Dajian Huineng – The Sixth Ancestor of Zen

 Huineng lived between the mid-seventh and early eighth century CE. He is the author of the Platform Sutra and the principle proponent of the doctrine of sudden enlightenment. He was a Chinese Buddhist of the Southern Chan school, which became known as Zen Buddhism when it moved across the water to Japan.

 According to his legend, Huineng was a lay person, it is said that upon reading the Diamond Sutra he attained a state of perfect enlightenment and was subsequently able to expostulate his understanding of the teachings of the Buddha to his teacher Hongren, the Fifth Ancestor of Zen.

 Huineng’s Platform Sutra recapitulates the major teachings of Chan Buddhism including the Diamond Sutra, the Lotus Sutra and the Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana.

 He was considered to be an uneducated barbarian by his contemporaries. Regardless of the opinion that so many others had of him, it was on account of his extraordinary ability to see the broader context that held such disparate teachings together that Hongren chose him to lead his school over the monk who had been groomed to fulfil that role.

 Huineng taught "no-thought" and the purity of the “unattached mind" which comes and goes freely, functioning fluently without any hindrance.

 Be mindful!

 The principle of “no-thought” does not mean that a person is not thinking, but that in the state of “no-thought” the mind is attentive to its immediate experience, unentangled by the exigencies of the past or the expectations of the future.

 The state of ‘no-thought” is understood as a way of being, wherein the mind is open, non-conceptual or post linguistic, allowing the individual to experience reality directly.

 Huineng criticized the formal understanding of Buddhism which suggests that the individual must devote themselves to a life of quiet contemplation, likening the conventional practices and institutions of his day to the same social, religious and intellectual traps that Gautama Siddhartha, the Original Buddha sought to free people from when he taught them that they did not have to endure innumerable lifetimes and countless rebirths before they can be free from the wheel of life.

 His teaching on sudden enlightenment is a doctrine of liberation, he likened it to the five-fold-path as taught by the Buddha, both teachings aim at freeing a person from their in the immediacy of the present moment.The Buddha was a liberator and so was Huineng.

 He taught this:

 When alive, one keeps sitting without lying down. When dead, one lies without sitting up, observing that in both cases, the individual is a set of stinking bones!

 He asked the most important question: What has any of it to do with the great lesson of life?

 When I was given my first Koan to meditate on, my mentor offered me the old cliché:

 What is the sound of one hand clapping?

 In the spirit of Huineng I understood the Koan to be meaningless and replied:

 There is no sound.

 My mentor insisted that I answered too quickly, suggesting that I must meditate on the Koan further before returning a response.

 Of course he was wrong, I had simply told the truth, speaking from the immediacy of my experience, with the understanding that one hand does not clap, and there is nothing more that needs to be said about that.