Theology
638 to 713 CE, Tang dynasty China
The Sixth Patriarch of Chan, who taught that awakening is sudden, that your own nature is already Buddha, and that the mind should abide nowhere.
Start learning Huineng →How the words of an illiterate woodcutter became the one native Chinese text ever honored with the title sutra - the Platform Sutra - and how Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch, made Chan a teaching rooted in Chinese soil.
The great fault line of Chan: the Southern school’s sudden awakening against the Northern school’s gradual cultivation - and what ‘sudden’ really means, which is not fast, but immediate and whole rather than reached by…
The three pillars of Huineng’s method - wunian (thought that does not cling), wuxiang (freedom in the midst of forms), and wuzhu (a mind that abides nowhere) - which together describe a way of being awake within ordinar…
Huineng’s radical internalizing of ritual: the ‘formless’ precepts, the formless repentance, and taking refuge not in external Buddhas but in the three treasures of one’s own nature - because, he insists, your own natur…
The wisdom ( prajna ) at the heart of Huineng’s teaching, drawn from the Diamond Sutra: emptiness, the mind that rests on nothing, and the astonishing claim that the passions are themselves enlightenment and the ordinar…
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