Platform Sūtra of the Sixth Patriarch

Platform Sūtra of the Sixth Patriarch (Chin., Liu-tsu t'an ching). An early Chinese Ch'an classic containing the traditional biography and teachings of Hui-neng (638–713), a figure revered as the sixth patriarch of the Chinese Ch'an school. The autobiographical sections, though unreliable as historical witness, tell us much about ideological struggles within early Ch'an. Hui-neng is portrayed as an illiterate woodcutter who attains a sudden awakening upon hearing some passages from the Diamond Sūtra chanted aloud from within a Buddhist temple. He travels to the East Mountain monastery to study with the traditional fifth patriach of the Ch'an tradition, Hung-jen (601–74). Hung-jen disparages him as an ignorant southerner, to which Hui-neng replies that ‘in enlightenment there is no north or south’. Hung-jen puts him to work pounding rice in the monastery kitchen, but does not ordain him. Later, when Hung-jen felt it was time to bestow the mantle of sixth patriarch upon one of his followers, he ordered all his disciples to compose a verse to demonstrate the depth of their understanding. All of the disciples decide to let Shen-hsiu (606–706) present a verse without competition, which he does after much hesitation. Hung-jen, upon hearing the verse, publicly praises it and assigns all of the monks to recite it, but in private tells Shen-hsiu it is short of perfect understanding. Later, Hui-neng hears an acolyte reciting the poem, and realizes immediately how to correct it. He asks about it, and the acolyte tells him of the contest. He then asks the acolyte to take him to a hallway where a wall had been cleared and white-washed so that a painter could paint scenes from the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra upon it, and dictates his own verse to the acolyte. Hung-jen, hearing the verse, publicly disparages it, but dismisses the painter so as to leave the verse on the wall. Later that night, he calls Hui-neng to his room and privately gives him the robe (see cīvara) and bowl (see begging-bowl) of Bodhidharma as a sign that he is the sixth patriarch, and tells him to escape lest the monks of East Mountain, jealous of this unordained stranger, do him harm.

This story appears to involve at least two currents of debate within the nascent Ch'an school. First, prior to that time the school had been known as the ‘Laṅkāvatāra School’, denoting its emphasis on the study of that scripture. Hui-neng's awakening upon hearing passages from the Diamond Sūtra and the manner in which his poem pre-empts the painting of scenes from the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra appear to be part of an attempt to shift the school's emphasis from the long, disorganized, and eclectic Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra to the brief and clearly focused Diamond Sūtra. Second, the story of the poetry contest pits Hui-neng against Shen-hsiu, two monks who probably did not live at the East Mountain monastery at the same time. Shen-hsiu later became very famous at the imperial court and the paterfamilias of a lineage that came to be known as the ‘Northern School’, while Hui-neng is traditionally identified as the progenitor of the ‘Southern School’, which vied with the Northern School for supremacy in the Northern–Southern School controversy. The story of the contest puts Shen-hsiu in a very unflattering light and purports to show that, despite Hung-jen's public approval of his senior disciple, in private he named Hui-neng as the true inheritor of his teaching and enlightenment.

The sermons which follow the autobiographical section deal with issues of practice and enlightenment, much of which is common to all Ch'an lineages and indeed to Chinese Buddhism as a whole. The distinctively ‘Southern’ teachings have to do with practice envisioned as ‘no-thought’ (Chin., wu-nien) and the transmission of the ‘formless precepts’ (Chin., wu-hsiang chieh). ‘No-thought’ means that, while in seated meditation, the practitioner simply allows the mind to work naturally, and does not attempt to suppress any thoughts that might arise. This is based in Perfection of Insight (Prajñā-pāramitā) thought that undercuts any distinction between the ignorant mind and the enlightened mind; simply to observe the workings of the ordinary mind is to observe directly the Buddha's mind. This method, which conflates practice and attainment into a single moment, is the basis for teachings of ‘sudden enlightenment’, that is, enlightenment seen as instantaneous because there is nothing to attain and no goal to reach. This is obviously much easier than traditional forms of meditation that took much practice and discipline to tame the mind. It is interesting that, in his sermons, the supposedly illiterate Hui-neng quotes scriptures several times.

The ‘formless precepts’ as given in this text do not refer to any efforts to amend one's behaviour, but to do everything within the realization that one is manifesting perfect Buddhahood already. Certain sections of the text depict Hui-neng as if he were actually transmitting these vows to an assembled crowd, and after he pronounces the vows, contains rubrics such as ‘recite the above three times’, which leads some scholars to believe that these sections might have actually been used as ordination texts. The origins of this text are obscure. That the East Mountain master Hung-jen had a disciple named Hui-neng is not in doubt, but beyond the mere appearance of his name in lists of Hung-jen's pupils, no other details of his life and teachings are known. The ‘autobiographical’ sections are certainly fictitious, and many of the teachings in the sermons repeat almost verbatim records of sermons preached by Hui-neng's disciple Shen-hui (670–762), the instigator and chief polemicist in the Northern–Southern School controversy. In spite of this, it is probably not merely Shen-hui's fabrication, as it contains much other material, some of which is disparaging of Shen-hui. The fact that the earliest extant manuscripts are much shorter than later versions shows that the text underwent some development after its initial composition in the late 8th or early 9th centuries, and some scholars have theorized that the Oxhead school, a group that existed independently of the Northern and Southern Schools, may have had a hand in its composition in an effort to quell hostilities by presenting a moderate interpretation. The text remains remarkable in bearing the title ‘sūtra’, despite the fact that it does not report sermons of the Buddha, and in the manner in which it transcended its own contentious origins to become a classic beloved and studied by the Ch'an tradition as a whole.