No Dust

Hui-neng and the two verses

In one paragraph. Hui-neng (638 to 713) is remembered as the sixth patriarch of Chan, the Chinese school that became Zen in Japan. In the story the tradition tells, he was a woodcutter who could not read, pounding rice at the back of a monastery, when the senior monk wrote a verse on a wall comparing the mind to a mirror that must be wiped clean so that no dust settles. The woodcutter had a reply written on the same wall, and the old master gave him the robe in secret, in the night. No Dust takes that reply as its title. This page gives the story, the two verses in the book's own renderings, the oldest copy, and what the book does with the reply.

What is the story?

The old master at Huangmei, Hongren, calls his monks together, the story says, and tells them that birth and death is the great matter. Each of them is to write a verse showing what he has understood, and whoever has seen will receive the robe. Nobody writes anything. Everybody knows who will win.

The senior monk, Shenxiu, is afraid: to offer a verse looks like grasping for the robe, and to offer nothing leaves the master unable to see what he understands. So at the third watch, with a candle, he writes four lines on the wall of the south corridor, and does not sign them. In the book's rendering:

The body is a tree of awakening,
the mind a bright mirror on its stand.
Wipe it clean, again and again,
and let no dust settle.

In the morning the master has incense burned before the wall and tells everyone to learn the verse by heart. In private he tells Shenxiu that it reached the gate and did not go through.

A boy comes past the rice shed chanting it. The woodcutter asks to be taken to the wall, and, since he cannot read, asks an official to write his own four lines beside it. In the standard later text, in the book's rendering:

Awakening has no tree,
no stand holds the bright mirror.
There was never a single thing.
Where could dust settle?

In the later telling the master rubs the verse out with his shoe and says its writer has not seen it either. What he does next, and why, is the part of the story the book saves for the middle. By the end of it the robe is on the road south, with several hundred men behind it.

What is the difference between the two verses?

The book honours both verses. Shenxiu's is the most exact description of the evening review the author found anywhere, and nobody who has lain awake going back over the day can read it without recognising themselves. The reply does not scold it. It says what the wiping was for.

The oldest copy

The oldest surviving copy of the Platform Sutra was found sealed in a cave at Dunhuang, on the Silk Road, among thousands of other scrolls. Where the standard later text says there was never a single thing, it gives the reply a different third line: the Buddha-nature stays clear and clean. And then, with no word to say why, it adds: another verse said, and gives a second. The wording the world knows settled in the edition of 1291.

The book tells this as a wonder, not as a correction. The verse that says there is nothing to polish was itself handed down, copied and cared for by many hands, the way a family's treasured story grows in the telling. And Shenxiu, the monk the story needs to lose, was in history among the most honoured teachers of his age: an empress bowed before him, and his school kept a treatise on contemplating the mind in his name.

What does No Dust do with the reply?

This is interpretation, and the book's own. Shenxiu's verse describes a job: keep the picture clean, wipe again and again, let nothing settle. The mirror is the picture of yourself; the wiping is the labour of keeping it up and checking it; the commentator is the one who never signs off.

The reply, on this reading, is not a claim that you are clean, or empty, or that a pure witness sits behind your eyes, and it is not an instruction to go inside and inspect anything. It is not a permission to stop acting either: the woodcutter, the story says, spent fifteen years among hunters, freeing the animals from their nets when he could. It is a report on the surface. The grade has nowhere to land, because the mirror was a picture, held up and checked. The book brings that down to two words and follows them with a second phrase, the first job: the thing actually in front of you.

It is also clear about what the reply cannot do. It does not stop the inspecting from starting again. You will pick the cloth up again, the book says, and that is not the failure. That is Tuesday.

Sources

The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch: the Dunhuang manuscript (Taishō 2007) and the edition of 1291 (Taishō 2008). Zhang Yue's memorial inscription for Shenxiu and the Old Tang History for his honours. The verses above are the book's own renderings from the Chinese; they are not quotations from any translation. The book gives the Chinese of every line, with a word-by-word gloss, at the back.

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