Notes Beside the Bamboo Window — Third Collection, Part 37
Continuing the Third Collection (三筆). Zhuhong takes up the old question of why the Fifth Patriarch's robe and bowl passed to Huineng rather than to the far more publicly celebrated Shenxiu, defending Huineng's own fifteen years of hidden obscurity as a mark of genuine attainment rather than weakness, and reading Shenxiu's own generous acknowledgment of Huineng as proof of how true spiritual friendship actually works.
114. 大鑑大通（一）— Dajian and Datong (Part One)
Zhuhong takes up the old question of why the Fifth Patriarch's robe and bowl passed to Huineng rather than to the far more publicly celebrated Shenxiu, defending Huineng's own fifteen years of hidden obscurity among hunters as a mark of genuine attainment rather than weakness, and reading Shenxiu's own generous acknowledgment of his rival as proof of how true spiritual friendship actually works.
或曰：「曹溪六代傳衣，舉世靡不知之。而當是時，何為惟見兩京法主、二帝門師，北宗大著於天下，而不及曹溪者，又何也？」曰：曹溪既承印記，祕其衣缽，為獵人守網，潛光匿彩，至於一十八年，大通之道盛行，曹溪之名未顯也。迨風旛之對，而後道播萬世矣！曹溪潛龍深淵，不自炫耀；大通見龍在田，不自滿盈，其言曰：「彼親傳吾師衣缽者也。」蓋善知識之相與以有成也如是。
Someone asked: "That Caoxi received the robe as the sixth patriarch in the transmission lineage is something the whole world knows. And yet at that very time, why is it that only the Dharma-masters of the two capitals, teachers to successive emperors, and the Northern school were widely celebrated throughout the realm, while Caoxi himself remained unknown?"
I answered: once Caoxi had received the Fifth Patriarch's own seal of confirmation, he kept his robe and bowl entirely hidden, living among hunters and tending their nets, concealing his own light and hiding his own brilliance for a full eighteen years, during which time Datong's own teaching flourished widely while Caoxi's name remained entirely unknown. It was only after the famous exchange about the wind and the banner that his own teaching finally spread to be honored across ten thousand generations! Caoxi was like a hidden dragon lying deep beneath the water, never once flaunting himself; Datong, for his part, was like a dragon that had already appeared openly in the fields, and yet never grew complacent or self-satisfied, saying instead of his own rival: "That man personally received our own teacher's robe and bowl." Such is precisely how true spiritual friends support one another toward genuine accomplishment.
Caoxi (Dajian, "the Great Mirror") is the historical Sixth Patriarch Huineng, and Datong is Shenxiu, the two men whose rival teachings gave rise to the later distinction between the "Southern school" of sudden awakening and the "Northern school" of gradual cultivation — a division genuinely documented in early Chan history, though, as Zhuhong's own account implicitly acknowledges, the terminology itself was largely the work of Huineng's disciple Shenhui promoting his own teacher's lineage as orthodox rather than a distinction the two masters drew for themselves. Huineng's own fifteen-to-eighteen-year period living in hiding among hunters after receiving the patriarchal transmission, protecting the robe and bowl from those who sought to seize it by force, and his eventual public emergence at the famous debate over whether it was the wind or the banner that moved, are episodes recorded in the historical Platform Sutra itself, giving Zhuhong's account here a solid basis in the tradition's own earliest sources; Shenxiu's generous acknowledgment of Huineng as the true heir, quoted here, is likewise consistent with the comparatively conciliatory portrayal of Shenxiu found in the more historically grounded strands of the Chan record, in contrast to later sectarian retellings that cast him as Huineng's straightforward rival.