How Can Someone Walk and Still Go Nowhere?

Henry Shukman says a student who declared that Bodhidharma never took a step seems to have found a reality where there is nowhere to go. A person can drive all over, fly all over, and walk as much as they like, and in one sense still not be going anywhere. He calls the discovery a deep awakening, and he is simplifying the student's words.

The student stubbed his toe on a rock in open straw sandals. The pain was sudden and bloody, and the shock went right through him. Everything fell away into one openness. Nobody remained and no body remained, a real experience of emptiness. He asked where pain comes from when nothing is left, and yet pain remains. All the reactivity had gone. Pain was only a sensory experience with nobody having it, vast emptiness with pain. He went straight back to the monastery, with a handkerchief around the toe in the telling. The master thought he had already left. The reply was that he never took a single step, and in the fuller wording, that Bodhidharma, the great master said to have brought Zen from India to China, never took a step.

The awakening changed his life. He stayed with the master, never went anywhere else, succeeded the master, and became a great teacher.