legitimate successor of Hung Jan, had not the Kachaya of Bodhidharma been carried away by a poor farmer’s son of Sin Cheu.  Hwui Nang, the Sixth Patriarch, seems to have been born a Zen teacher.  The spiritual light of Buddha first flashed in his mind when he happened to hear a monk reciting a sutra.  On questioning the monk, be learned that the book was Vajracchedika-prajnya-paramita-sutra,[FN#42] and that Hung Jan, the Abbot of the Hwang Mei Monastery, was used to make his disciples recite the book that it might help them in their spiritual discipline.  Hereupon he made up his mind to practise Zen, and called on Hung Jan at the Monastery.  “Who are you,” demanded the Fifth Patriarch, “and whence have you come?” “I am a son of the farmer,” replied the man, “of Sin Cheu in the South of Ta Yu Ling.”  “What has brought you here?” asked the master again.  “I have no other purpose than to attain to Buddhahood,” answered the man.  “O, you, people of the South,” exclaimed the patriarch, “you are not endowed with the nature of Buddha.”  “There may be some difference between the Southern and the Northern people,” objected the man, “but how could you distinguish one from the other as to the nature of Buddha?” The teacher recognized a genius in the man, but he did not admit the promising newcomer into the order, so Hwui Nang had to stay in the Monastery for eight months as a pounder of rice in order to qualify himself to be a Zen teacher.

[FN#42] The book was translated into Chinese by Kumarajiva in A.D. 384. 417; also by Bodhiruci in A.D. 509, and by Paramartha in A.D. 592; then by Hiuen Tsang in A.D. 648.  Many commentaries have been written on it by the prominent Buddhist authors of China and Japan.

9.  The Spiritual Attainment of the Sixth Patriarch.

Some time before his death (in 675 A.D.) the Fifth Patriarch announced to all disciples that the Spirit of Shakya Muni is hard to realize, that they should express their own views on it, on condition that anyone who could prove his right realization should be given with the Kachaya and created the Sixth Patriarch.  Then the venerable Sung Siu, the head of the seven hundred disciples, who was considered by his brothers to be the man entitled to the honour, composed the following verses: 

“The body is the Bodhi-tree.[FN#43]
The mind is like a mirror bright on its stand. 
Dust it and wipe it from time to time,
Lest it be dimmed by dust and dirt.”

[FN#43] The idea expressed by these lines is clear enough.  Body is likened to the Bodhi-tree, under which Shakya Muni attained to his supreme enlightenment; for it is not in another body in the future existence, but in this very body that one had to get enlightened.  And mind is pure and bright in its nature like a mirror, but the dirt and dust of passions and of low desires often pollute and dim it.  Therefore one should dust and wipe it from time to time in order to keep it bright.