The conversation with the Patriarch starts the series of surprises.

Learning out that he is a common man, an illiterate, but who is endeavoring for Buddha-nature, Hung Jen says: "You are [...] a barbarian? How can you expect to be a Buddha?" Hui Neng's short answer vexes our faith that we must respect a spiritual personality: "Although there are northern men and southern men, north and south make no difference to their Buddha-nature. A barbarian is different from Your Holiness physically, but there is no difference in our Buddha-nature." (3).

In other words, despite the external cultural differences, of social origin, etc., the Buddha-nature of a barbarian is not different from that of the Patriarch!

The poem was rejected by Hung Jen because it wasn't expressing the genuine illumination. Moreover, the metaphor had already been used by Chuang-tzu, one of the masters of the philosophical Taoism.

Hui Neng asked a monk to show him and to read the notice of the main candidate. After he carefully red Shen-Hsiu's poem, he dictated the following verse:

There is no Bodhi-tree,
Nor stand of a mirror bright.
Since all is Void,
Where can the dust alight? (6)

The following night Hui Neng was very secretly confirmed to be appointed and left in a haste the Tung Ch'an Monastery. His supporter, the former Patriarch, has advised him not to make acquainted his appointment for fear that he could be hunted and killed by the other monks. So, Hui Neng, the Sixth Patriarch of the meditation school Ch'an had to wander about for six years, escaping by the skin of his teeth from all the dangers which were threatening his life.

Only at the age of 39, Hui Neng decides to go out to preach the Dharma. He settled until the end of his life at the Pao-Lin Monastery from Tsao-Hui region, laying the foundations of the sudden school or the school of spontaneous illumination from South, which seems to had very many proselytes.

***

At the beginning of this article, we mentioned that Hui Neng's story "is a vivid example of the spiritual climate of Ch'an Philosophy and of Taoism, in generally". Why? For two reasons:

- First: the way Hui Neng, an illiterate, who the other day was working hard to support his family, talks on equal position with the Patriarch of Ch'an Monastery suggests a frame of mind defined by a favorite term of the Taoist spirit: naturalness, unaffectedness, opposite to artificiality.

On the social level, this represents the mind missing the intellectual, spiritual, racial prejudices, a mind open to the Truth and which hasn't a prefabricated truth which the reality should comply with.

The Fifth Patriarch is himself an open-minded person, although we might believe that from the high rank conferred by his position he remains unapproachable. He could easily and with serenity admit that a barbarian has a complete spiritual knowledge. Moreover, he could give up his position to such a person, proving a commitment and a casualty which set us thinking. This is what we called the facts argument.

- The second one: Hui Neng's preaching of the man's genuine nature has nothing to do with the speculations of the hermetic philosophy, of the esoteric mysticism etc.

Hui Neng speaks straightway about a reality which rejects imagination and philosophy for their own sake. In his poem, he rejects any attempt to represent the spirituality shaped in an intellectual or poetical garment. Nothing from what Shen-Hsiu says as a pledge of his knowledge does really exist. Words as "Bodhi-tree", "mirror bright" or "dust alight" have no coverage in an authentically experience of the essence of the mind or the Buddha-nature.

Finally, the illumination is not a process connected to erudition or an effort towards the storing of knowledge, it is but the result of removing from our mind everything that dulls it and illegitimately imposes restrictions upon it.

Notes:
1. Robert Linssen: Le Zen sagesse d'Extreme-Orient: un nouvel art de vivre?, Marabout Universite, 1969, p. 37.