- Length
- 224 pagesYampolsky, The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, Columbia, 1967 - the Dunhuang text
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch
The founding document of the Chan tradition's self-image, and one of the great cases of a text turning out to be younger than the events it describes. Two manuscripts sealed in a cave for nine hundred years produced a version four hundred years older than the standard one and half its length, and the history of Zen had to be rewritten around them.
- Date
- c. 780
- Attributed to
- attributed to Huineng, recorded by Fahai
- Region
- Shaozhou, southern China
- Language
- Classical Chinese
- 1930 English, Wong Mou-lam Of the vulgate; older and freer Consensus
- 1967 English, Philip Yampolsky Of the Dunhuang text, with a study of the textual history; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Opens — Starts a line of argument nothing before it was answering
- Form
- Compiled
- Method
- Narrative — Argument carried by story, image or confession
- Transmission
- Recovered — Lost to circulation and recovered from a surviving copy
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
The received version was standard for six centuries; a version four hundred years older and half its length came out of a sealed cave in 1900 and changed the field.
What the book says
The sermons of an illiterate woodcutter who became the sixth patriarch of Chan, and the only Chinese composition ever given the title reserved for the words of the Buddha himself. It opens with an autobiography that is also a manifesto. Huineng arrives at the monastery from the far south, is set to pounding rice, and hears that the patriarch has asked for a verse showing understanding. The head monk writes one comparing the mind to a mirror that must be constantly wiped clean of dust. Huineng, unable to write, has his own verse put up beside it: there is no mirror and no stand, and where would the dust settle? He receives the robe secretly at night and is sent away before the others can stop him. The teaching that follows is compressed and radical. Awakening is sudden, not gradual, because there is nothing to accumulate; meditation and wisdom are not two things done in sequence but one thing seen from either side; one's own nature is already Buddha-nature, so purification is not the work. Sitting in meditation is redefined as not being caught by circumstances rather than as a posture. The text then gives a ceremony of formless precepts, dialogues with disciples, and Huineng's final instructions to his successors.
What it argues
That awakening is not the end of a process but a recognition, and that the process was the obstacle. If one's own nature is already Buddha-nature, then polishing it presupposes the dust that has to be denied - which is what the two verses at the centre of the story are about. From this follow the reversals the text is known for: meditation and wisdom are one thing, not a sequence; sitting is a state of mind rather than a position of the body; and scripture, ritual and merit-making are all subordinated to seeing into one's own nature. The insistence that an illiterate southerner could receive the transmission over the learned head monk is part of the argument rather than colour: understanding is not what education accumulates.
How it argues
By story, verse and reversal rather than by exposition. The autobiography carries the doctrine, the two verses state the disagreement in eight lines, and the dialogues work by refusing the terms of the question - a monk asks about purity and is told that to conceive purity is to create something to be pure about. The prose is plain and the effect deliberately abrupt. Calling the collection a sutra was itself an argument: no other Chinese text was ever given that title, which is reserved for the Buddha's own words, and applying it here asserts that Huineng's realisation is continuous with the Buddha's.
The moment
Eighth-century China, in a factional struggle inside Chan between a northern lineage associated with gradual cultivation and a southern one claiming sudden awakening. The verse contest dramatises exactly that dispute, and the text was produced by the winning side. Shenhui, Huineng's pupil, campaigned publicly and effectively for the southern claim from the 730s, and the Dunhuang finds indicate that he did more to construct the position than the master it is attributed to.
How it travelled
Through a wall. The vulgate edition of 1291 entered the Ming canon and was the version everyone knew, in China, Korea and Japan, for six hundred years. Then in 1900 a sealed library was opened at the Mogao caves near Dunhuang - the same find that produced the oldest printed book in the world - and among its manuscripts were copies of a much shorter and much earlier Platform Sutra. Japanese scholars published it in the 1920s and 1930s, and the study of early Chan has been reconstructing itself ever since. The doctrinal tradition and the historical one now read different texts.
The strongest objection
That sudden awakening cannot be taught, and a school built on it will teach something else. If there is nothing to cultivate, then monastic training, precepts, sitting and a lineage of transmission are all in an awkward position - and the text prescribes all four. Chan's later history is largely the working out of that tension, with gradualist practice reintroduced under other names. The sharper version of the objection is historical: a doctrine of unmediated insight was propagated by a highly organised faction using a document that backdated its own claims, which is not itself an argument against the doctrine but is a fact about how it prevailed.
Why read it
Because it is short, dramatic and among the most readable philosophical texts in this section - the rice-pounding, the verses on the wall, the night flight with the robe. Read Yampolsky's translation of the Dunhuang text alongside any version of the vulgate: the differences are the most instructive thing about it.
- First printed
- 1291
- First in English
- 1930
- Digitised
- Yes
At least three states of the text. The Dunhuang manuscript runs to about twelve thousand characters and has no chapter divisions; Qisong produced a larger edition in 1056; Zongbao's edition of 1291 runs to about twenty-one thousand characters in ten chapters and is the one that entered the Ming canon and is normally translated.
Yampolsky's 1967 translation of the Dunhuang text and Red Pine's and Cleary's versions of the vulgate are all in copyright. Wong Mou-lam's 1930 English of the vulgate is older and freer.
Where it stands
Live in practice and thoroughly unsettled in scholarship. It remains a central text of Zen and Chan schools worldwide, while the historical account of its composition, its authorship and the events it narrates has been substantially revised and continues to move.
On quoting this book
The Chinese is public domain; the accurate English versions are in copyright, and the famous verses differ between recensions, so any quotation would have to specify which text. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Nearly everything narrative. Huineng's illiteracy is doubted. The verse contest is widely regarded as a later legend developed to establish the southern lineage's priority. The attribution to the disciple Fahai is uncertain, and Shenhui's role in composing or shaping the text is argued. The Dunhuang and Zongbao versions differ in length, organisation and content, and which represents the tradition is a question with a scholarly answer and a devotional one that do not coincide. The tradition's own account of an unbroken transmission from the Buddha through twenty-eight Indian patriarchs is not history, and the section gives both accounts without adjudicating.