While Hui-nêng was working for the cause of Zen in the south, Shên-hsiu representing another school was active in the north. Before he was converted into Buddhism, he was a learned Confucian and thus destined from the start to cut a different figure, compared with his brother-disciple, Hui-nêng. The Emperor Wu of the T‘ang dynasty was one of the devoted followers of Shên-hsiu, and naturally around him were gathered a large number of courtiers and government officers. When the Emperor Chung-tsung came to the throne, A.D. 685, he was all the more treated with reverence, and it was Chang-shuo, one of the state ministers, who inscribed a biographical sketch and eulogy on the memorial stone erected over his grave when he died. One of his sermons recorded reads:
“The teaching of all the Buddhas
In one’s own Mind originally exists:
To seek the Mind without one’s Self,
Is like running away from the father.”
He died in A.D. 706, seven years prior to Hui-nêng. His school known as the Northern in contrast to Hui-nêng’s Southern School prospered in the north far better than the latter did in the south. But when Ma-tsu (died 788) and Shih-t‘ou (700–790) began their active propaganda in the south and finally established the foundations of Zen teaching, Shên-hsiu’s school failed to find able successors and finally disappeared altogether so that all the records we have of their movements come from the rival school. It thus came to pass that Hui-nêng, and not Shên-hsiu was recognised as the sixth patriarch of Zen Buddhism in China.
The difference between the Southern and the Northern school of Zen is one inherent in human mind; if we call the one intellectual or intuitional, the other would be regarded as pragmatical. The reason why the Southern school is known as “abrupt” or “instant” (yugapad) against the “gradual” (kramavṛittya) school of the North is because it upholds that the coming of enlightenment is instantaneous and does not allow any gradation, as there are no stages of progress in it; whereas the Northern school emphasises the process of arriving at enlightenment which is naturally gradual, requiring much time and concentration. Hui-nêng was a great advocate of absolute idealism, while Shên-hsiu was a realist and refused to ignore a world of particulars where Time rules over all our doings. An idealist does not necessarily ignore the objective aspect of reality, but his eyes are always fixed at one point which stands by itself, and his surveyings are done from this absolute point. The doctrine of abruptness is thus the result of looking at the multitudinousness of things in absolute unity. All true mystics are followers of the “abrupt” school. The flight from the alone to the alone is not and cannot be a gradual process. The teaching of Shên-hsiu is to be heeded as the practical advice to those who are actually engaged in the study of Zen, but it fails to describe the character of experience known as “the seeing into one’s own Nature,” which was the special message of Hui-nêng as distinguished from those of the other Buddhist schools. That the school of Shên-hsiu could not survive as a branch of Zen was natural enough, for Zen could not be anything else but an instantaneous act of intuition. As it opens up all of a sudden a world hitherto undreamed of, it is an abrupt and discrete leaping from one plane of thought to another. Hsiu missed the ultimate object of Zen when he emphasised the process to reach the end. As a practical adviser he was therefore excellent and full of merit.
The ideas of instantaneity and gradation in the realisation of the truth of Zen originally comes from the Laṅkāvatāra (Nanjo’s edition, p. 55), where this distinction is made in regard to cleansing one’s mind of its stream of ideas and images. According to the Sutra, this cleansing is in one sense gradual but in another abrupt or instantaneous. When it is regarded as like the ripening of a fruit, the modelling of a vessel, the growing of a plant, or the mastering of an art, which takes place gradually and in time, it is an act of gradual process: but when it is comparable to a mirror reflecting objects, or to the Ālaya reproducing all mental images, the cleansing of mind takes place instantaneously. Thus the Sutra recognises the two types of minds: with some the cleansing to a state of enlightenment can be obtained gradually after a long practice of meditation, perhaps through many a successive life; but to others it may come all of a sudden, even without previously conscious efforts. The division of the two schools as regards the abrupt realisation of enlightenment is based not only on the statements in the Sutra but ultimately on facts of psychology. The point at issue however was not a question of time; whether enlightenment took place as an act of one moment or not, ceased to concern them; for the difference now developed into that of their general philosophical attitude and outlook towards the fact of enlightenment itself. The question of physical time has thus turned into that of psychology in its more profound aspect.
When process is emphasised, the end is forgotten, and process itself comes to be identified with end. When a disciple of Shên-hsiu came to Hui-nêng to be instructed in Zen, he asked what was the teaching of Shên-hsiu, and the disciple informed him thus: “My master usually teaches us to stop the working of our minds and to sit quietly in meditation for a long time at a stretch, without lying down.” To this Hui-nêng responded: “To stop the working of mind and to sit quietly in meditation is a disease and not Zen, and there is no profit whatever to be gained from a long sitting.” Then he gave him the following gāthā:
“While living, one sits up and lies not,