Master Chinul (1158-1212) was the major founder of Korean Zen. Ordained at fifteen, his first awakening occurred at the age of thirty, when he was reading the liberating words of the Sixth Chinese Patriarch. Thereafter, Chinul came to view Buddhist training in alertness and calmness as an incremental process comparable to human maturation. This long developmental path resembled his own. It was one of “sudden enlightenment followed by gradual cultivation.” Its momentum surged during these early sudden glimpses into the inherent nature of reality. Afterwards, one refined this enlightened perspective in the course of skillfully applying all of one’s discriminative faculties and wisdom to meet the needs of daily life practice.

From James Austin’s Selfless Insight: Zen and the Meditative Transformations of Consciousness, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2009, p. 239.