Huineng

Huineng was a Chinese Buddhist monk revered as the Sixth Patriarch of Chan (Zen). According to the Platform Sutra, he was a poor, unlettered seller of firewood in the far south awakened on hearing the Diamond Sutra recited. He went to study with the Fifth Patriarch, Hongren, and won the succession with a verse answering the head monk Shenxiu: if the mind is pure from the start, there is no mirror on which dust can settle. Modern scholars treat much of this story as legend, shaped by Shenhui, who claimed to be his heir, and by later editors of the Platform Sutra. Even so, the teaching attributed to Huineng, that awakening means seeing one's own nature here and now, became the basis of the Southern school, to which the later Chan and Zen lineages trace their descent.

Key ideas

• Every person already has the Buddha-nature; awakening is seeing into one's own nature, not acquiring something new.
• Awakening can be sudden: the truth itself has no stages, though people differ in how ready they are to see it.
• Meditation and wisdom are one, related as a lamp is to its light.
• No-thought means not being caught up in thoughts while thinking, not emptying the mind of them.
• Practice belongs in everyday activity, carried out with a straightforward mind, not only in seated meditation.

Major works

• The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch (compiled 8th century; earliest surviving manuscript, from Dunhuang, c. 850)
• Enlarged Platform Sutra in the Zongbao edition (1291), the version most widely read in later Chan and Zen

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