Hui-neng (Jap., E’nō), also called Wei-lang, 638-713; the sixth patriarch of Ch’an (Zen) in China; a student and dharma successor (hassu) of Hung-jen. Hui-neng was one of the most important Ch’an masters. He gave Ch’an, which had hitherto been strongly marked by traditional Indian Buddhism, a typical Chinese stamp. Thus he is sometimes regarded as the real father of the Ch’an (Zen) tradition. He never transmitted the patriarchate formally to a successor; thus it came to an end. Nonetheless Hui-neng h ad several outstanding students and dharma successors. From two of them, Nan-yüeh Huai-jang (Jap., Nangaku Ejō) and Ching-yüan Hsing-ssu (Jap., Seigen Gyōshi) stem all the major lineages of Ch’an (goke-shichishū).
Hui-neng is considered the author of the only Chinese work that later was attributed the status of a sūtra, the Sūtra [spoken} from the High Seat of the Dharma Treasure, or, as it is usually known, the Platform Sūtra (Liu-tsu-ta-shih fa-pao-t’an-ching), which contains some of the most profound passages in Zen literature. We also learn from this sutra, called for short the T’an-ching (Jap., Dan-gyō), various details of the life of the sixth patriarch. Hui-neng came from a poor family, had hardly any formal education, and had to support his widowed mother by gathering and selling firewood. One day he heard, in front of a house he had just serviced with wood, someone reciting the Diamond Sūtra. Hearing the sentence, “Let your mind flow freely without dwelling on anything,” he had an enlightenment experience. He learned that the man who had recited the sūtra had come from Hung-jen and decided to go see him. When he reached the monastery led by Hung-jen on Mount Huang-mei, Hung-jen immediately recognized his potential but had Hui-neng begin as a helper in the kitchen, where he split firewood and cranked the rice mill. The most famous episode of his life, which concerns the transmission of the patriarchate and the division of Ch’an into a Northern and a Southern school, is, in broad outline, as follows:
When the aged fifth patriarch saw that the time had come to transmit the patriarchate to a successor, he requested the monks of the monastery to express their experience of Ch’an in a poem. Only Shen-hsiu, the most intellectually brilliant of his students and the head monk, highly esteemed by all the monks of the monastery, wrote such a poem. In it he compared the human body with the Bodhi-tree (under which Shākyamuni Buddha attained complete enlightenment) and the mind with a stand holding a mirror that must be continuously cleaned to keep it free of dust. When Hui-neng, who was working in the kitchen, heard this poem, he composed as an answer the following verse:
Fundamentally bodhi is no tree
Nor is the clear mirror a stand.
Since everything is primordially empty,
What is there for dust to cling to?
Hung-jen, who recognized in Hui-neng’s lines a level of experience far deeper than that of Shen-hsui, fearing Shen-hsui’s jealousy, sent for Hui-neng secretly in the middle of the night and gave him robe and bowl (den’e) as a sign of confirmation. Thereby he installed Hui-neng, who in contrast to Shen-hsiu was not seeking this position, as the sixth patriarch, well knowing the difficulties for the transmission of his dharma teachings that would arise from this move. At the same time Hung-jen charged Hui-neng to leave the monastery immediately and to go into hiding in south China so as to be safe from the reprisals that were to be expected from Shen-hsiu and his followers.
After about fifteen years of living in hiding, Hui-neng, who as yet was still not even ordained as a monk, went to Fa-hsin monastery (Jap., Hōshō-ji) in Kuang-chou, where his famous dialogue with the monks who were arguing whether it was the banner or the wind in motion, took place. This dialogue is recorded as example 29 in the Wu-men-kuan. When Yin-tsung, the dharma master of the monastery, heard about this, he said to Hui-neng, “You are surely no ordinary man. Long ago I heard that the dharma robe of Huang-mei had come to the south. Isn’t that you?” Then Hui-neng let it be known that he was the dharma successor of Hung-jen and the holder of the patriarchate. Master Yin-tsung had Hui-neng’s head shaved, ordained him as a monk, and requested Hui-neng to be his teacher.
Thus Hui-neng began his work as a Ch’an master, first in the Fa-hsin monastery, then in his own monastery, the Pao-lin-ssu near Ts’ao-ch’i, not far from the port city of Canton. He founded the Southern school of Ch’an, while Shen-hsiu and his students propagated the teachings of the Northern school and also claimed the successorship of the fifth patriarch. In a manner corresponding to the respective inclinations of the two founders, the Southern school stressed reaching enlightenment through a sudden, intuitive leap into intellect-transcending immediacy of experience (tongo), whereas the Northern school advocated a gradual approach to enlightenment with the help of intellectual penetration of the meaning of the sūtras (zengo). In the “competition” between the partisans of sudden and gradual enlightenment, the Southern school eventually proved itself the more vital. While the Northern school died out after a few generations, a great number of profoundly enlightened masters in succession from Hui-neng bear witness to the legitimacy of the attribution of the patriarchate, and thus the lineage of the true dharma, to Hui-neng.
With Hui-neng, who as an uneducated lay man received the transmission of the patriarchate against all conventions of the religious establishment, a decisive step was made toward the assimilation of Indian Dhyāna Buddhism into the Chinese mind-set, as well as toward the development ofa native Chinese Ch’an that was at least as strongly marked by Taoism as by Buddhism. It was this Southern school with its radical rejection of mere book learning (a view already exemplified for centuries by Taoist sages), and its practical down-to-earthness combined with dry humor, so typical of the Chinese folk character, that produced all the great lineages of Ch’an. With Hui-neng and his students and dharma successors began the golden age of Ch’an. During the T’ang, and the following Sung, period, it produced numerous outstanding Ch’an masters, whose deeds and sayings are still an inspiration today and (as kōans) an important means of training on the way of Zen.
Source: The Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion: Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Zen. Shambhala Publications, Inc.
Books on Hui-neng
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