Hui-Neng & Shen Hsiu: Dust or No Dust? That is the Question
Thursday, February 11th, 2010
SFTS Lodge Friday Night Conversation - 2-5-2010
(Based on the Minutes of the 2-5-10 SFTS Lodge Friday Night Meeting)
The Sutra of Hui-Neng is a vital resource in the spiritual life of the SFTS Lodge since the time of Joe Miller.
The text was very important to Joe. It was one of those he recommended to Sam Bercholz and Mike Fagan for the Clear Light Series (later available in the Dragon edition) when they started Shambhala Books way back when.
Joe contributed a a Foreward to the publication. He also gave several talks on Hui-neng. It later became one of those core teachings used as touchstones over the eighteen year span of our Wednesday night study group in the 1980s and 1990s.
It was revisited by Jan Black on this particular Friday night. Jan recounted the powerful legend of Hui-Neng’s life and how he came to be the Sixth Patriarch; also explored the origins and implications of the Sudden School (associated with Hui-Neng) and the Gradual School (associated with Shen Hsiu).
“Shen Tzu, in the North, was the Gradual School: “I will become the Buddha.” Hui-Neng, in the South, was the Sudden School: “I am the Buddha.”
Jan read a commentary on this from Richard Power’s recently published True Noth on the Pathless Path:
“A miracle erupts from the Divine in satsang with great beaings. Somhoew through communion with their life force and soul-power, our own are mysteriously awakened. Sooner or later, each of us has to leap off from knowledge (or as Joe called it no-ledge) into experience, not of someone else’s potency and
vision, but of our own. In every tradition, there is some version of the debate between adherents of ‘the Sudden School’ and ‘the Gradual School.’ (These two terms are used in the Sutra of Hui-Neng.) Of course, in a deeper sense, the debate is meaningless – the road to sudden revelation can be painfully slow; and the slow, deliberate path on which one step leads to another is eventually swallowed whole in sudden revelation. On the path of SELF-discovery, the conventions of time and distance are as unhelpful as the illusion of a separate, personal self. All that befalls us is the inexorable action of Divine Grace. How and why this is so cannot be articulated, it can only be lived through.” (pg. 11)
Jan’s also read from the writings of D.T. Suzuki.
A lively discussion followed.