The Dharma Transmission Verse of Buddha Kanakamuni

Original text: 佛不见佛知是佛，若实有知别无佛；智者能知罪性空，坦然不怖于生死。

Explanation: Suchness (tathatā) has no seeing and no hearing, no awareness and no knowing. The true mind of suchness does not see itself; the mind itself does not know itself; the true mind of suchness is not aware of itself. From this, we know that the mind which does not see suchness itself is the Buddha. If someone says that suchness has knowing and seeing, that it can see forms and hear sounds, that it can know whether there are or are not delusive thoughts, that it can enter samādhi or not enter samādhi—this knowing is the knowing of the mind consciousness, not suchness. If one takes this knowing to be suchness, then there is no Buddha at all. It is the suchness without knowing and without seeing that is the true Buddha, the true essence of buddhahood.

A person of wisdom is able to know that all dharmas arise from and are manifested by the true mind of suchness; nothing among them is real. When sentient beings commit evil or cultivate goodness, those actions themselves are also manifested and transformed by suchness, with no real dharma to be obtained; the nature of their offenses and merits is also empty. All phenomena of birth-and-death are likewise illusory appearances manifested by suchness, with no real dharma of birth-and-death to be obtained. Birth-and-death is like an illusion, a dream, or flowers in the sky—utterly unobtainable. Therefore, the wise who have attained the Path, the bodhisattvas who have realized that all dharmas are like illusions and dreams, will no longer fear birth-and-death, and will not, like the arhats, seek nirvāṇa to extinguish and terminate birth-and-death. The bodhisattvas continually travel back and forth through illusory birth and illusory death, within the worlds of the various Buddhas, liberating themselves and then becoming able to liberate others.