Free Zen's Chinese Heritage: The Masters and Their Teachings by Andy Ferguson Page B

speaking, this view does not recognize expedients such as chanting Buddha’s name, reading sutras, etc., as being necessary to realize enlightenment.
    There is scant solid evidence to support the traditional story of Huineng’s life but his legend remains a cornerstone of Chinese religious culture. As told in the Platform Sutra, Huineng lost his father at the age of three and was forced as a youngster to support his widowed mother by selling firewood in ancient Guangzhou City. He is said to have gained enlightenment instantly as he overheard someone reciting the Diamond Sutra. Resolving to follow the Dharma, he set off to seek out the Fifth Ancestor, Daman Hongren, who resided at Huangmei, a place near the Yangzi River hundreds of kilometers to the north. Upon their meeting, the Fifth Ancestor assigned Huineng to work in the kitchen.
    Months later, Hongren invited the monks to each write a verse that would display his individual understanding of the Zen way. In the famous episode that followed, the head monk, Shenxiu, purportedly wrote the following verse on a wall in the monastery:
The body is the Tree of Wisdom,
The mind but a bright mirror,
At all times diligently polish it,
To remain untainted by dust.
     
    According to the legend, Huineng, who was illiterate and had not yet gained ordination as a Zen monk, enlisted another monk’s help to write his own verse upon the wall. It read:
The Tree of Wisdom fundamentally does not exist,
Nor is there a stand for the mirror,
Originally, there is not a single thing,
So where would dust alight?
     
    Upon reading Huineng’s verse, Hongren recognized the author’s profound level of spiritual realization. Afraid of the uproar that would result from bestowing authority on someone of such low status, Hongren is said to have met secretly with Huineng at night to pass him the traditional robe and bowl of succession, symbols of the mind-to-mind transmission of Zen. Hongren instructed Huineng to leave the monastery to avoid repercussions from the congregation. Thereafter, Huineng remained in obscurity for, by some accounts, sixteen years, before beginning to teach publicly.
    The story cited above is the kernel inside more elaborate legends concerning Huineng’s life and teaching. The legend’s essence is of an individual, uncultured and unlettered, who injects a strong element of nonconformity into the traditional and structured religious hierarchy. If Bodhidharma’s teaching of “directly pointing at mind” was misplaced among the more labored practices that later gained entry into the Zen tradition, the story of Huineng’s life moved the scales back toward the First Ancestor’s direct and simple teaching.
    The Platform Sutra itself states that fundamentally there is no difference between “gradual” and “sudden” as they relate to enlightenment. However, the text also ascribes a lesser standing to the “gradual” idea, associating it with persons of “inferior ability.”
    A key part of the Platform Sutra involves an ordination ceremony. In it, Huineng introduces what he terms the “signless precepts,” “signless penitence,” and the “signless refuges.” The idea of “signless” is here related to Huineng’s emphasis on the nature of the mind as central to the Zen perspective, and punctuates this idea’s importance in the tradition. Huineng focuses on thought and its contents as the arena fundamental to Zen practice and the place where genuine morality and penitence is practiced. Thus the monks in Huineng’s ceremony are called on to say “All my former evil karma arising from ignorance, I fully confess and acknowledge, so that in a single moment it is extinguished, to not arise again forever.…Thoughts of former times, thoughts of the present, and thoughts of the future, all these will never again be carelessly defiled.” Similarly, Huineng changes the “three refuges” taken by the monks in his ceremony. Buddhists take refuge in the “three