May 24, 2026

The foolish reject what they see, not what they think. The wise reject what they think, not what they see." — Huang Po, The Zen Teaching of Huang Po

Huang Po said this to monks in ninth-century China who kept arriving at the monastery with fixed ideas about enlightenment. They had read the sutras, formed conclusions, and wanted those conclusions confirmed. He was cutting through that directly — telling them that the problem was not their experience but their insistence on interpreting it before they even let it land. Beginning again means the same thing today: you don't need a new situation, you need to stop running your current one through old assumptions.