Zen Buddhism : Practise of passing through a gate less gate and hearing the sound of one hand clapping.

The Buddhist conception of enlightenment isn’t intellectual. It’s experiential. It’s kind of like being a parent: If I went back in time and tried to explain to my younger self what it feels like to be a dad, nothing I could say would adequately convey it. I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to be a dad until I actually became one. In the same way, you cannot truly know what it’s like to be enlightened unless you’ve realized enlightenment.

To be enlightened is to be liberated from our habitual reactivity, freed from our perceptions and ideas to see reality as it is without wanting it to be different.

I would go further and say that enlightenment is also freedom from wanting to be enlightened. Any notion we have about what enlightenment is can get in the way of actually experiencing it. Put another way, enlightenment isn’t something you get or find; it’s something you rediscover—a state of being that has always been in you but that has been covered with made-up stories and false concepts. Buddhism teaches that enlightenment is our true nature. It’s not something we can become, because it’s something we already are. We just have to realize it.

Buddhist scholar and author Stephen Batchelor discusses the Four Noble Truths as tasks with an easy-to-remember acronym: ELSA.

E - Embrace the instance of suffering.
L - Let go of the reactive pattern.
S - See the stopping of the reactivity.
A - Act skillfully.

A famous koan (a paradoxical statement that Zen Buddhists meditate on) says you can enter this state of awakening only through a gateless gate. This is a seemingly simple but rather profound teaching: As long as you think there is a gate, you will not be able to enter the awakened state. You enter it by realizing there is no gate; you’ve been in that awakened state all along. You arrive there by realizing there is no “there” there.

Zen Buddhism: Practise of passing through a gateless gate and hearing the sound of one hand clapping.

When we practise mindfulness we watch our thoughts without attachment. Then we realize that they are transient and do not define us.

It liberates us.

Krishnamurti´s choiceless awareness is watching the mind without labeling, categorizing, or trying to change it. This resonates with Buddhist mindfulness.

Buddhism teaches satipathana for awareness but Krishnamurti says there is no need for method. Seeking enlightenment creates the distinction between the seeker and the searched truth and the hook is that this separation comes between the truth and you. Truth is a pathless path. Just like the Zen gateless gate.

Both lessons are the same but it is framed differently.

It is you and your awareness. Not what Buddha said. What he said also must have changed during translation and travel. Once Krishnamurti asked a Buddhist scholar."You are a Buddhist scholar who has learned all the Buddhist scriptures. Suppose Buddha came to you and said something different, will you believe him?" That is the point.