The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Gautama grew up in the Brahmanic religious world of ancient нndia, and he shared its assumptions (which we have already encountered in the Bhagavad Gita [17]): The world has no concrete reality, but is fundamentally illusory; each per- son is born and reborn many times, and carnes from one birth to the next a burden of karma derived from good or ill done in previous lives; each person must follow his or her own dharma, or path of duty in the world. Building on this tradition, the Buddha formulated his new understanding in the Four Noble Truths: Ali life is suffering; suffering proceeds from desire; desire can be overcome; the means to overcoming desire is the Noble Eightfold Path (right intentions, right thoughts, right actions, etc.). The key insight here is that it is desire itself that keeps a person bound to the wheel of karma; the illusory world exerts such a pull on the ego that people seek rebirth, even though that inevitably only mires them in a new lifetime of suf­fering. Fortunately, the Buddha taught, it is possible to end that cycle of desire, and to reach a state of nirvana, extinction of the soul in pure enlightenment.

Buddhism spread widely in нndia, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia in the centuries after Gautama^ death. It reached China in the first century C.E., and spread from there to Korea and Japan. Over the centuries Buddhism branched into many different schools and sects, and accumulated many scriptures (.sutras, ali at least nominally the teachings of the Buddha him- self). The main branch of Buddhism that became popular in China was Mahayana, or "Greater Vehicle,^,> Buddhism, which promised believers that saints, called Bodhisattvas, would reward their faith by helping them to break free of the wheel of karma and be reborn in paradise (a far cry from the austere nirvana of Gautama^ original conception). Mahayana sects became extremely popular and encouraged many acts of devo- tion, from building temples and making holy religious images to copying and recopying the sutras.

A radical challenge to this form of Buddhism was mounted in the late fifth or early sixth century c.E. with the founding of a new school called Cfran [Chan], the "meditation" school of Buddhism; most of us know the word better in its Japanese pronunciation, Zen. Founded by an obscure and semile- gendary monk named Bodhidharma, the Ch'an school taught that salvation should be sought not in acts of religious merit, nor in the intervention of Bodhisattvas, but through an intense regime of meditation that would empty the mind of doctrine, scriptures, desires, distractions, and ali attachment to the world, thus preparing the way for a wordless leap into enlight- enment.

Bodhidharma^ new sect suffered its own schisms and com- peting claims to leadership; it was finally united again by a most unlikely man. Hui-neng was an illiterate woodcutter from southern China who became a Cfran monk, and soon showed a genius both for expounding the doctrine of the school and for imposing discipline on its monastic practices; he came to be accepted by ali of the Cfran subschools as the Sixth Patriarch in a line from Bodhidharma himself. The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch is a record of Hui-neng's life and work.

The book's title is odd; it is the only Buddhist text called a sutra that is openly and obviously not a record of the teachings of Gautama Buddha. The Platform Sutra consists of three main parts: an autobiography of Hui-neng, a long sermon, and a set of miscellaneous sayings, anecdotes, and teachings. Even more curious is the autobiography itself; Hui-neng is described as having been illiterate, and the autobiography is supposedly "as told to" a monk named Shen-hui. But it is really a fabrica- tion, written long after Hui-neng's lifetime, possibly based on factual traditions handed down about him but including a great deal of hopeful confabulation as well. Hui-neng's sermon also was certainly transmitted orally for a long time before it was written down.

The most famous teaching recorded in the Platform Sutra, though, is probably the work of Hui-neng himself. A rival had written a poem:

The body is a tree of perfect wisdom,

The mind is the stand of a bright mirror.

At ali times diligently wipe it clean;

Do not allow it to become dusty.

Hui-neng wrote in reply:

Truly perfect wisdom has no tree,

Nor has the bright mirror a stand.

Buddha-nature is forever clear and pure.

Where would there be any dust?