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WorkHuineng

The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch

An illiterate firewood seller beats the senior monk in a verse contest and inherits the robe: Chan's founding story, told twice.

by Huineng122 passages held

  • Chinese, the original language
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Original title
六祖壇經
Original language
Chinese

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Overview

The only Chinese Chan work to call itself a sutra is a sermon with a life story at its front. For six centuries readers knew it in the version a monk named Zongbao edited in 1291, which entered the Ming dynasty's Buddhist canon. Early in the twentieth century copies turned up among the manuscripts sealed in the Mogao caves at Dunhuang, written in the ninth century and far shorter, and scholars could see how the book had grown. The text says that Huineng preached it at the Dafan monastery in Shaozhou, and that the prefect ordered his disciple Fahai to write it down. Huineng tells how, as a poor seller of firewood in the south, he heard a customer reciting the Diamond Sutra, walked north to the Fifth Patriarch Hongren, and spent eight months pounding rice. When Hongren asked his monks for a verse, Shenxiu, the senior monk, compared the mind to a mirror on its stand that must be wiped clean of dust. Huineng, who could not read, had someone write an answer on the wall: awakening has no tree and the mirror no stand, so there is nowhere for dust to settle. Hongren gave him the robe at night. The sermon draws the doctrine from the scene: everyone's own nature is already awake, so awakening comes all at once, and meditation and wisdom are one thing rather than two stages. The two versions differ even in that verse, where the third line moves from a Buddha-nature that is always pure to the claim that there is not a single thing. Scholars such as Philip Yampolsky, whose 1967 translation of the Dunhuang text was a landmark of Western Zen scholarship, read the story as a product of Shenhui's campaign of the 730s: calling himself Huineng's heir, Shenhui attacked Shenxiu's followers as mere gradualists. Morten Schlütter, a historian of Chan, has traced how Shenhui's own place shrinks from main heir to minor figure in the later versions.

Key concepts

What is self-nature in the Platform Sutra?

Self-nature, zixing, is each person's own original mind, which the sermon says is pure and awake from the beginning. It is not a soul or a personality but the capacity to see that every person already has; delusion only covers it. Hence the book's repeated phrase 'seeing one's nature', jianxing: awakening is recognising what was there, not producing something new.

What do no-thought, no-form and no-abiding mean?

Huineng names them the three foundations of his teaching. No-thought means thinking without being carried off by thoughts; no-form means meeting forms without being caught by them; no-abiding means the mind settles on nothing, moving from moment to moment without clinging. None of them means blankness: a mind that stopped thinking would, he says, be like an insentient thing.

What is the difference between sudden and gradual teaching?

Gradual teaching treats awakening as the end of a long purification, the mind cleaned like a mirror over time; sudden teaching holds that the mind's nature is already awake, so awakening happens in one moment of seeing. The book sets Shenxiu's northern school against Huineng's southern one on this point, yet Huineng says the teaching itself is one, and only people differ in speed.

What is prajñā, the wisdom Huineng preaches on?

Prajñā, the Sanskrit word for wisdom, here means seeing directly that nothing has a fixed self, rather than knowing a lot. The sermon's subject is maha prajñā pāramitā, the perfection of great wisdom, and Huineng says everyone has it from birth, only obscured by confusion. He recommends the Diamond Sutra, the text he heard as a firewood seller, as the way to it.

Why does the robe matter in the Platform Sutra?

The robe and bowl passed from patriarch to patriarch were proof of who held the true teaching. The story turns on that proof, and then undercuts it: the Fifth Patriarch tells Huineng that the teaching passes mind to mind, the robe only causes strife, and it is not to be handed on further. Huineng has to flee with it all the same.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Verse on the Wall

A senior monk compares the mind to a mirror that must be wiped clean, and an illiterate kitchen worker answers that there is nowhere for dust to land. Which of them has seen the mind is the contest the book is built on.

Huineng's life story is the argument in narrative form. A southern 'barbarian' told by the Fifth Patriarch that his kind cannot become Buddhas replies that people have north and south, Buddha-nature has none. Shenxiu's verse treats awakening as the result of constant cleaning; Huineng's denies there is a stand or a mirror to clean. The robe goes to the one who cannot read, at night, and the sermon spells out what it means: everyone's own nature is already pure, and only seeing it is wanting.

  • lineage
  • transmission
  • original nature
  • buddha-nature
  • self-nature
  • self-realization
  • enlightenment

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All at Once

If the nature is already awake, awakening cannot be built up step by step. What then becomes of meditation, and whether calm and insight are two stages or one thing, is argued here.

Huineng's sermon refuses the picture of practice as first quieting the mind and then gaining wisdom. Concentration and wisdom are like a lamp and its light: two names, one body. The teaching is neither sudden nor gradual in itself, he says, only people are quick or slow to see. Its watchword is no-thought, which he takes care to separate from blank emptiness: not ceasing to think, but thinking without clinging to what passes. Sitting still to suppress the mind, he warns, is binding oneself.

  • sudden awakening
  • sudden enlightenment
  • meditation
  • wisdom
  • concentration
  • no-thought
  • nonattachment
  • nonduality
  • awakening

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The Pure Land Within

A prefect asks about the merit of building temples and about rebirth in the western paradise. Whether the religion's outward acts mean anything when the Buddha is one's own nature is the question put to Huineng.

Asked why Bodhidharma told Emperor Wu that his temples and alms earned no merit, Huineng agrees: they earn blessings, but merit lies in seeing one's own nature. The western Pure Land is near for the one whose mind is pure, for whom the Buddha's land is purified with the mind. He turns the rites inward one by one: the refuges are taken in one's own nature, repentance is formless, the vows are kept in the mind. Practice at home is as good as practice in a monastery.

  • pure land
  • refuge
  • repentance
  • merit
  • ethical conduct
  • scripture
  • liberation
  • practice

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Within this work

passages held
122
distinct concepts
168
by passages held, corpus-wide
#464

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “meditation” and “nonattachment”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 27 pairings. 74 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
meditationnonattachment13
awakeningbuddha-nature11
buddha-naturenonattachment9
buddha-naturewisdom9
nonattachmentwisdom9
meditationwisdom8
awakeningnonattachment7
buddha-natureself-cultivation6
meditationnonduality6
awakeningemptiness5
awakeningnonduality5
buddha-naturenonduality5
emptinessnonattachment5
awakeningmeditation4
buddha-natureemptiness4
buddha-naturemeditation4
emptinesswisdom4
self-cultivationwisdom4
awakeningwisdom3
emptinessmeditation3
emptinessnonduality3
meditationself-cultivation3
nondualitywisdom3
awakeningself-cultivation2
nonattachmentnonduality2
nonattachmentself-cultivation2
nondualityself-cultivation1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch (六祖壇經) you are here ZH
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