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born in India. He learned Chinese. Even in your own mother tongue, to give expression to the experiences of your innermost life sources, silences of your heart, and blissfulness of your being, is difficult -- even in your mother tongue. But to speak in a language which he has just learned, and Chinese is not a simple language .... If one really wants to be a scholar it needs at least thirty years, because it has no alphabet, it is a pictorial language. It is a very primitive sort of language.
The alphabet brings language to a very simple phenomenon. But a nonalphabetical language, like Chinese, or Korean, or Japanese, is very difficult for one who is not born in those lands. You have to remember thousands of pictures. Those languages are pictorial. Each thing has a certain symbolic picture and unless you remember thousands of symbolic pictures, it is impossible to speak, it is impossible to write. Bodhidharma had only three years while he was moving towards China to learn as quickly as possible before he reached there. He did in three years, almost thirty years' work.
Naturally, what he has said is far from his experience. And the difficulty is again multiplied because these sutras are translated from Chinese into English. For example, I will just give you one word which is very central to these sutras, the word `mind'.
Anybody reading these sutras is going to understand exactly the opposite of what Bodhidharma must have meant, and the reason is the word `mind'.
In English there is only one word for your thinking process, and that is `mind'. And in the English language there is no word which can denote something beyond the thinking process. The whole philosophy of Gautam Buddha and Bodhidharma is how to go beyond the thinking process. In Sanskrit, in Pali, there are different words: MANUS, which is the root of the English word `mind', exactly means THINKING PROCESS; then CHITTA means CONSCIOUSNESS BEYOND THE THINKING PROCESS.
Those who are very alert, and those who have not only been just scholars but have also experienced something about meditation -- wherever in these sutras you find the word `mind', a meditator would put just
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