There is a thriving industry built on the premise that the sacred is available, for a fee, in certain designated locations and under certain carefully managed conditions. You can access it at a retreat center in Vermont, at a ten-day silent course in the foothills of the Himalayas, in a microdosed ceremony guided by a licensed facilitator, or by following a thirty-day curriculum on a meditation app. The spiritual marketplace has never been more democratized, which is to say, the architecture of holiness has never been more elaborate. We have become very sophisticated consumers of the transcendent.
The underlying premise of all of it — the one premise that nobody stops to examine — is that the sacred is a special category. That there is ordinary experience and then, adjacent to it, accessible through the right practices, teachers, or states of mind, experience of a qualitatively different kind. The holy is what ordinary experience is not. This architecture is so deeply assumed that we rarely notice we have built it. We simply inhabit it, and then wonder why, after the retreat ends or the subscription lapses, the ordinary Tuesday reasserts itself with such ruthless indifference to all that transcendence we recently purchased.
In the sixth century, a monk from Central Asia arrived in China. His name was Bodhidharma. He was granted an audience with Emperor Wu of Liang, one of the most powerful Buddhist patrons in Chinese history. Wu had funded the construction of dozens of temples. He had organized mass ordinations and sponsored the translation of scriptures. He had fed and sheltered thousands of monks. By any reasonable accounting, the emperor was an extraordinarily accomplished practitioner of the Buddhist path.
Emperor Wu presented his spiritual resume to Bodhidharma and asked: what merit had all this accumulated?
Bodhidharma said: no merit whatsoever.
Wu, unsettled but persistent, changed his angle. He asked the deeper question, the one his resume had been building toward: What is the first principle of the holy teaching?
Bodhidharma replied: 廓然無聖. Vast emptiness — nothing holy.
Thrown completely off balance now, the emperor asked one final question: Who is this standing before me?
Bodhidharma said: I don't know.
This exchange is Blue Cliff Record Case 1 — the first case in the first of the great Song-dynasty koan collections, positioned there not by accident. It is the case the tradition chose to open with. And the reason, I think, is that it gets the demolition over with immediately. If you're going to study these texts seriously, you first need to have the ground pulled out from under you. Everything Bodhidharma says here is a refusal of a premise the question contains.
No Merit
The "no merit" answer has been extensively commented on, and it is easy to understand in its broadest outlines. Emperor Wu was treating Buddhism as a system of accumulation. Do enough holy things, donate enough gold, ordain enough monks, and the merit piles up in a cosmic ledger. It is an essentially transactional view of the path. Bodhidharma refused the transaction. Whatever temples and translations and ordinations are, they are not deposits in a merit account. The ledger doesn't exist.
Modern readers feel the sting of this immediately. We have our own merit ledgers: meditation streaks, silent retreats attended, therapy hours logged, the number of times this week we have paused to breathe before responding. We are counting something, and we are hoping the count will eventually tip toward some threshold of transformation. Bodhidharma would look at our Insight Timer statistics with the same unblinking refusal he directed at the emperor's temples.
But the "no merit" answer is actually the gentlest of the three. It addresses the practice from the outside, pointing out the flaw in how we're keeping score. The second answer goes deeper. It doesn't just say you're counting wrong. It says the thing you're counting toward doesn't exist.
Nothing Holy
When the emperor asks about "the first principle of the holy teaching," he is asking a very reasonable question. He has spent his entire reign patronizing a religion premised on the existence of holiness — the holiness of the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. He is asking what stands at the center of all this. What is the fundamental insight the whole edifice is built around?
Bodhidharma says: vast emptiness. And in that vast emptiness — nothing holy.
The Chinese word 聖 carries the full weight of the sacred. It means holy, hallowed, sagely — the quality that distinguishes a Buddha from an ordinary person, a monastery from a tavern, a sutra from a grocery list. Emperor Wu's entire life project had been the cultivation and propagation of 聖. And Bodhidharma says: 無聖. None of it. Not present.
This is not the same as saying nothing matters. It is saying something far more precise: the category of the holy — the idea that certain things, places, teachers, texts, or experiences are intrinsically elevated above others — is a construction we have imposed on the fabric of reality. And reality, in its vast openness (廓然 — expansive, unobstructed, without seam), does not support the partition.
There is a temptation to read this as a kind of negative theology: not "nothing is holy" but "holiness is beyond all categories, too vast to be located." Some commentators have taken this route. But the Tang-dynasty masters were not subtle in this way. They meant what they said. When Linji Yixuan told his students to kill the Buddha if they meet him on the road, he was not speaking in mystical paradox. He was speaking with deliberate, direct clarity: the Buddha you have constructed in your mind — the holy figure that your practice is organized around encountering — is not the thing. Meet it and cut it down.
"Nothing holy" is the same instruction. The first principle of the teaching is the elimination of the first principle. Once the category of the sacred dissolves, what remains? Vast openness. Not empty in the sense of cold or absent — but empty in the sense of not partitioned, not divided, not elevated here and diminished there. The ground you are standing on is already it. The problem was never the quality of the ground; it was the belief that you needed to find a different, better, holier patch of it.
This is why the monastery kitchen was always the most spiritually serious place in a Tang-dynasty Zen community. Dongshan Shouchu, asked about the Buddha, answered: "Three pounds of flax." When someone came to Yunmen looking for instruction, he was told: "Eat your breakfast." The masters consistently directed attention not toward the extraordinary but toward the unremarkable. Not as a teaching about mindfulness — about paying better attention to everyday things — but as a teaching about the non-existence of the extraordinary. There is nowhere to go. The flax is three pounds. Breakfast is breakfast.
I Don't Know
Emperor Wu's third question — "who is this standing before me?" — is the most poignant of the three. After two consecutive demolitions, the emperor is still trying to locate something solid. He cannot quite believe that this monk, who speaks with such authority and refuses the entire scaffolding of Chinese Buddhism, is standing before him without any assignable identity. He wants to know: who are you? What is your lineage, your school, your accomplishment? Where, in the hierarchy of the holy, should I place you?
Bodhidharma says: I don't know.
It would be easy to read this as a kind of Socratic modesty, or as a Zen gesture toward the ineffability of the self. But that reading makes Bodhidharma into a wise teacher offering a pedagogically crafted non-answer. I think something simpler and more devastating is happening. "I don't know" is the same move as "nothing holy" — applied this time to the questioner.
The person asking "what is sacred?" has been, throughout the exchange, secretly hoping to locate themselves on the sacred side of the divide. Emperor Wu has been building toward a validation: here is a man who will confirm that my temples and translations and ordinations place me in a special relationship to the truth. The question "who are you?" carries the implicit companion question: and who am I, in relation to you? "I don't know" removes the subject doing the hoping. There is no stable, located self standing in a special relationship to the teaching, because the teaching is not located in a special relationship to anything.
You cannot find the holy, because there is no partition between the holy and the rest. You cannot locate the holy teacher, because the teacher is not standing somewhere the rest of us are not. You cannot locate yourself as a seeker of the holy, because the seeking presupposes exactly the architecture that the first principle dismantles.
After the Interview
Bodhidharma crossed the Yangtze River and sat facing a wall in a cave at Shaolin for nine years. Emperor Wu did not follow. According to the records, he told his advisors about the encounter and one of them, Zhiyao, said: "Does Your Majesty not know who that man was? He was the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, transmitting the seal of the Buddha's mind." The emperor was distressed and immediately sent a messenger to bring Bodhidharma back.
Zhiyao said: it's too late. Even if everyone in the kingdom went after him, he would not return.
The story is instructive in a way the encounter itself is not. Emperor Wu, the moment the interview ended, went right back to the same move. Having been told that holiness is not a category, he immediately tried to assign the interlocutor a place in the hierarchy of the holy: he was a bodhisattva! He was transmitting Buddha-mind! Now, properly located on the sacred side of the ledger, the emperor wanted to recover the relationship. It was too late, not because Bodhidharma was far away, but because the emperor still hadn't understood. He was still trying to establish the connection between himself and something holy.
This is not a story about the emperor's failure. It is a story about the stickiness of the architecture. We do not dissolve the sacred/secular divide by being told, once, that it doesn't hold. The mind rebuilds it immediately. It is one of our most fundamental cognitive habits — the partition that makes some experiences feel like they are what life is really about and others like they are merely what we have to get through to reach the real part. The Tang masters knew this. That's why they kept hammering at it from every angle, in every exchange, for two hundred years.
What they were pointing at was not a better version of holiness, more expansive and democratic. They were pointing at the absence of the category entirely. Not: everything is equally sacred. But: the partition was always your own imposition. Remove it, and what's left is the kitchen table, the breakfast bowl, the three-pound flax, the unremarkable Tuesday already underway.
That Tuesday — not despite its ordinariness but by virtue of having had the label stripped away — turns out to be the only ground there ever was.