But just what was this mind that was being transmitted? His answer was that nothing was transmitted, since the whole point was just to jar loose the intuition of the person being "taught."
_Once Huang-po was asked, "If you say that mind can be transmitted, then how can you say it is nothing?" He answered, "To achieve nothing is to have the mind transmitted to you." The questioner pressed, "If there is nothing and no mind, then how can it be transmitted?" Huang-po answered, "You have heard the expression 'transmission of the mind' and so you think there must be something transmitted. You are wrong. Thus Bodhidharma said that when the nature of the mind is realized, it is not possible to express it verbally. Clearly, then, nothing is obtained in the transmission of the mind, or if anything is obtained, it is certainly not knowledge_."28
He finally concludes that the subject cannot really even be discussed, since there are no terms for the process that transpires. Just as _sunyata_--that "emptiness" or Void whose existence means that conceptual thought is empty and rational constructs inadequate--is not something that can be transmitted as a concept, so too is the Dharma or teaching, as well as Mind, that essence we share with a larger reality. Even statements that concepts are pointless must fall back on language and consequently are actually themselves merely make-do approximations, as are all descriptions of the process of transmission. He finally gives up on words entirely, declaring that none of the terms he has used has any meaning.
_A transmission of Void cannot be made through words. A transmission in concrete terms cannot be the Dharma. . . In fact, however, Mind is not Mind and transmission is not really transmission.29
He was working on the very real problem of the transmission of understanding that operates in a part of the mind where speech and logic cannot enter. As John Wu has pointed out, in a sense Huang-po had come back full circle to the insights of Chuang Tzu: good and evil are meaningless; intuitive knowledge is more profound than speech-bound logic; there is an underlying unity (for Chuang Tzu it was the Tao or Way; for Huang-po, the Universal Mind) that represents the ineffable absolute.30