting better. It’s the freedom of no longer waiting for life to begin.

“Do not permit the events of your daily lives to bind you, but never withdraw yourselves from them.”

You don’t need to renounce the world. You don’t need to become a monk or move to the mountains. The One Mind is in the ordinary, in the chaos, in the dishes and the subway and the sorrow of loss. This life, just as it is, holds the whole truth.

No Path, No Progress, No Problem

Huang Po is radical because he refuses the comforting lie of gradual progress. There is no path. There is no enlightenment to attain.

“There is only the one Reality, neither to be realized nor attained.”

This doesn’t mean you give up meditation, or that practice has no value. It means that practice is not a means to something else. It is the expression of what already is. Just sitting, just breathing, just being aware—that is the Buddha-nature, not a tool to reach it.

You don’t meditate to become enlightened. You meditate because the One Mind is already present, and you’re learning to stop arguing with it.

What This Means for Your Life

If you take Huang Po seriously, your entire relationship to life shifts. You stop trying to fix yourself. You stop using spirituality as a self-improvement project. You stop running from your pain or clinging to your joy.

You learn to trust what’s here.

That doesn’t mean you become passive. It means you act from clarity, not compulsion. You feel more deeply, not less. You meet suffering with presence, not escape. You fall into this moment with nothing held back.

“Only awake to the One Mind, and there is nothing whatever to be attained.”

No message could be more countercultural—or more compassionate. You don’t need to become anyone. You don’t need to transcend your humanity. You don’t need to find the right technique, the right teacher, the right mindset. What you are is already whole.

So what’s left?

Live.

Live without holding back. Live without trying to win at life. Live without dividing yourself into good and bad, awake and asleep, spiritual and mundane. Be fully here, without picking or choosing. Be the silence behind the noise, the stillness in the dance, the awareness that holds it all.

Final Word: The Sound of One Mind

Huang Po’s words are not easy. They’re not designed to inspire in the usual sense. They’re designed to wake you up. To burn through your ideas of who you are and leave only what is real.

That’s not a theory. That’s your life. This breath. This moment.

“The Way is perfect like vast space, where nothing is lacking and nothing is in excess.”

If you stop for a second—really stop—you might notice that what you’ve been looking for has been looking out through your eyes the whole time.

And that’s the wonder, the mystery, and the simplicity of life according to Huang Po.

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~Huang Po (circa 770–850 CE) was a Chinese Chan (Zen) master known for his fierce, uncompromising teachings on non-duality and the One Mind. A successor in the lineage of the great master Mazu, Huang Po taught that all beings are already enlightened but remain unaware due to clinging to thoughts and seeking outside themselves. His teachings, compiled by his disciple P’ei Hsiu in The Zen Teaching of Huang Po, remain a cornerstone of Zen literature. With clarity and precision, he dismantled all spiritual striving, pointing directly to the truth beyond words, concepts, and effort: the awakened Mind that is always present, here and now.

Excellence Reporter 2025