本來無一物

*A Zen turning-phrase that points at original emptiness, and that cannot itself be clutched as the final answer.*

What This Concept Is Actually Saying

「本來無一物」 is one of the most quoted sentences in the entire Zen (Chán / 禪宗) tradition. In popular culture it is often taken as a single dramatic declaration — "Everything is nothing!" — and used as a kind of philosophical slogan. But the classical records treat it quite differently: as a *頓語*, a sudden-turning phrase, and as the opening of a multi-layered examination that the tradition then immediately dismantles. To understand it, we have to walk through its parts carefully, in the order the records themselves lay them out.

1. The phrase itself, and what each word is doing

「本來」(bĕnlái) — "originally," "from the beginning," "as it has always been." This is not a temporal claim about a moment in the past, nor a metaphysical claim about a primordial state. It marks what is the case *prior to* conceptual overlay: before you apply categories, before you divide inside from outside, self from other, before the interpretive machinery of "I know, I understand, I can explain" has been switched on. The 景德傳燈錄 (Jingde Chuandeng Lu) preserves the stone-cellar teacher Shishi Shandao's (石室善道) image: the newborn infant just emerged from the womb has not yet learned any interpretive distinctions. It doesn't yet know "looking at the teachings" versus "not looking at the teachings," and it doesn't yet know "Buddha-nature" versus "no Buddha-nature." 「本來」 points to that pre-interpretive horizon, not to some distant golden age.

「無一物」(wú yī wù) — "not a single thing." Crucially, this is not a statement *about* the world ("the world contains no things"), nor a nihilistic claim ("nothing exists"). It is a pointing to the fact that when you search for any *self-standing essence* — any dharma that holds itself up by its own nature, independent of conditions and concepts — you cannot find one. No thing stands under its own power. No "thing" is, on inspection, an isolated, ownerless, unconditioned atom of being. "Not a single thing" means: no item of experience, including the experiencer, has the kind of self-contained reality that ordinary thought assumes.

The famous verse preserved in the 景德傳燈錄 crystallizes this by negation upon negation:

菩提本非樹，心鏡亦非臺， 本來無一物，何假拂塵埃。

"The bodhi (菩提) is not a tree, the bright mirror (心鏡) is not a stand — originally there is not a single thing, why bother to brush away dust?" The verse negates the very symbols of awakening (bodhi-tree) and mind (bright-mirror-stand), and it negates the practice of polishing (the dust-brushing of Shenxiu / 神秀). Because there is originally nothing to be cleaned, no cleaning operation is needed.

2. The first negation: "有法" → "無法"

But the classical records do not let the phrase settle there. The same 景德傳燈錄 puts the principle of transmission this way:

本來付有法，付了言無法。 各各須自悟，悟了無無法。

"What was originally transmitted as 'there-is-a-dharma' (有法), once transmitted, is spoken of as 'no-dharma' (無法). Each one must awaken by themselves; once awakened, there is not even 'no-dharma' (無無法)."

This sequence is the spine of the whole teaching. To begin with, the student needs *something to hold* — a dharma, a teaching, a pointer. So at the start "有法" stands: there is a dharma to be transmitted. But once the transmission has actually happened, that very "dharma" is dissolved; it is now "無法," no-dharma. And then, even that "no-dharma" cannot remain as a position. "悟了無無法" — once awakened, there is not even the category "no-dharma." The negation has to negate itself. The empty insight itself cannot be installed as a fixture.

This is what the records mean when they say 「本來無一物」 is itself an expression that cannot be held onto. The phrase is a *turning-phrase* (轉語), not a *concluding-thesis* (結論語).

3. The second level: 「直饒將來，亦無處著」

If 「本來無一物」 empties out *what* can be found, the next-level turning phrase — recorded in the 瑞州洞山良价禪師語錄 (Dongshan Liangjie), in the 景德傳燈錄, and echoed in the 宏智禪師廣錄 — empties out *the act of bringing*. The texts converge on this version:

直饒將來，亦無處著。

"Even if you were to bring [the awakened state] here, there is nowhere to place it."

The phrase 「本來無一物」 says: there is no thing. The phrase 「直饒將來，亦無處著」 says: there is no place. The first empties out content; the second empties out the very activity of "having arrived with something." Even the motion of carrying your realization to this place has nowhere to land. The Dongshan record makes this the climax of a famous koan-exchange: a monk offered ninety-six turning phrases, none of which Dongshan accepted; only the final turning, heard in secret and held back for years, finally fit. That final turning was: even bringing it, nowhere to set it down.

So 「本來無一物」 is not just one sentence. It is the opening of a two-stage clearing. Stage one: *emptiness of object* — nothing to hold. Stage two: *emptiness of the holding itself* — nowhere to put even the act of having held.

4. The third level: what this is *not*

The records are almost obsessively careful to specify what is being refused:

- It is not 狂慧 (kuáng huì) — "mad wisdom." Shishi Shandao warns: if you set the twelvefold teachings of the three vehicles against it and treat emptiness as one more doctrinal position, you produce 心境 (mind-object) duality and 能所 (subject-object) dual functioning — just intellectual splitting. That's "狂慧," a kind of clever frenzy mistaken for insight.

- It is not 認奴作郎 (rèn nú zuò láng) — "mistaking the servant for the lord." The 景德傳燈錄 warns that whatever you happen to recognize or feel in meditation — a particular state, a clearing, a peace — you must not mistake that *recognized thing* for your "original face" (本來面目). The recognized object is the servant. The lord is the recognizing itself, which has no recognizable form.

- It is not a replaceable name. When the monk in Dongshan's record answered the question about the Vimalakīrti (《維摩》) phrase "cannot be known by intellect, cannot be known by consciousness" (不可以智知，不可以識識) by calling it "a phrase praising the dharma-body" (讚法身語), Dongshan cut him off: "Calling it 'dharma-body' is already praising it." Even the most exalted Buddhist category, "dharma-body" (法身), once you name it, has become an object you are praising — and therefore an object you have set up, contradicting "not a single thing."

- It is not to be made into a teaching about "all is empty." The 宏智禪師廣錄 has the monk say, "Throw away the sense-faculties and their objects, everything empty, the whole of space-powder pervaded and clear." The teacher replies: "There is no such thing as 'pervaded.' " Even the experience of total emptiness is still a position you can stand on, and it must give way.

5. The fourth level: what it actually leaves you with

Here is where the records do something surprising. After all this deconstruction, they do not leave you in a grey nowhere. The 宏智禪師廣錄 carefully distinguishes the empty-clear from the merely vacant:

靈靈歷歷地，虛中明白。 "Brightly, vividly — clear in the midst of emptiness."

一塵不受 —— yet 「法法同體，人人同心」， "not receiving a single dust-particle" — and yet "every dharma is the same body, every person the same mind."

諸佛與眾生，同身共命。 "Buddhas and sentient beings share one body and one life."

This is not a contradiction. The point is that once you stop *installing* emptiness as a thing you possess, the ordinary world does not vanish — it appears *as it is*, without the overlay. White hair, dark eyes, dignified deportment (威儀), radiance (光明) — these appear right there in the open. The 宏智 record actually uses a parallel formulation to the famous verse:

本來無物，當處出生。 "Originally no-thing, [yet] at this place, born."

"Originally no-thing" and "at this place, born" are not two statements but one movement. Emptiness is not the opposite of appearing; it is what allows appearing to appear without being held.

The records close this off with a sequence of final negations:

見性不留佛，大悟不存師。 "Seeing the nature does not retain 'Buddha'; great awakening does not store 'teacher.'"

生佛立不得。 "Sentient-being and Buddha cannot be set up."

言語道斷。 "The path of words is cut."

This is the classical meaning of 「本來無一物」: not a slogan, not a metaphysics, not a therapeutic technique, but a series of turnings that progressively undo the habit of installing *anything* — including the undoing itself — as a solid.

Life Walkthrough: Mapping the Phrase Onto a Contemporary Day

This is where it gets harder, and where the classical records' warnings matter most. Let me walk through an ordinary contemporary day — the commute, the phone, the work, the relationship — and trace the phrase step by step, mapping it carefully onto what the records actually say.

Morning: waking up and the first thought

You wake up. Before you check the phone, before "today's tasks" forms, there is a brief moment — call it twenty seconds, call it the time it takes to swing your legs off the bed. In that moment there is no "project of the day," no "I," no "to-do." The classical baby-metaphor points here. This is what 「本來」 names: the condition before interpretive machinery has been switched on. It is not a metaphysical state you have to achieve; it is what is already the case before the day's narrative begins.

But here is the first place contemporary readers commonly mis-map the phrase. They say, "Yes! The present moment, the 'now,' that's the original non-thing." And then they *install* the "now" as a special object — schedule it, photograph it, put it on Instagram with the caption "be here now." The 宏智 record's monk said exactly this: "Throw away root-and-dust, everything empty, the whole of space-powder pervaded and clear." Dongshan / 宏智 would say: you have just made a new thing, called "the present moment," and you are now standing on it. That's 狂慧, intellectual frenzy. 「本來」 is not another thing to install; it is what is left when you stop installing.

The commute: an emotion appears

A car cuts you off. Anger flares. You feel hot, your jaw tightens, a story begins: "that person is a jerk, the world is going downhill, this always happens to me." Where does 「本來無一物」 go here?

It does *not* say: "the anger is not real." It does *not* say: "suppress it." It does *not* say: "transcend it into a higher space." What it points at is something more precise: when you look closely at the anger, *the anger itself* cannot be found as a self-standing thing. There is heat (a sensation), a story (a verbal fabrication), a tightening (a muscular event), an urge (a karmic push). When you try to locate the "anger" itself — the essence-of-anger that is supposed to be present — you cannot. It is not even one thing; it is a process without an owner.

This is the first-stage clearing: no thing. The anger is "empty of self-standing essence" (in Buddhist technical terms, 自性空). But — and this is where the second-level turning kicks in — you cannot *bring* this insight to the anger like a tool. You cannot say, "I will now apply the doctrine of emptiness to my anger." That would be 「直饒將來」 — *bringing* the awakened state to this place — and there is 「無處著」 — *no place to set it down*. The anger is not a place to put the insight; the insight is not a thing to be placed.

What actually happens, when it happens, is that the anger is seen through, not by *adding* emptiness as another layer, but by the seeing-through itself. The 宏智 record calls this 「虛中明白」 — *clear in the midst of emptiness*. Not empty-about; clear-in.

At work: the project, the meeting, the inbox

You are in a meeting. Someone presents a plan. You think, "This is good" or "This is bad." Then you catch yourself and think, "I should be non-judgmental." Now you have *two* judgments: the original one, and a meta-judgment about having judgments.

This is exactly the 能所 (subject-object) dual functioning that Shishi Shandao warned against. You have split into a judging subject and a judged object, and then split again into a watcher watching the judging. Each layer is a "thing" installed. The phrase 「本來無一物」 does not call for a third, higher, more refined watcher. It points to the fact that none of these layers was ever a self-standing thing; the watcher was always *the watching*, not an entity doing the watching.

This is where the Dongshan-Dahui-Hongzhi lineage's teaching about 「認奴作郎」 — *mistaking the servant for the lord* — is so apt. The watcher-of-judgments feels very spiritual, very luminous. It is, in fact, the servant. The "lord" is the ungraspable openness in which watching and watched both appear. You cannot *catch* that openness and turn it into a state called "witnessing." The moment you do, it is no longer the lord; it is a servant wearing the lord's robe.

In the evening: the phone, the feed

You open your phone. There are messages, news, an infinite scroll. You feel behind, anxious, attracted, repelled. You notice this and think, "I should be more mindful." Now you have a "mindful self" supervising an "unmindful self." Three things where there was one. Each of them empty-of-self-essence.

The phrase 「本來無一物」 here does not mean "the phone is unreal" or "social media is illusory." It points to a much more specific fact: the *self* that is behind, anxious, attracted — that self cannot be located as a thing. It is a verbal fabrication (you tell yourself, "I am the kind of person who…"), a felt sense (a contraction in the chest), and a habit-pattern (the muscle-memory of reaching). When you try to point to the self, you find only these processes. 「本來」 names the openness in which these processes are appearing, and which is not itself any of them.

But — and this is the second turning — do not *install* this insight as a new attitude toward your phone. The 景德傳燈錄's 「本來付有法，付了言無法」 pattern applies: at first you may need a practice, a rule, a "no phone after 9pm." That is 「有法」 — there-is-a-dharma. Once the rule has actually done its work, you do not keep the rule as an identity ("I am a person who doesn't use phone after 9pm"); that is 「無法」 — no-dharma. And once even that is gone, you are simply with what is appearing — without even the negation of the rule. 「悟了無無法」.

In intimacy: a difficult conversation with someone you love

You try to say something important. The other person reacts in a way you did not expect. Now there is hurt, defensiveness, a story about "what they always do."

Here 「本來無一物」 has its sharpest and most tender application. The *story* about the other person — "they always do this," "they don't care," "they are selfish" — is precisely a thing that has been installed. It is a verbal fabrication piled on top of the actual moment. When the moment itself is examined — the tone, the breath, the eyes — none of those alone *is* "what they always do." The "always" is the extra thing you added.

This is not a counsel to suppress your feelings or pretend the story isn't there. It is a precise observation: the story is not a self-standing thing; it is conditioned, contingent, fabricated. To see this is the first turning. To *use* this observation as a club against your partner ("I'm being non-attached, you're being attached") is the second-stage error: you have just brought emptiness to the conversation and set it down between you as another weapon. There is no place for that. The honesty that lets the other person actually be there — without the story — is what 「本來」 names, but it cannot be packaged into a technique.

The end of the day: the meditation attempt

You sit down to meditate. You try to "experience the present." You watch the breath. Thoughts come. You try to be empty. You fail. You try harder to be empty. You fail harder.

The 景德傳燈錄's verse is built precisely to dismantle this loop:

菩提本非樹，心鏡亦非臺， 本來無一物，何假拂塵埃。

Every element of a meditation practice has been negated. Bodhi (the object of attainment) is not a tree you climb. Mind is not a mirror that needs polishing. There is no thing. So there is no need for the very act of polishing (拂拭) — including the polishing of "watching the breath," including the polishing of "being present." This is exactly what 神秀 (Shenxiu) was told to do — "diligently brush away the dust moment by moment" (時時勤拂拭) — and the verse insists: there is no dust to brush, because there is no self-standing mind-dust to be there in the first place.

But again — and the Dongshan record is explicit about this — saying "originally there is no thing" *while sitting on the cushion* is not yet 「合得衣鉢」 (to receive the robe and bowl of the ancestors). It is still a sentence. The Dongshan record is blunt: 「直道本來無一物，猶未合得他衣鉢」 — "Even if you straightforwardly say 'originally there is not a single thing,' you have not yet received his robe-and-bowl." The robe-and-bowl is the transmission-token, the symbol of full realization. So you can chant the verse in the meditation hall and still be miles from the thing it points to.

This is the disciplined honesty of the classical records. The phrase is real. It is also not enough.

Why Contemporary People Need This

There is a tendency to assume that 「本來無一物」 is a teaching for monastics in ancient China and has little to say to a person in a contemporary apartment with a router, a smartphone, a therapy practice, and climate anxiety. I think the opposite is true: the conceptual pressure of contemporary life has made the *crisis* that this teaching addresses more acute.

The crisis of "things"

Contemporary life is, in a very specific sense, saturated with *things*. Not just physical objects — though those too — but *identifications*. You are a particular kind of worker, partner, parent, consumer, citizen. Each identification is a "thing" you carry: "I am a creative," "I am the responsible one," "I am the one who was hurt," "I am the one who figured it out." The contemporary self is, to an unusual degree, an assemblage of installed identities, each defended, each curated, each posted.

The first turning of 「本來無一物」 is directly relevant here: when you search for the *self* that is supposed to be carrying these identities, you cannot find it as a thing. What you find is a process. The contemporary discovery — that identity is performed, that the "self" is a narrative, that the brain constructs a continuous "I" out of discontinuous processes — is, from the Zen side, just a confirmation of what 「無一物」 was already pointing to in a different vocabulary.

But the Zen teaching will not let this discovery itself become a new identity ("I am the kind of person who sees through identity"). That would be exactly the 宏智 monk's "拈却根塵一切空，廓然遍徹周沙界" — *throw it all away, empty all, pervade and clarify the whole world* — which the teacher answers with: "也無遍底道理" — *there is no such thing as 'pervaded'*. Even the experience of universal emptiness, even the experience of seeing-through-identity, if installed, becomes another thing.

The crisis of optimization

Contemporary culture is dominated by a particular assumption: that every state can be improved, optimized, made into a "thing" you have. Sleep can be tracked. Mood can be logged. Even mindfulness has been turned into a productivity tool. The contemplative traditions respond to this with a counter-pressure: some things are not improvable because they were never *things* in the first place. You cannot optimize the ungraspable openness in which optimizations appear. The 宏智 record's language of 「廓落無依」 — *vast and unanchored* — names something that does not respond to optimization. It is not a higher-performing version of awareness; it is what was already the case before performance was being asked for.

The crisis of meaning-collapse

Many people of the contemporary generation report a kind of flatness: a sense that the things they were told would be meaningful — career, relationship, status, ideology — turn out to be empty in some specific, persistent way. 「本來無一物」 does not solve this. But it is, perhaps, the most honest classical articulation of that flatness, precisely because it does not pretend to fill the flatness back up. The Zen tradition's mature position is not "everything is meaningless, but here's a meaning we can install instead." It is more like: yes, you have come to see that the installed meanings were not self-standing. Good. Now: do not install *un-meaning* either. 虛中明白 — *clear in the midst of emptiness* — is not the same as grey resignation. The 宏智 record insists on 「靈靈歷歷」 — *bright, vivid, distinctly there*. Things appear. The bodhi-tree, the bright mirror, the dust to be brushed — they appear. They are not self-standing. They appear.

The crisis of religious language

It is also worth saying that contemporary readers have, often, a particular allergy to religious language. 「本來無一物」 can sound either too mystical (a metaphysical claim) or too nihilistic (a denial of everything). The classical records carefully refuse both. The phrase is neither a metaphysics nor a nihilism; it is a *turning device* whose function is to stop you installing anything — including itself — as a thing you have understood. This is a posture, not a position. For people trained to be skeptical of all metaphysical claims, this is an unusual gift: a teaching that does not require you to believe anything in particular in order to engage with it. You are asked to look, and to notice what the looking does.

Common Misreadings and Clarifications

I want to address the misreadings carefully, because the classical records are unusually explicit about them, and contemporary readers fall into them almost inevitably.

Misreading 1: "It means nothing exists."

This is the most common mistake. 「無一物」 is read as a metaphysical claim: "the world is not real." But the records do not support this. The 宏智 record, after all the negations, insists that 「當處出生」 — *at this place, born*. White hair, dark eyes, dignified deportment, radiance — these are not denied. They appear. What is denied is that any of them is a *self-standing thing* — an essence that holds itself up by its own power, independent of conditions. The verb in 「本來無一物」 is not "exists" but "*stands on its own*." This is a much more specific claim than "nothing exists," and it is much closer to what contemporary philosophy of science says about *any* phenomenon: nothing exists as a self-contained atomic fact; everything is relational, conditioned, interdependent.

The difference is that the Zen teaching will not let even "everything is interdependent" become a new metaphysical doctrine. That's the third-stage clearing: even your doctrine of interdependence has to give way.

Misreading 2: "It means: relax, don't try, be passive."

This is the misreading the 神秀 (Shenxiu) — 「時時勤拂拭」 — verse was meant to refute. 「本來無一物」 is not a license for passivity. The records repeatedly insist that awakening is not achieved by *not-doing*, but by a kind of seeing-through that completely changes the quality of action. The 宏智 record's 「廓落無依」 — *vast and unanchored* — is not slack. 「靈靈歷歷」 — *bright, vivid* — is not slack. Even the 景德傳燈錄's baby-metaphor is not a recommendation for regressive infantile bliss; it is a pointer to the pre-conceptual clarity that is already operating before interpretation overlays it. When the baby cries, the cry is total. When the awakened person acts, the action is 「當處出生」 — *born right here, with no residue of installation*.

The classical records are also clear that some forms of practice are necessary at the beginning: 「本來付有法」 — *what was originally transmitted as 'there-is-a-dharma'*. The 「有法」 stage is not optional. You do need something to hold at first. Passivity that refuses the 「有法」 stage is just laziness disguised as wisdom.

Misreading 3: "If I can say the sentence, I get it."

Dongshan is explicit: 「直道本來無一物，猶未合得他衣鉢」. Saying the sentence is not receiving the robe-and-bowl. The transmission-token is not in the saying. This is why the records set up the elaborate "turning phrase" (轉語) mechanism: ninety-six attempts at a turning phrase, none of which fit; one final turning phrase, "even bringing it, nowhere to set it down," which *does* fit — and which itself has to be unwitnessed to fit. The phrase is real, but it is not the thing. You cannot *get* 「本來無一物」 by stating it. You can only *be done with* it, in the same way that you cannot *get* the end of a rope by gripping it.

Misreading 4: "It's a feeling I had once."

This is 「認奴作郎」 — *mistaking the servant for the lord*. People sometimes report a particular experience in meditation or in nature — a sense of vastness, of "no-thing," of pure openness — and then install that experience as "the original non-thing." But the experience is *an* experience. It has arisen under conditions. It will pass under conditions. It is a thing — precisely the kind of thing the phrase says cannot be installed. The 宏智 record insists: 「靈靈歷歷地，虛中明白」 — *bright and vivid in the emptiness* — but also 「不立一塵」 — *not setting up a single dust-particle*. Even the experience of pure openness, if you make it into a thing you have had, has become a dust-particle.

Misreading 5: "This is brain science / AI tells us the same thing."

This deserves careful handling. There is a contemporary temptation to say: "Buddhism was right; neuroscience (or AI, or quantum physics) has now confirmed that there is no self, that experience is constructed, that reality is process rather than substance." The Zen teaching does not need this confirmation, and the records would view it with the same suspicion they view any doctrinal claim. Neuroscience, AI research, and process philosophy are themselves *views* — sets of conceptual claims — that can be installed as "things you know." The Zen teaching is not a *view*. It is a turning device that dismantles views, including itself.

That said, the parallels are not nothing. If the brain's "self-model" is constructed moment by moment from many sub-processes, with no central "self" to be found; if large language models generate coherent output without any central "meaning"; if quantum field theory describes reality as fields of relations rather than particles-in-themselves — these are *in some respects consonant* with what 「本來無一物」 is pointing at. But "in some respects consonant" is not "confirmed by." Neuroscience has not shown that there is no self; it has shown that the self is not where naive introspection thought it was. AI has not shown that meaning is constructed; it has shown that meaning-like behavior can be produced by processes without an inner "knower." Quantum theory has not shown that particles don't exist; it has shown that the question "does this particle exist independently of measurement?" is more subtle than it looked. Each of these is a turning-phrase in its own domain, but each also stops being useful the moment it is installed as a final metaphysical claim.

The classical warning applies: any parallel you draw between Zen and contemporary science is itself a 「有法」 — a dharma to be transmitted — that, once its work is done, must become 「無法」, and then 「無無法」. Use it; don't install it.

Misreading 6: "It means there is no Buddha, no path, no practice."

The records do say 「無佛道可成」 — *no Buddha-path to be accomplished*. They say 「見性不留佛」 — *seeing the nature does not retain 'Buddha.'* But this is not a denial of the path; it is a precise description of what a *finished* path looks like. Before the path is finished, you absolutely need a path. 「本來付有法」 — at the start, there is a dharma to be transmitted. After transmission, 「付了言無法」 — once transmitted, no-dharma. And after that, 「悟了無無法」 — once awakened, not even "no-dharma." So there is a sequence. To read the final stage as a denial of the earlier stages is to take the third turning while standing at the first. Dongshan's question about Shenxiu — "why didn't he receive the robe-and-bowl?" — answers: 「不入門者」 — *one who has not entered the gate*. The gate has to be entered. 「時時勤拂拭」 is *not* wrong; it is *incomplete* — a stage on the way, which is not the final stage.

This is one of the most important things the records teach: do not skip stages. The 景德傳燈錄 does not say 神秀 was a fool. It says his verse was on the way to the place where 「本來無一物」 becomes available, and that the verse 「本來無一物」 itself, once it appears, is also on the way to the place where even it can no longer be held. The path is real. The end of the path is not a place where the path was unreal; it is a place where even the *path* is no longer a thing.

A Final Word

「本來無一物」 is, when held correctly, less a doctrine and more a *doorknob*. You turn it, and the door is supposed to open. If you install the doorknob as a thing to be contemplated, you will never get through the door. The classical records are, in their various ways, all insisting on this: the verse from the 景德傳燈錄, the baby-metaphor of Shishi Shandao, the ninety-six turning-phrases of Dongshan, the 「靈靈歷歷地」 of Hongzhi — all are designed to be turned through, not sat on.

The contemporary person who sits with this phrase honestly will find, I suspect, that it does not give them a new thing to believe. It gives them, instead, a release from installing — *every time they notice the installation-habit kick in*. And that release is not empty in the sense of being nothing; it is empty in the sense that the 宏智 record means when it says 「虛中明白」 — *clear in the midst of openness*. Things appear. You are not the things. The things are not self-standing. They appear.

That is, I think, what the records mean when they say 「本來無一物」 — and that is also what they mean when they say you cannot hold onto the sentence to get it.