If you love the sacred and hate the secular, you'll float and sink in the birth-and-death sea. The passions exist dependent on mind; have no-mind, and how can they bind you? Without troubling to discriminate or cling to forms, you'll attain the Way naturally in a moment of time.

— Linji

Linji's warning cuts close to the bone for anyone drawn to spiritual practice. We come to Chan because we sense something is wrong with ordinary life—the anxiety, the restlessness, the feeling that we're missing something essential. So we seek the sacred. We carve out time for meditation, read the old masters, perhaps join a sangha. And without noticing it, we begin to divide the world: this is spiritual, that is mundane; this brings me closer to awakening, that pulls me away. We've simply traded one set of preferences for another.

This is what Linji means by floating and sinking in the birth-and-death sea. Samsara isn't a place we go after we die. It's the turbulence of a mind caught in endless cycles of wanting and rejecting, grasping and pushing away. Every preference, even a preference for enlightenment over delusion, keeps the cycle spinning. The monk who despises his distractions is no freer than the businessman who chases his ambitions. Both are captive to the same mechanism—a mind that won't stop sorting the world into acceptable and unacceptable.

"The passions exist dependent on mind." This is the pivot point. Our cravings and aversions feel so solid, so obviously ours. But look closely and you find they have no independent existence. They arise when conditions come together and vanish when conditions change. They require a mind to host them—specifically, a mind that takes them seriously, that believes in their reality and urgency. What Linji calls "no-mind" isn't unconsciousness or blankness. It's a mind that has stopped feeding its own agitation, stopped elaborating every flicker of desire into a story that demands action.

The instruction sounds simple: don't discriminate, don't cling. But we've spent our whole lives discriminating and clinging. These aren't occasional activities—they're how we construct our sense of self moment by moment. To stop is to feel, at first, like we're dissolving. And in a sense we are. What dissolves is the fiction that required constant maintenance, the exhausting performance of being someone in particular who needs certain things and fears certain outcomes.

"In a moment of time." Linji isn't promising years of gradual progress. He's pointing to something available right now, obscured only by our habit of reaching for it. The Way isn't distant. It's what remains when we stop troubling ourselves with the question of whether we've found it yet. The gateless gate stands open. We keep looking for the key.