e-mail
One day, the Leader of the School called all his pupils and declared, “Life and death are serious things. You pupils waste your time making offerings, seeking worldly blessings and not even trying to break out of the cycle of life and death! If you give yourself over to delusions, how can blessings save you? Go to your rooms and think for yourselves!“Those who have true wisdom, use it! Each of you has to write a verse for me. For the student who best sums up the basic ideas taught by the Buddha, I will hand over my robes, naming that person the next Leader of the School. Go on! Hurry!”
…Late that night, Head Monk Shen-hsiu snuck out and wrote a verse on the wall by candlelight:
The body is the tree of perfect wisdom (like the tree under which the Buddha sat)
The mind is the stand holding up a bright mirror.
Always clean it diligently
Never let it become dusty.The Leader of the School said, “This verse is good, but it’s not complete – it comes to the door of wisdom, but doesn’t walk through. Ordinary people can follow these words and succeed. But you can’t reach the ultimate wisdom while following this view. You have to walk through the door and see your own nature. Write another verse, show me you’ve seen your own nature, and you’ll have my robes of leadership.”
But the Head Monk spent days trying to come up with another verse and couldn’t.
I’d also written a verse:
The tree under which the Buddha sat is not his enlightenment.
The mind is not a bright mirror.
Since everything is originally empty,
Where can there be any dust?The other monks were surprised by my verse; I went back to the kitchen to pound rice. But the Leader of the School realized that I alone understood the basic ideas taught by the Buddha.
— tr. by me, loosely after Dr. Wing-Tsit Chan
Hui-neng (also written in pinyin as Huineng) is one of the most important (and entertaining) figures in Chinese Buddhism – specifically in the school that was known as Dhyana in India and as Ch’an in China. In the West, most people know it by its Japanese name: Zen. These are all versions of the same name, a word that means “meditation”, specifically the kind of meditation where one sits and empties one’s mind of all distractions. Before the first Dhyana Buddhists traveled to China, there were Chinese Buddhists who practiced something they called “meditation,” but it was more about visualizing internal energies and preserving your outer jade fluid and that. But in the 600s (just before the time that Mohammed was moving his mountain and the Christians were deciding to shave their heads in circles instead of sideways ((and no, I’m not making that up))), a fellow named Hung-jen took the lessons of Bodhidharma and said, “THIS is the way it oughtta go!” He’s the Leader of the School mentioned up there – the Fifth Patriarch of Ch’an.
Hui-neng was his most notable pupil. He was actually a kitchen boy in the monastery – an orphan who supported himself selling firewood – but, after the little poetry contest quoted up there, he went on to become the Sixth Patriarch, founder of the influential Southern School of Zen Buddhism. His school is the one we all recognize as Zen today. It emphasizes sudden enlightenment (no long waiting!) and the concept that the mind is best understood as a single, indivisible thing that emanates from True Reality. Since it can’t be divided, that means that anything, anywhere can be understood as a part of our minds (and that our minds are just a part of the bricks, sofas, cars, nightclubs, rain drops and eggplant parmigiana around us). And if everything is part of our mind, then everything has Buddha-nature… which means that everything can lead directly to sudden enlightenment.
There’s another version of the Zen poetry duel over here, and a fun “what happened next” story at the e-sangha.
(As a language note, the name “Hui” means “bright,” as in the “bright mirror” and as in “Hui-neng.” You’ll see it as an element in lots of Chinese names – including my daughter’s.)
