The Dharma Transmission Verse of Kanakamuni Buddha

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: True suchness (tathatā) has no seeing and no hearing, no awareness and no knowing. The true suchness of one's own mind does not see its own mind; one's own mind does not know its own mind; the true suchness of one's own mind does not perceive or know itself. Thus we know that this mind which does not see true suchness itself is the Buddha. If someone says that true 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 meditative concentration (samādhi) or not enter it—this knowing is the knowing of the mind consciousness, not true suchness. If one takes this knowing to be true suchness, then there is no longer any Buddha. Only the true suchness that is without knowing and without seeing 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 suchness of one's own mind, and that nothing among them is real. When sentient beings commit evil or cultivate goodness, those actions themselves are also manifested and transformed by true suchness, with no real dharma to be obtained, and the nature of their offenses and merits is also empty. All phenomena of birth-and-death are also illusory marks manifested by true suchness, with no real dharma of birth-and-death to be obtained; birth-and-death is like an illusion, a dream, and flowers in the sky, utterly unobtainable. Therefore, the sage who has attained the Path—the bodhisattva who has realized that all dharmas are like illusions and dreams—will no longer fear birth-and-death, and will not, like an arhat, seek nirvāṇa to extinguish and terminate birth-and-death. Rather, amid the illusory arising and illusory ceasing of birth-and-death, bodhisattvas continually travel back and forth, liberating themselves in the various buddha-lands and then being able to liberate others.