Platform Sutra - Three Verses on a Wall

The Story at the Wall

At Huangmei, the fifth patriarch Hongren called his monks together. Each was to compose a verse showing what he had understood, and whoever had grasped the meaning would receive the robe and the dharma and become the sixth patriarch. The monks gave up before starting. Shenxiu was their instructor; once he received the dharma, they reasoned, they could simply follow him.

Shenxiu hesitated. If he offered no verse, his teacher could not judge the depth of his understanding. If he did, it would look as though he coveted the patriarch's seat. In the third watch of the night, unseen, he took a candle to the middle wall of the southern corridor and wrote his verse there. A few days later Huineng, a lay worker pounding rice in the mill, heard a boy reciting it and went to the wall. He could not read, so he asked someone to read it to him, and he had someone else write his own verse on the wall.

No scene in Chan has been retold more often. Shenxiu and Huineng each left one verse on the wall, Huineng won, and the dharma passed to him. The book that tells it is the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch (六祖壇經), a record of Huineng's teaching and life. Open the oldest manuscript, though, and the verses on the wall number three, not two.

Shenxiu's Verse

The Dunhuang manuscript held by the British Museum carries a long title: the Platform Sutra of the Supreme Mahayana Great Perfection of Wisdom of the Southern School's Sudden Teaching, Preached by the Sixth Patriarch Huineng at Dafan Temple in Shaozhou (南宗頓教最上大乘摩訶般若波羅蜜經六祖惠能大師於韶州大梵寺施法壇經). It presents itself as the record of a sermon Huineng gave at Dafan Temple, collected by his disciple Fahai. This is the text printed as number 2007 in the Taisho canon.

Shenxiu's verse reads:

身是菩提樹 心如明鏡臺 時時勤拂拭 莫使有塵埃

The body is the bodhi tree, the mind is like the stand of a bright mirror. At all times wipe it diligently, and let there be no dust.

Seeing it, Hongren dropped his plan to have the corridor wall painted with scenes from the Lankavatara Sutra. He paid the painter and sent him off, citing the Diamond Sutra's line that whatever has marks is illusory, and left the verse up for people to recite. Practice by it, he said, and you will not fall into the evil paths. Calling Shenxiu in privately, though, he told him that his understanding had reached the gate and not yet gone through.

Huineng in the Oldest Manuscript

In the Dunhuang text Huineng has his verse written on the western wall. It is not one verse.

菩提本無樹 明鏡亦無臺 佛性常清淨 何處有塵埃

Bodhi originally has no tree, and the bright mirror has no stand. Buddha-nature is always clean and pure; where could there be dust?

Then he adds another.

心是菩提樹 身為明鏡臺 明鏡本清淨 何處染塵埃

The mind is the bodhi tree, the body is the bright mirror's stand. The bright mirror is originally clean and pure; where could dust stain it?

The second verse answers Shenxiu by swapping his body and mind. The first clears away the tree and the stand Shenxiu had set up and puts buddha-nature in the empty place. In both, what carries the last line is purity.

The manuscript is full of copying errors. The third line of the first verse is actually written 佛姓常青淨 in the manuscript. The Taisho editors printed it as it stands, and the CBETA digital canon corrects the two characters to 性 and 清. The Dunhuang text is therefore always read through a critical edition.

Nowhere in it does the line about there not being a single thing appear.

Where the Single Thing Came In

The line shows up in the next generation of the text, the edition by Huixin, who reorganized the sutra into two fascicles and eleven sections. In his preface he writes that the old text was so prolix that readers began delighted and ended weary. He dates his work only to a dingmao year, usually taken to be 967. A Song dynasty recarving of it reached Koshoji in Japan, and that is how it can be read today.

菩提本無樹 明鏡亦非臺 本來無一物 何處有塵埃

Bodhi originally has no tree, and the bright mirror is not a stand. Fundamentally there is not a single thing; where could there be dust?

Two verses have become one. "Has no stand" (亦無臺) has become "is not a stand" (亦非臺), and the third line, where buddha-nature stood, now says there is not a single thing. The last line still reads 有, as in the Dunhuang text.

The form most widely read today was completed under the Yuan. Zongbao, abbot of the Fengfan Bao'en Guangxiao monastery, wrote that the three editions he had seen disagreed and each had gains and losses, so he corrected what was wrong and filled out what had been cut. His colophon is dated to the xinmao year of Zhiyuan, 1291. This is Taisho number 2008, the Dharma Treasure Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch. Here Huineng's verse ends 何處惹塵埃, and Shenxiu's becomes 勿使惹塵埃.

Set the last line of Shenxiu's verse alone and it moves by one character with each edition: 莫使有塵埃 in Dunhuang, 莫使染塵埃 in Huixin, 勿使惹塵埃 in Zongbao. The last line of Huineng's verse moves from 有 to 惹. A line that asked whether there is dust now asks what could attract it.

It is hard to say, however, that the line was first composed by Huixin. The Wanling Record of Huangbo Xiyun, compiled by Pei Xiu, already quotes 本來無一物 何處有塵埃, and even includes an exchange asking whether, if there is fundamentally not a single thing, nothing is then the right answer. Pei Xiu wrote his preface to Huangbo's other record, the Essentials of the Transmission of Mind, in 857. But the Wanling Record in the Taisho canon is based on a Ming edition, so treating it as ninth century evidence calls for care.

The verses are not the only thing that differs. In the Zongbao and Huixin editions, Huineng hears Hongren expound the Diamond Sutra and awakens at the line "produce a mind that abides nowhere" (應無所住而生其心). In the Dunhuang text Hongren expounds the Diamond Sutra and Huineng awakens on hearing it, but no line is named. The attachment of that particular line of the Diamond Sutra to Huineng's story also happened inside the history of the text.

The Language of Presence and the Language of Absence

"Buddha-nature is always clean and pure" and "fundamentally there is not a single thing" point at the same place from opposite directions. The first says there is something clean. The second says there is nothing to call anything. When Shenxiu says to wipe the mirror, the Dunhuang Huineng answers that the mirror is clean to begin with, and the Zongbao Huineng answers that there is not even a mirror to speak of. The first sits closer to the language of tathagatagarbha and buddha-nature, the second closer to the language of prajna and emptiness.

Scholars disagree about which is Huineng's meaning. The Chinese Buddhologist Du Jiwen points out that "fundamentally not a single thing" was one of Huangbo Xiyun's central propositions, that Huangbo used the sixth patriarch's verse to prove it, and that this very line happens to replace the Dunhuang text's 佛性常清淨. He does not take it as an interpolation by Huixin, but reads it as a sign that different branches of Chan transmitted different Platform Sutras.

Complaints that the sutra was being altered go back to the Tang. The Jingde Record of the Transmission of the Lamp, fascicle 28, preserves these words of National Teacher Nanyang Huizhong:

把他壇經改換 添糅鄙譚 削除聖意 惑亂後徒

They take that Platform Sutra and change it, mix in vulgar talk, cut away the sage's meaning, and confuse later students.

Huizhong saw some group in the south rewriting the sutra to suit itself. Long before the Dunhuang copy was made, the text was already passing through many hands.

Huineng of the South, Shenxiu of the North

The later part of the Dunhuang text itself speaks of South and North.

世人盡傳南宗能北宗秀 未知根本事由

People everywhere say Huineng of the Southern school and Shenxiu of the Northern, but they do not know the root of the matter.

The explanation follows. Shenxiu lived at Yuquan Temple in Dangyang county of Jiangling in Jingzhou, and Huineng on Caoxi mountain thirty-five li east of the city of Shaozhou. The dharma is one school; the people were in the south and the north, and so South and North were set up. The dharma has no gradual and sudden; people are sharp or dull, and so the names gradual and sudden arose. The sutra assigns South and North to geography and sudden and gradual to capacity.

The framing of a sudden South against a gradual North, however, was sharpened outside this book. In the 730s, at an open assembly at Dayun Temple in Huatai, Huineng's disciple Heze Shenhui attacked Shenxiu's disciples as a collateral branch of Bodhidharma's line and called their teaching gradual. Some scholars take the very name Northern school to be a label Shenhui used to belittle his opponents. Shenxiu himself had died in 706, the second year of Shenlong, at Tiangong Temple in Luoyang.

Some scholars see a deeper link between Shenhui and the sutra. Hu Shih, who found Shenhui's records among the Dunhuang manuscripts in Paris and London in the 1920s, argued that much of the Platform Sutra came from Shenhui or his circle, and the American scholar Philip Yampolsky also suggested that one of Shenhui's disciples may have written it. Yinshun in Taiwan took another route in his History of Chinese Chan of 1971, holding that the core of the sutra is the Dafan Temple sermon, to which were added the southern doctrines Huizhong criticized and the Shenhui line's account of handing on the sutra itself.

The Lamp and Its Light

Clear away the textual questions and some teachings remain whatever the edition. One is that concentration and wisdom are not two. The Dunhuang text says:

定惠體一不二 即定是惠體 即惠是定用

Concentration and wisdom are one in substance, not two. Concentration is the substance of wisdom, and wisdom is the function of concentration.

To say that one first cultivates concentration and then produces wisdom, or the reverse, gives the dharma two aspects. Huineng's image is a lamp and its light. With a lamp there is light, without a lamp there is none. The lamp is the substance of the light, and the light is the function of the lamp. There are two names but not two substances. When Jinul of Goryeo opened his retreat society, the tract he wrote was titled an Exhortation to Join the Society for Cultivating Concentration and Wisdom Together.

The other is no-thought (無念).

我此法門 從上以來 頓漸皆立無念為宗 無相為體 無住為本

This dharma gate of mine, from of old, whether sudden or gradual, has taken no-thought as its doctrine, no-mark as its substance, and non-abiding as its root.

No-thought is easily mistaken for erasing thought, and the sutra heads off exactly that misreading. No-thought is to think without being caught by thinking (於念而不念), and to try not to think of anything, wiping thought out entirely, is itself a bondage to dharmas. The sutra criticizes again and again the practice of sitting motionless to watch the mind and watch purity for the same reason. If sitting without moving were right, it says, Vimalakirti would never have rebuked Sariputra for sitting quietly in the forest.

The Name Caoxi

The Dunhuang text writes the name of Huineng's mountain as 漕溪, with the water radical. Later editions write 曹溪. Because Huineng spread the dharma widely at Baolin Temple on that mountain, Caoxi, read Jogye in Korean, became a way of naming Huineng himself. The Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism takes its name from it.

The person in Korea who took the Platform Sutra most deeply to heart was Bojo Jinul (1158 to 1210). He is said to have had his first awakening while reading the sutra during a stay at Cheongwon Temple in Changpyeong. In the winter of 1207, when Damuk of the Suseon Society asked him for a colophon to a new carving of the Dharma Treasure Record Platform Sutra, he gladly agreed. In that colophon he calls the book this:

此予平生宗承修學之龜鑑也

This is the mirror by which I have honored, studied, and practiced all my life.

In the same colophon Jinul quotes Huizhong's criticism in full and admits that the edition he had received also contains a passage that could be read in the sense Huizhong condemned: that it is the nature of suchness that gives rise to thought, and not the eye, ear, nose, or tongue that thinks. Jinul explains it as a skillful word, Huineng adapting to listeners when more than a thousand monastics and laypeople sat before him together. Yet the passage naming eye, ear, nose, and tongue is absent from the Dunhuang text and present in the Zongbao edition. The sutra Jinul held in 1207 was already an edition different from Dunhuang. At the end of the colophon he signs himself a monk of the Suseon Society on Jogye Mountain in Haedong.

The Edition Korea Read

A year before Zongbao, Mengshan Deyi (1231 to 1308) compiled his own edition. His preface is also printed at the front of the Zongbao edition in the Taisho canon. Writing in the twenty-seventh year of Zhiyuan, 1290, Deyi laments that later hands had abridged the sutra so heavily that the sixth patriarch's full meaning could no longer be seen, and says that after searching more than thirty years for an old edition he had seen as a boy, he finally obtained the complete text. Huixin cut the text because it was prolix; Deyi and Zongbao filled it out because it had been cut.

The Deyi edition is the one that took root in Korea. Hyegam Manhang, tenth patriarch of the Suseon Society, printed it at Seonwon Temple on Ganghwa in 1300, and that edition, preserved at Baekcheon Temple in Sacheon as the first Korean printing of the Deyi text, was designated a Treasure in 2020. From then through Joseon and into the present, the Platform Sutra studied in Korea has mainly been the Deyi edition. In 1496, the second year of Yeonsangun, the monk Hakjo translated it into Korean at the wish of Queen Dowager Insu, published in three volumes as the Yukjo beopbo dangyeong eonhae.

For a Reader Today

When you open the Platform Sutra, check first which edition it is, and the reading changes. The same Huineng says in the Dunhuang text that buddha-nature is always clean and pure, and in the Huixin and Zongbao editions that there is not a single thing. Even Shenxiu's verse ends on a different character from edition to edition.

The question of what that nothing is, if there is fundamentally not a single thing, was already asked in the Wanling Record. Huangbo answered that nothing is not right either. Sitting with such a question compressed into a single word is ganhwa seon, and the sutra that Huineng heard while selling firewood, the one that sent him to Huangmei, is laid out by five commentators side by side in the Five Commentaries on the Diamond Sutra. Huineng's answer about those who wish to be born in the Western Pure Land is read separately in the essay on nianfo.