Every surviving line of Chan and Zen counts its descent through Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch, and historians can say very little about him. An early list of the ten chief students of Hongren, the Fifth Patriarch, names him as a teacher of regional importance in the far south. The poet Wang Wei wrote an epitaph for him in 739 or shortly after. His family home was given to the Buddhist order after his death, which suggests a family of some local standing. Almost everything else comes from the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, a sermon with his life story at its front, and from later histories that grew around it.
The tradition's Huineng is a different man. In the Platform Sutra, his father is an official from the north who was banished to Xinzhou in Lingnan, the southern frontier, and died young, leaving the boy and his mother poor. Huineng sells firewood, hears a customer reciting the Diamond Sutra, walks north to Hongren's monastery and is set to pounding rice. He cannot read, yet his verse on the wall beats that of Shenxiu, the senior monk, and Hongren gives him the robe at night. In the later edition he then hides for fifteen years among hunters. When he comes out, at the Faxing temple in Guangzhou, two monks are arguing whether the wind is moving or the flag; he tells them it is their minds that move, and Yinzong, the monk lecturing there, shaves Huineng's head and asks Huineng to be his teacher. The same edition says he received the robe at twenty-four, was ordained at thirty-nine, taught for thirty-seven years at Caoxi, and died in 713 at seventy-six.
The claim the sermon carries is that everyone's own nature is already awake. Practice does not slowly clean the mind into awakening; a person sees their own nature, and the seeing happens all at once. From that follows the sermon's refusal to split the path into stages: meditation and wisdom are one thing, as a lamp and its light are one. Shenxiu's verse, which tells the mind to wipe its mirror clean, is set up as the gradual view that this teaching replaces.
The Southern school, which taught sudden awakening and claimed him as its founder, came to define Chan, and the Platform Sutra became the one Chinese Chan text to be called a sutra. A mummified body said to be his sits in the Nanhua temple in northern Guangdong. The Jesuit Matteo Ricci saw it in 1589, and Red Guards damaged it during the Cultural Revolution.
The contest with Shenxiu is also where the scholarship begins. In the 730s Shenhui, a monk who called himself Huineng's heir, attacked the followers of Shenxiu, who were then honoured at court, as gradualists and claimed the patriarchy for his own teacher. Shenhui seems to have known little about Huineng beyond his link to Hongren and his life in Shaozhou. When manuscripts of the Platform Sutra were found at Dunhuang early in the twentieth century, scholars could compare a ninth-century text with the expanded edition of 1291 and watch the story grow. Philip Yampolsky, in his translation of 1967, read the sermon as shaped by Shenhui's campaign; John Jorgensen's Inventing Hui-neng (2005) followed the making of the legend further. There is no reliable evidence that even Nanyue Huairang and Qingyuan Xingsi, the two students through whom all later lines descend, studied with him.