Read the Platform Sūtra of the Sixth Patriarch

Read the classic Chan text attributed to Huineng — its story of the verse contest and its teaching of sudden awakening and “nonthought” — knowing what kind of text it is.

Pourquoi ça marche

The Platform Sūtra presents itself as the teachings of Huineng, the sixth patriarch, recorded by his disciple Fahai, and it proclaims the Southern school’s “sudden enlightenment” and seeing one’s own nature. Its best-known scene is the verse contest: Shenxiu writes that the mind is a bright mirror to be wiped clean of dust, and Huineng answers that fundamentally there is not a single thing, so where could dust collect. Its central sermon says the teaching takes nonthought as its doctrine, the formless as its essence and nonabiding as its basis, and that sudden and gradual are only provisional names: the Dharma itself has neither, while people are quicker or slower. John McRae, its BDK translator, writes that the characters are literary creations and the story mostly invented, yet that the text’s enthusiastic adoption by centuries of Chinese Buddhists makes it a truer record of what they cared about than an accurate chronicle would be. Reading it with that in mind lets the teaching land without mistaking the story for history.

Comment faire

1. Choose a translation. Philip Yampolsky translated the earliest surviving version, a Dunhuang manuscript, with a long historical introduction; John McRae translated the later, longer version, and the BDK edition can be downloaded free from its publisher’s page.
2. Read the translator’s introduction first, so you know which version you are reading and how historians understand it.
3. Read Huineng’s life story and the verse contest as the tradition’s story about awakening, not as biography.
4. Then read slowly the sermon on nonthought, the formless and nonabiding, and the section on sudden and gradual.
5. Take one line into your sitting — “Fundamentally there is not a single thing” — without trying to solve it.
6. Bring what puzzles you to a teacher or a study group.

Données probantes

BDK America’s page describes McRae’s 2000 translation (Taishō 2008) as a record of Huineng’s teachings compiled by Fahai that proclaims the Southern school on sudden enlightenment and seeing the nature. McRae’s introduction dates the earliest extant version to around 780, preserved at Dunhuang, describes the translated text as a longer Yuan-dynasty composite, and judges almost every detail of the story untrue. The verses and the sermon on nonthought are quoted from his translation. Columbia University Press describes Yampolsky’s translation as based on the Dunhuang manuscript, with an account of the formation of the Huineng legend. McRae’s Seeing through Zen examines the myths of patriarchal succession more broadly. (anecdotal)

Scholars and the living tradition read this text differently: the Rinzai and Ōbaku council tells the story of Huineng as Zen history, while McRae argues that the historical Huineng is almost unknown and was almost certainly not illiterate. Other English translations exist; this page has not compared them.

Sources

• McRae, J. R. (trans.) (2000). The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch (Taishō vol. 48, no. 2008). BDK English Tripiṭaka. Berkeley: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research.
• Yampolsky, P. B. (trans.) (1967; paperback 1978). The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch: The Text of the Tun-huang Manuscript. New York: Columbia University Press.
• McRae, J. R. (2004). Seeing through Zen: Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Joint Council for Rinzai and Ōbaku Zen. What is Zen? — History (Shakyamuni to China, the Five Houses, transmission to Japan, revival movements, the Ōbaku school). Rinnou.net.

Erreur fréquente

Taking “sudden awakening” to mean that practice is unnecessary. The sūtra’s own sermon calls sudden and gradual provisional names, and McRae notes that the text insists meditation must be undertaken even while forbidding any goal to grasp at.