What is your original face?

The story of Huineng, Zen's legendary Sixth Ancestor

Not thinking good, not thinking evil, right at this very moment, what is your original face?

This week we're looking at case 23 in the Gateless Barrier, 'Not Thinking of Good or Evil'. It's one of the longer stories in the collection (second only to case 2), so the line above is the pivotal excerpt which we might work with in formal meditation. We'll look at the whole story a little later on, but I'd like to set it in a broader context. So in this article we're going to take a look at the life and times of Huineng, the Sixth Ancestral Master of Zen. Along the way we'll explore two competing views of how Zen practice unfolds, and we'll even attend a poetry competition. So let's get into it!

The humble beginnings of Huineng, the Sixth Ancestor

The protagonist of our story is Dajian Huineng, who lived in the Tang dynasty in China. (Typically he's simply called Huineng. The name is pronounced 'hway-nung', although it's also quite common to hear it said more phonetically - Chinese transliteration is pretty counterintuitive!) He's considered to be one of the most important Zen masters in the whole lineage. His life story can be found in the Platform Sutra, on which this article will lean quite heavily.

Prior to taking up Zen practice, Huineng was an illiterate woodcutter, selling firewood to support his widowed mother after his father's professional disgrace and subsequent untimely death. One day, while in the market, Huineng met a monk reciting the famous Diamond Sutra. When Huineng heard the words, he had a sudden breakthrough to enlightenment.

Eagerly, he asked the monk where he had learnt this Sutra. The monk replied that he came from a monastery in Huangmei, where he studied with the Fifth Ancestor, Hongren.

(In the Zen way of reckoning things, there are 28 Indian Ancestors, beginning with the historical Buddha, then Kasyapa, then Ananda, and on down the line. Bodhidharma, who brought Zen to China, is considered the final Indian Ancestor and the first Chinese Ancestor, from where the lineage goes Huike, Sengcan, Daoxin, Hongren, Huineng.)

Soon thereafter, Huineng fortuitously came into enough money to take care of his mother's needs without needing to keep selling firewood, and so Huineng said his farewells and travelled to Huangmei, in the north of China. As a southener himself, Huineng was from a different ethnic group to the northeners, and was subject to considerable prejudice along the way. The other monks, who were well-educated northerners, treated the illiterate southener with contempt.

Perhaps by way of a test, even Hongren himself launched an opening salvo at poor old Huineng about his ethnicity.

Hongren asked, 'Where are you from, and what is it you seek?'

Huineng said 'Your disciple is a commoner from Xinzhou in Lingnan, and I have come this far to pay reverence to you. I wish only to achieve buddhahood and do not seek anything else.'

Hongren said, 'If you're from Lingnan, then you must be a hunter. How could you ever achieve buddhahood?'

Huineng replied, 'Although people may be from north or south, there is fundamentally no north or south in the buddha-nature. Although this hunter's body is different from Your Reverence's, how can there be any difference in the buddha-natures within?'

At this point, Hongren could see that there was something special about Huineng, but equally that he would have a hard time trying to find acceptance with the other monks, so he was assigned to work in a shed behind the monastery, pounding rice to remove the outer husks. Some time later, Hongren met Huineng secretly and began teaching him, out of view of the rest of the monks.

The poetry contest, and transmission of the robe

One day, Hongren announced to the community that his time was coming to an end, and that he was looking for a successor before he passed away. Hongren invited his monks to write poems demonstrating their realisation and write them on one of the temple walls; whoever wrote the finest poem would then receive transmission (which we discussed in detail last time).

Most of the monks thought to themselves 'Obviously the head monk, Shenxiu, will win - there's no point in the rest of us bothering.' But Shenxiu was deeply troubled - on some level, he knew he didn't have 'it' yet, but due to his position it would be unthinkable not to contribute a poem. In the end, he wrote the following on the wall:

Our body is the bodhi tree
And our mind a mirror bright
Carefully we wipe them hour by hour
And let no dust alight

According to the Platform Sutra, Hongren wasn't particularly impressed with this, and told Shenxiu to go away and try again. In the meantime, however, the other monks had dutifully learnt Shenxiu's verse, and one such monk happened to be reciting it as he walked past the shed where Huineng worked. Huineng asked about the verse, and - after berating him for being a thick southerner - the monk gave him the back story to the poetry competition. Huineng was still illiterate, but he asked if someone would be willing to write a poem of Huineng's own creation on the wall alongside Shenxiu's. Fortunately, someone agreed, and Huineng had the following (perhaps the original diss rap?) written up on the wall:

There is no bodhi tree
Nor stand of a mirror bright
Since all is empty
Where can the dust alight?

When Hongren saw this, he knew he had a true successor. However, having seen Huineng's treatment in the temple, he also knew that the community would never accept him. So Hongren met Huineng late at night, gave him the transmission in secret, and then told him to flee the monastery, and to travel for some time to continue to deepen his understanding before finally setting up somewhere to teach.

The next day, when it became known that Huineng had received the robe and bowl and fled the temple, there was uproar. One monk - a former military general named Huiming (or simply Ming) with a reputation for being a tough customer - set out to pursue Huineng and bring back the robe and bowl.

And this is where our koan begins - thrown right into the middle of the action.

The koan

The Sixth Ancestral Master of Zen was pursued by the elder Ming all the way to a mountain ridge. When the ancestor saw Ming coming, he cast the robe and bowl onto a rock, and said 'This robe symbolises faith; could it be right to fight over it? You can take it away.'

Ming tried to pick it up, but it was immovable as a mountain. Vacillating, in fear, Ming said, 'I have come for the teaching, not the robe. Please instruct me.'

The ancestor said, 'Not thinking good, not thinking evil, right at this very moment, what is your original face?'

Ming immediately attained great enlightenment. His whole body ran with sweat. In tears, he bowed and said 'Is there any meaning beyond the esoteric intent of the esoteric words you have just spoken?'

The ancestor said, 'What I have just said is not esoteric. If you turn your attention around to your own state, the secret is, after all, in you.'

Ming said, 'Though I went along with the assembly at Huangmei, in truth I had not seen into my own state. Now that you have pointed out a way of entry, I am like someone who drinks water and knows for himself whether it is warm or cool. Now you are my teacher.'

The ancestor said, 'If you are thus, then you and I alike are students of the Fifth Ancestor. Keep it well on your own.'

What just happened?

Personally, I like to interpret the first part of the koan metaphorically. You have this big tough guy who evidently feels strongly that the southern bozo who's been cluttering up the work shed doesn't deserve to have transmission - so Ming sets off to bring him back and show him who's boss. But then it turns out that you need more than muscle to be a true Zen teacher - it also takes insight, and Ming doesn't have it. Huineng effectively says to him 'Hey, if you want it, it's yours - just reach out and take it!' but Ming can't. Humbled by his failure, he sees Huineng with new eyes, and asks instead for a teaching.

Then we get the pivotal line: 'Not thinking good, not thinking evil, right at this very moment, what is your original face?'

The first part is an invitation to set aside our discriminative mind with its insistence on duality. Ordinarily, we dissect and categorise our experience into this and that, right and wrong, good and bad. Huineng is asking us to suspend that, just for the present moment, and see what happens.

Then he asks the key question: 'What is your original face?' Perhaps contrary to appearances, this doesn't mean 'What did your face look like when you were a baby?' The 'origin' that's being referred to here is the origin of our experience in this moment, as opposed to the origin of our body in time. (Sometimes you'll see this given as 'What is your original face from before your parents were born?', to emphasise that we aren't talking about the physical body.)

So - what is your original face? One way to explore this is to look to see what you find when you turn your attention in the direction that other people look when they look at your face. What do you find there?

Well, Ming gets it right away in the story, but if that didn't happen for you, keep trying! Nevertheless, Ming clearly has a dramatic shift at that moment. His whole world turned upside down, he asks if Huineng is holding anything back - is there more, perhaps another secret teaching?

But Huineng counters that there are no secrets at all. Everything you need to know is already within yourself, contained within that original face. All you have to do is turn your attention around and look.

Ming then admits that, although he maybe talked a good game at the monastery, he hadn't seen his original face until just now. In gratitude, he suggests to Huineng that they should develop a teacher-student relationship.

Huineng is having none of it, though, and deflects him back to Hongren. We could see this as a sign of respect for Hongren; we could interpret it as Huineng following Hongren's advice not to set up as a teacher right away (even though he's just given a life-transforming teaching to Ming); or we might perhaps imagine a more human explanation, where Huineng sees the temple jock who has made his life hell for the last few years and now wants to follow him around all day every day, and thinks 'Yeah, no thanks.'

Getting back to the poetry contest

Let's look again at those two poems.

Our body is the bodhi tree
And our mind a mirror bright
Carefully we wipe them hour by hour
And let no dust alight

Shenxiu's poem represents the 'gradual' view of practice, which is prominent in early Buddhism. The basic idea is that we have the raw materials that we need to wake up - a body and a mind - but right now they need a lot of work. So it's our job to practise diligently and purify body and mind until we're finally ready to awaken.

This is a natural and accessible metaphor for practice. We've all been through the process of learning a skill (riding a bike, driving a car, speaking a language), starting out totally incapable but gradually developing our ability until eventually we become fluent. And it's certainly true that there are skills which we develop through meditation (such as concentration, sensory clarity and equanimity).

However, this isn't the whole story.

There is no bodhi tree
Nor stand of a mirror bright
Since all is empty
Where can the dust alight?

From the perspective of awakening, everything is empty - the world of discrete things which we had previously experienced is revealed to be simply the play of awareness. Every obstacle, every hindrance and defilement, every cause of suffering, is similarly empty, and - if seen for what it is - immediately loses its hold. From this perspective, no 'gradual training' is required - it's simply a matter of recognising how things already are and have always been. This is the so-called 'sudden' view of awakening, championed by Huineng.

This view of practice is much simpler but also borderline incomprehensible until you've seen it for yourself - and so it isn't so helpful as a teaching strategy unless you're working with someone with a certain level of faith. Faith tends to be a bit of a dirty word in Western Buddhist circles, so this one can be a hard sell. And yet it's entirely true. Reality really is like this - you just need to see it for yourself.

The historical legacy of the sudden and gradual schools

Historically, this difference in practice orientation turned into a pretty big deal, with Chinese Zen's northern schools becoming associated with the gradual approach, and the southern schools with the sudden approach.

In fact, there's a dirty secret that I've held off from mentioning until now. The story above is now considered to be historically extremely dubious - even Huineng himself is considered 'semi-legendary', which is a polite way of saying 'he probably didn't exist'.

In fact, it appears that the Platform Sutra was composed by Shenhui (sorry for all the similar names!), a proponent of the southern/sudden approach, who was looking to create a strong sense of legitimacy for his tradition as it competed with the prosperous northern schools. So Shenhui wrote a text criticising poor old Shenxui, attacking his poetry and basically calling him a good-for-nothing dummy, while creating a fabulous 'chosen one' figure in Huineng.

Huineng's life story is pretty great for teaching purposes, really - it's a rags to (spiritual) riches story, it's a tale of overcoming prejudice, it emphasises the common refrain in Zen that you don't need to be wise and well-read like all the nerdy monks at Huangmei (Huineng couldn't even read!), and it establishes clearly that the sudden approach to Zen is the 'true' Zen, whereas Shenxiu's crummy gradual approach is a cheap knock-off. And, actually, because it's such a good story, it can still be useful to us, in the same way that myths and stories in general can present archetypal versions of important truths without the inconvenience of the messy historical details.

Reconciling sudden and gradual

A simple way to reconcile these two schools, and save yourself the trouble of deciding which side you're going to root for, is 'sudden awakening, gradual cultivation'.

Huineng is quite right. From the perspective of awakening, there's nothing to do. It's like noticing the space in a room. Once you realise that the space is everywhere, all the time, it doesn't matter how you arrange the furniture or whether it's tidy.

On the other hand, Shenxiu has a point too. It's hard to awaken! And if we have a cluttered room full of junk, with piles of unpaid bills on the table, yesterday's half-eaten food that still needs to be thrown away and an overflowing bin that urgently needs to be emptied, we can be so overwhelmed with all the stuff that needs doing that it's hard to find the inner peace and presence of mind needed to take a step back and look 'past' all the stuff to see the space. By putting some effort into tidying the room first, we can create a calmer, quieter environment that places fewer demands on us. And it may even be the case that as we tidy up, thereby freeing up more empty space in the room, we might notice the space along the way.

We can look at it like this. Sooner or later, we need to see our original face - we need to awaken to the space in the room, to our true nature. Once we do, we'll realise that it was always like that, and there was nothing we needed to 'get' - we just had to look a little differently, at which point our originally awakened nature is suddenly revealed. Before that first moment of awakening, however, doing some gradual practices is very worthwhile - while it's never really 'easy' to wake up, it certainly seems to be easier when the mind is quiet and focused (which is why jhana practice is a good idea). But even after that initial awakening, pretty much everyone finds that there's more work to do. It's difficult to sustain the view of emptiness at first, even for a few moments. It takes practice to learn to rest there, and it's even more challenging to begin to integrate it into activity, so that we can see the world from the awakened perspective even in the midst of our daily lives. That takes time, practice and diligence - in other words, gradual cultivation.

May you see your original face - right at this moment.