It is a family tradition in my home that on New Year’s Day you do only those things you want to do throughout the coming year. No housework. No laundry. Just relax and enjoy. This year I spent several hours in my office recliner reading The Sixth Patriarch’s Dharma Jewel Platform Sutra.
I finished this 226-page bilingual English-Chinese edition recently and now I want to post stuff I found interesting. Here’s the book summary from the Buddhist Text Translation Society’s website:
The knowledge and vision of the Buddha is just your own mind; there is no other Buddha. Such is the teaching of Master Huineng (638-713), the most important and most revered figure in the Chan (Zen) School of East Asian Buddhism.
Master Huineng left no written record, but his students compiled accounts of his public lectures and one-on-one exchanges, together with the dramatic story of his life. The resulting volume was “Liu zu fa bao tan jing”; The Sixth Patriarch’s Dharma Jewel Platform Sutra, sixth, because Master Huineng is counted as the sixth generation of patriarchal succession from the first Chan patriarch Bodhidharma. Master Huineng’s Platform Sutra is so highly regarded in Buddhist Asia that it is called a Sutra, a term otherwise reserved for texts spoken by the Buddha himself.
In presenting this entirely new English translation of The Sixth Patriarch’s Dharma Jewel Platform Sutra, the editors, Professors Reverend Heng Sure and Martin Verhoeven of Dharma Realm Buddhist University, have aimed above all to bring across into English Master Huineng’s plain-spoken, forthright style.
As Professor Verhoeven writes, “Readers inclined to see Buddhist writings as abstruse metaphysical treatises will find The Platform Sutra refreshingly artless and spare. Those expecting a sutra to delve into the supernatural and otherworldly will be surprised at how down-to-earth and here-and-now this text is. The Platform Sutra is humanistic to its core.”
As Master Huineng says in a verse, ‘The Buddha Dharma is right here in the world, there is no awakening apart from this world.’ The essence of the Sixth Patriarch’s philosophy is that all beings have the buddha-nature and all can become a Buddha. Full awakening is not a future state or a distant place, but exists right here within your own mind, directly and immediately available. The text presents a powerful and resounding vision of unbounded human potential waiting to be fully realized if only we can see it.
The translators of this new edition are also important to me. In reading Buddhist texts I find those texts written by or translated by Buddhist adherents offer the best insights, especially when compared to dry, academic presentations of the teaching.
Here are biographies of translators Rev. Heng Sure and Martin Verhoeven from The Path Within, a 2024 collection of Dharma talks by teachers of the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association.
Reverend Heng Sure, Ph.D., ordained as a Buddhist monk in the Chinese Mahāyāna tradition at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, Talmage, California, in 1976. Born in Toledo, Ohio, he was finishing his M.A. in Oriental Languages at the University of California, Berkeley, when he met his teacher, the late Chan Master Hsuan Hua (1918-1995). After his ordination, he commenced a “Three Steps, One Bow” pilgrimage dedicating his efforts to world peace traveling up the California coast highway from South Pasadena to Ukiah, a distance of over six hundred miles in two years and nine months.
Rev. Sure regularly leads lectures, seminars, and retreats in a variety of venues on at least three continents a year. He is fluent in Mandarin, and also speaks French and some Japanese. He is involved in work on a new translation of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra and has recently completed a translation of the Sixth Patriarch Sūtra with Dr. Martin Verhoeven.
He has been an active participant in the interfaith community for many years and is also an accomplished musician and guitarist, translates traditional liturgical Buddhist music from Chinese and has written many Buddhist songs. He currently serves as Director of the Berkeley Buddhist Monastery, the Chair of the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association, and holds a Doctorate in Religion from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California.
(Pages 157-158)
Martin Verhoeven, Ph.D., is currently Professor of Buddhist Classics at Dharma Realm Buddhist University, as well as Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion at the Graduate Theological Union, in Berkeley. He also teaches a weekly translation and meditation series at the Berkeley Buddhist Monastery that is open to the community and broadcast online.
Dr. Verhoeven’s background includes both academic study of history and various philosophical traditions and Buddhist practice. He was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford under a Ford Fellowship in the 1970s. In 1976, he met and trained under the Venerable Master Hsuan Hua, becoming a monk (with the name Heng Chau) in 1977, and took full ordination in 1979.
His study with Master Hua took him to monasteries around the world. It also led him to undertake a three-year, 800-mile bowing pilgrimage up the California coast with Reverend Heng Sure from 1977 to 1979. After 18 years as a monk, Dr. Verhoeven returned to lay life, but continued to study and teach Buddhism and related topics in the u.s. as well as in Asia, Europe, and Canada. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on the American encounter with Asian religions. His particular areas of interest are the historical teachings of Buddhism, the Euro-American encounter with Asian religions, and the process of religious acculturation.
(Pages 162-163)
I was especially appreciative of the translators’ efforts to interpret the Chinese in a way that goes beyond the original meaning to also capture the original intent. Here’s how the translators explained this work in the book’s Translators’ Introduction.
ON INTERPRETATION
The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you’ve gotten the fish you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you’ve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?
-Chuangzi
In language it is simply required that it convey the meaning,
-Analects of Confucius
In working with a classical text of this nature, our ability to get at the meaning is handicapped if we ask only, “What is the author(s) trying to say?” or “What do the words mean?” This can easily turn into a pedantic exercise of dictionary searching for equivalents in the target language, assuming they can be found. Moreover, an overly literal rendering that nails down the letter can stifle or even lose the spirit of the text. Here, we achieve a superb focus but the field has become irrelevant.
But if we also ask “What is it/he trying to do?” and “What are we being led to feel?” we enlarge the scope of the inquiry, and broaden the contextual field to include the emotive and existential thrust of the text. Here we are not just reading the text, but reading ourselves as we are challenged and changed through a serious engagement with the text.
To this end, we have found extremely helpful the following:
First, the brilliant work of the French classicist, Pierre Hadot. His insights into early Western philosophical texts provide a useful lens through which to view The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch.
Hadot argues that ancient philosophers aimed less at imparting systems of thought and ready-made knowledge than at cultivating an enlightened way of living, and in providing training that would foster their students’ efforts to carry this out. The texts themselves were “therapeutic” – intended, in the first instance, to form people and to transform souls. The transmission of a purely abstract knowledge was not the teachers’ goal. Their instructions were pragmatic: to be applied, lived directly, and embodied. The ‘doing’ of philosophy entailed study and practicing a method of spiritual exercises in learning to live the philosophical life. Hadot writes,
Ancient philosophy presented itself as a ‘therapeutics’ and that this goal meant doing philosophy. In this study/practice more than theses, one teaches ways, methods, and spiritual exercises; dogmas have only a secondary aspect.
The exercises were “spiritual” because they required effort, training, and a serious purpose of will to correct entrenched habits and effect a reorientation in one’s whole way of being. The aim of the teacher and the text (which was seen as a direct or indirect echo of the oral instructions of the teacher) was not to transmit knowledge, but to produce a certain psychic effect in the reader or listener. The encounter was intended more to form than to inform. The texts born of this tradition came embedded with spiritual exercises aimed at realizing a transformation of one’s vision of the world and a metamorphosis of one’s personality.
So too, we would argue, is the aim of The Platform Sutra. When a student asks the Master which of the “vehicles” (schools or traditions of Buddhism) is the correct one given that they all differ and seem to contradict each other, he answers:
Vehicles are methods of practice; not subjects for debate. Cultivate yourself; don’t ask me. At all times, your own essential nature is itself “truly as it is.”
This sutra is clearly “philosophical” in Hador’s sense. It aims at producing an effect upon and an affect in the reader. The Master is trying to get his disciples, and by extension the reader, to stop and consider, to act, feel, and live in a certain way. The Sixth Patriarch is not trying to indoctrinate, nor even set up a school of thought. His aim, to borrow Hadot’s phrase, is “therapeutic.” Huineng stirs his students from their complacency, and purposely unsettles them. He stimulates them to inquire, to take up a practice, and to directly engage their own minds, rather than to believe in a doctrinal exposition, however cogent and credible.
Huineng himself avoids calling his method a system of thought, or even a Teaching. He says, “If I said I had a teaching to give others, I would be deceiving you. Depending on the situation, I merely use expedients to untie people’s bonds, and provisionally call it ‘samadhi.” His goal it seems is not to be worshipped as an enlightened teacher, but to set his students on a course of self-cultivation leading them to directly awaken on their own. Put another way, he asks his students “to walk the same path the Buddha(s) walk.” Anything else is provisional, expedient, secondary. He deflects attention from himself the teacher, even as he is about to die, and instead redirects his students to the teaching. He tells them,
After I pass away, don’t indulge in worldly sentiment. If you cry tears like rain, receive condolences, or wear mourning garments, you are no longer my disciples; all of this runs counter to the Teaching. Just recognize your original mind and see your fundamental nature.
By rephrasing our question from “What was the Sixth Patriarch trying to say?” to, “What was the Sixth Patriarch attempting to do?” we are able in some degree to enter into the dynamic dialogues from which the text emerged. We engage the material more intimately, as if sitting as participant-observers in the Sixth Patriarch’s presence, and push ourselves to reach beyond the words to get the meaning, as in the Zhuangzi quote above. Otherwise, we are left just holding the empty snare.
The Sixth Patriarch's Dharma Jewel Platform Sutra, plxiv-lxviii
I first learned of this book from references to it in Chinese Master Hsuan Hua’s 14-volume commentary on the Lotus Sutra. What attracted me was the Patriarch’s insistence that there was nothing to seek outside one’s self.
As Rev. Sure and Professor Verhoeven explain, this was pragmatic teaching meant “to be applied, lived directly, and embodied.”
The Nichiren Buddhism I know seems to lack this transformative intent. We are asked to believe, but not necessarily to act or live a certain way beyond simply upholding the supremacy of the Lotus Sutra.
The Sixth Patriarch’s Dharma Jewel Platform Sutra
NEXT: The Practice
Practice Beyond Reciting
Seeking the Pure Land in the Wrong Place
Our Inherent Buddha Nature
