Huineng

Biography

Most modern scholars doubt the historicity of traditional biographies and works written about Huineng. The two primary sources for Huineng's life are the preface to the Platform Sutra and the Transmission of the Lamp.

Huineng was born into the Lu family in 638 A.D. in Xinzhou (present-day Xinxing County) in Guangdong province. His father died when he was young and his family was poor. As a consequence, Huineng had no opportunity to learn to read or write and is said to have remained illiterate his entire life.

The Platform Sutra

The Platform Sūtra of the Sixth Patriarch is attributed to Huineng. It was constructed over a longer period of time, and contains different layers of writing. It is...

...a wonderful melange of early Chan teachings, a virtual repository of the entire tradition up to the second half of the eighth century. At the heart of the sermon is the same understanding of the Buddha-nature that we have seen in texts attributed to Bodhidharma and Hongren, including the idea that the fundamental Buddha-nature is only made invisible to ordinary humans by their illusions".

Citation of Buddhist Scriptures

The Platform Sūtra cites and explains a wide range of Buddhist scriptures listed here in the order of appearance:

Diamond Sutra

According to the Platform Sutra, one day while delivering firewood to a store, Huineng heard a customer reciting the Diamond Sutra and had an awakening. He immediately inquired about the sutra, and decided to seek out the Fifth Patriarch, Daman Hongren, at his monastery on Huang Mei Mountain. Some later versions of the story have the customer giving him 10 or 100 taels of silver to provide for his aged mother. After travelling for thirty days on foot, he arrived at Huangmei Mountain, where the Fifth Patriarch was presiding.

Introduction to Hongren

The first chapter of the Ming canon version of the Platform Sutra describes the introduction of Huineng to Hongren as follows;

Huineng became a labourer in the monastery, doing chores in the rice mill, chopping wood and pounding rice at the monastery for the next eight months.

Succession of Hongren

The Platform Sutra contains the well-known story of the contest for the succession of Hongren. According to the text, Huineng won this contest, but had to flee the monastery to avoid the rage of the supporters of Shenxiu. The story is not a factual account, but an 8th-century construction, probably by the so-called Oxhead School.

Becoming the Sixth Patriarch

The first chapter of the Platform Sutra tells the well-known apocryphal story of the Dharma-transmission from Hongren to Hui-neng. Hongren asked his students to...

... write me a stanza (gatha) [...] He who understands what the Essence of Mind is will be given the robe (the insignia of the Patriarchate) and the Dharma (the ultimate teaching of the Chan school), and I shall make him the Sixth Patriarch.

Only Shenxiu wrote a poem, anonymously on the wall in the middle of the night. It stated:

After having read this poem aloud to him, Hui-neng asked an officer to write another gatha on the wall for him, next to Shenxiu's, which stated:

Hongren read the stanza, and received Huineng in his abode, where he expounded the Diamond Sutra to him. When he came to the passage, "to use the mind yet be free from any attachment," Huineng came to great awakening. He exclaimed,

How amazing that the self nature is originally pure! How amazing that the self nature is unborn and undying! How amazing that the self nature is inherently complete! How amazing that the self nature neither moves nor stays! How amazing that all dharmas come from this self nature!

Hongren then passed the robe and begging bowl, symbols of the Dharma Seal of Enlightenment, to Huineng and he thus became the Sixth Patriarch.

Interpretation of the verses

According to the traditional interpretation, which is based on Guifeng Zongmi, the fifth-generation successor of Shenhui, the two verses represent respectively the gradual and the sudden approach. According to McRae, this is an incorrect understanding:

[T]he verse attributed to Shenxiu does not in fact refer to gradual or progressive endeavor, but to a constant practice of cleaning the mirror [...] [H]is basic message was that of the constant and perfect teaching, the endless personal manifestation of the bodhisattva ideal.

Huineng's verse does not stand alone, but forms a pair with Shenxiu's verse:

Huineng's verse(s) apply the rhetoric of emptiness to undercut the substantiality of the terms of that formulation. However, the basic meaning of the first proposition still remains".

McRae notes a similarity in reasoning with the Oxhead School, which used a threefold structure of "absolute, relative and middle", or "thesis-antithesis-synthesis". According to McRae, the Platform Sutra itself is the synthesis in this threefold structure, giving a balance between the need of constant practice and the insight into the absolute.

Sudden Enlightenment

Doctrinally the Southern School is associated with the teaching that enlightenment is sudden, while the Northern School is associated with the teaching that enlightenment is gradual. This was a polemical exaggeration, since both schools were derived from the same tradition, and the so-called Southern School incorporated many teachings of the more influential Northern School. Eventually both schools died out, but the influence of Shenhui was so immense that all later Chan schools traced their origin to Huineng, and "sudden enlightenment" became a standard doctrine of Chan.

No-thought and meditation

According to tradition Huineng taught "no-thought", the "pure and unattached mind" which "comes and goes freely and functions fluently without any hindrance". The alleged Northern schools emphasis on quiet contemplation was criticised by Huineng:

Historical impact

According to modern historiography, Huineng was a marginal and obscure historical figure. Modern scholarship has questioned this hagiography. Historic research reveals that this story was created around the middle of the 8th century, beginning in 731 by Shenhui, a successor to Huineng, to win influence at the Imperial Court. He claimed Huineng to be successor to Hongren, instead of the then publicly recognized successor Shenxiu:

It was through the propaganda of Shen-hui (684-758) that Huineng (d. 710) became the also today still towering figure of sixth patriarch of Ch’an/Zen Buddhism, and accepted as the ancestor or founder of all subsequent Ch’an lineages ... using the life of Confucius as a template for its structure, Shen-hui invented a hagiography for the then highly obscure Huineng. At the same time, Shen-hui forged a lineage of patriarchs of Ch’an back to the Buddha using ideas from Indian Buddhism and Chinese ancestor worship.

In 745 Shenhui was invited to take up residence in the Heze temple in Luoyang. In 753 he fell out of grace, and had to leave the capital to go into exile. The most prominent of the successors of his lineage was Guifeng Zongmi According to Zongmi, Shenhui's approach was officially sanctioned in 796, when "an imperial commission determined that the Southern line of Ch'an represented the orthodox transmission and established Shen-hui as the seventh patriarch, placing an inscription to that effect in the Shen-lung temple".

Mummification

The mummified body of Huineng is kept in Nanhua Temple in Shaoguan (northern Guangdong).

Huineng's body was seen by the Jesuit Matteo Ricci who visited Nanhua Temple in 1589. Ricci told the European readers the story of Huineng (in a somewhat edited form), describing him as akin to a Christian ascetic. Ricci names him Liùzǔ (i.e. 六祖, "The Sixth Patriarch").