One day, while I was pottering around the monastery, I fell into conversation with the elderly monk in charge of the block-printing press which had for centuries been reproducing Buddhist works from heavy blocks of wood on each of which the text of a single page was beautifully hand-engraved. Thus a book containing one hundred pages required one hundred separate blocks of wood. The disadvantages of this method of printing are obvious; the advantage is that the lovely engravings are preserved virtually for ever, so that reprints can be made at any time. After showing me the press, my guide took me to the library and offered to lend me some of the volumes produced in that monastery during the last several hundred years. They included a work of one of the early Zen Masters, the Tun Ju Chieh Yao Men Lun, which title can be roughly translated as 'The Path to Sudden Attainment'; it was composed by the T'ang scholar Hui Hai.

I carried this volume, excellently printed on soft paper, back to my cell and began to examine it. Presently it occured to me that, though the content was very deep, the wording was such that a man with some knowledge of Zen would not find it difficult to translate. It contained some very striking paradoxes, of which one caught my eye as soon as I opened the book for the first time.

A fool seeks for the Buddha, not the mind.
A sage seeks for Mind, not for the Buddha.

from The Wheel of Life -by John Blofeld
Shambala Books, 1988
copyright 1959 by John Blofeld