Product Description

Hyakujo was the direct heir of Ma Tzu and became most well known for his establishment of the first
truly Zen monasteries and his treatise on sudden enlightenment.
To understand Hyakujo, the first thing is to understand that enlightenment can only be sudden.
The preparation can be gradual, but the illumination is going to be sudden. You can prepare the
ground for the seeds, but the sprouts will come suddenly one day in the morning; they don’t come
gradually. Existence believes in suddenness. Nothing is gradual here, although everything appears
to be gradual; that is our illusion.
In the past science used to think that everything was gradual: a child gradually becomes young;
the young man gradually is becoming older… Now, we know that is not the case because of Albert
Einstein and his discoveries about atomic energy. He himself was puzzled when he saw for the first
time that the particles of an atom don’t go from one place to another place the way you go from your
house to the market. They simply jump. And their jump is so tremendous that Einstein had to find
a new word for it: ‘quanta’, the quantum jump. It means that the particle was in one place, A, and
then suddenly you see it in another place, B. The path between has never been traveled.