Huineng Didn't Win the Poetry Contest
According to legend, Zen’s Sixth Ancestor was chosen in a poetry contest. I discuss the facts behind the legend, and the role of ambition and jealousy in Zen practice. This is a dharma talk I gave at the New Paltz Zen Center on August 30, 2026. Watch the video below (the recording is laggy at times, sorry), or read the transcript below that.
Once upon a time in China, there was an old abbot. He held a poetry contest to choose his successor. He told his monks,
You should each write a verse and show me. Go quickly—this is an emergency, and you must not delay! Thinking is of no use—he who will see the self-nature will see it immediately upon hearing these words!
This abbot’s name was Hongren, and he was the Fifth Patriarch of Zen in China. If you count from Bodhidharma, the Indian monk who founded Zen in China, as generation one, and he taught a student who taught a student who taught a student, then Hongren is the Fifth Patriarch. Hongren said to all of his monks,
Show me your verse. If you are enlightened to the great meaning, I will transmit the robe and dharma to you and make you the patriarch of the sixth generation.
The head monk at this monastery was an aristocratic intellectual named Shenxiu—I don’t know Chinese, so excuse my pronunciation. All the other monks assumed that Shenxiu would win the poetry contest, so they didn’t even try. But Shenxiu was pretty nervous, too. He knew it was up to him, but he wasn’t sure that his understanding of Zen was going to pass the test.
He composed a verse and he tried to go up and recite it to the abbot, but every time he tried, his robes were just soaked in sweat. He panicked and he sat back down. He tried this 13 times.
Finally, he decided he was just going to write the verse anonymously on a wall in the monastery in the middle of the night. There was a blank wall where a mural was scheduled to be painted. Shenxiu woke up at 1:00 a.m. and snuck out to write his verse on this blank wall.
Imagine this poor guy. He’s given his whole life to this practice, all the other monks are looking up to him, but in his heart he doesn’t have any faith in his own wisdom. So he sneaks out with this little clay lamp full of hempseed oil with a little hemp wick, and it’s barely enough light to work by. He’s holding the lamp in one hand up against the wall, he’s holding the brush in the other, he’s got his inkpot in front of his knees. He’s kneeling and he’s writing out this verse. The little lamp is flickering and the smoke is making his eyes water. He writes:
The body is the bodhi tree;
The mind is like a bright mirror’s stand.
Be always diligent in polishing it
Do not allow any dust to settle.
So he writes quickly and sneaks back to his room, but he can’t sleep. He’s worrying what the abbot will think about his verse in the morning.
The next day, the abbot discovers the verse, and he likes it! He tells the monks, “Don’t paint it over. In fact, you should all memorize this verse and walk around reciting it to yourselves.”
But that night he calls Shenxiu into his room, and he says, “Did you write that verse?”
Shenxiu says, “Yes, but I’m not wise enough to be a patriarch.”
The abbot says, “No, you’re not. You’ve only reached the dharma gate. You haven’t entered. The true mind is just like this.”
Meanwhile, at the monastery there was an illiterate woodcutter named Huineng. He’d come from the south to live at the monastery, and the abbot had let him stay there, but he didn’t let him sit with the other monks in the hall. He said, “Just stay in this shed and pound rice.” When Huineng heard a monk walk by reciting Shenxiu’s verse, he asked about it, and he wanted to contribute a verse of his own. So he asked a monk to write his verse on the wall next to Shenxiu’s.
So remember, Shenxiu’s verse goes:
The body is the bodhi tree;
The mind is like a bright mirror’s stand.
Be always diligent in polishing it
Do not allow any dust to settle.
And Huineng’s response goes:
Bodhi is fundamentally without any tree;
The bright mirror is also not a stand.
Fundamentally there is not a single thing
Where could any dust settle?
When the old abbot saw Huineng’s verse, he said in public, “This person has not seen the nature,” and he rubbed the verse out with his sandal.
But then in secret, he called Huineng to his room and he said, “You are the Sixth Patriarch.” In the middle of the night, he preached the dharma to Huineng, transmitted it to him, gave him the robe and bowl, and he said, “The other monks are going to be so jealous. You’re in danger. You better run back home to the south.”
Huineng said, “I don’t know the directions.” So the abbot led him down to a river, paddled him across, set him down on the far shore, and said, “Run.”
The next day, the other monks learned what had happened, and they formed a posse and ran after him to take the robe and bowl back.
Most of you have heard this story already. This is from the Platform Sutra—it’s maybe the most famous thing written in Zen. The story is told by Huineng himself, our sixth Chinese ancestor. When we’re on retreat, during the midday service, we chant the names of all of our male ancestors, from Buddha all the way down to Bernie Glassman, and Huineng’s name is in that list and Shenxiu’s name is not, because Huineng won the poetry contest.
When I first heard this story, I didn’t identify with Huineng the illiterate woodcutter. I identified with Shenxiu: the try-hard, the go-getter, the intellectual.
At the time when I first heard this story, I was living in a monastery in Southern California. I was 22 years old, and I had checked myself into a monastery because I was struggling. I was failing at my job. I was smoking pot every day. I was getting drunk every night. I hated myself. I wasn’t good enough. I felt like a failure. I was trying a dozen different self-help fads to try to turn myself into somebody that I thought would be good enough. Even at the monastery, I was still smoking cigarettes and getting drunk on weekends. I came to the monastery to do something to transform myself.
When I read the story, Shenxiu’s verse sounded right to me. The mind is like a bright mirror’s stand, but you have to polish it all the time—don’t let dust settle! This made sense to me: every moment is an opportunity to pay attention, and this way is liberation from suffering.
In contrast, Huineng’s message seems useless.
Fundamentally there is not a single thing
Where could any dust settle?
Yeah. Okay. What do I do?
Philosophically, I understand that there’s nothing separate or permanent. That’s true. But what do I do, as a struggling 22-year-old looking for a raft to cling to? This just sounds like the voice of God from the void. There is nothing.
Later on, there’s a different thing that bugged me about this story. Shenxiu has been practicing for years and years. He’s deeply studied Daoism and Confucian writings before Buddhism. He knows the sutras backwards and forwards. Huineng, on the other hand, has barely arrived. He hasn’t even been meditating in the hall or studying sutras. He’s just been pounding rice. And he gets the prize. Why?
When I was at the monastery at Yokoji, there was a jukai class. People were studying precepts. They were going to get dharma names and rakusus, and I so badly wanted to be one of them. All the experienced residents at the monastery had cool dharma names like Jokai or Shinko. I was just ordinary Jesse. I didn’t envy the rakusu—it seemed like a pain in the ass to me, and I was right, it is. But I was thirsty for that dharma name, and for what it would mean about me, right? The abbot told me no, I wasn’t ready. I was crushed.
I’m still the same person. I’ve felt envy my whole Zen career. After the monastery, I moved to New York City. I joined the Village Zendo. I got my cool dharma name. I got my pain-in-the-ass rakusu. But I wasn’t satisfied. I envied people who were shusos and gave dharma talks, senior students. I wondered why they were chosen before me, why I wasn’t good enough.
Eventually I got that recognition. That wasn’t enough for me either. Now this is embarrassing, but when announcements go out about somebody becoming a teacher, I text them to say, “Congratulations.” And in my heart, I’m chasing them across the river to take that robe and bowl from them.
I don’t wonder why other people are teachers and I’m not—there’s a process and I haven’t completed it—but I’m thirsty for that title, that recognition. It’s ugly and I’d rather not say it, but I think it might be helpful to say it, for me and for you.
So I feel for Shenxiu, that guy who got passed over, and I wonder who he really was. So I did a little bit of research, and guess what I found?
Shenxiu actually got dharma transmission before Huineng! Shenxiu was the foremost Buddhist teacher of his time, and Huineng was a complete unknown while he was alive.
Shenxiu was born around the year 600 to an aristocratic family. When he was 13, though, a famine struck his region. He and his family were starving. He went to a government granary to get help, and there he met a Buddhist. We don’t know this Buddhist’s name, but this person inspired Shenxiu to practice. Shenxiu wandered around as a teenager until he found a monastery, and he ordained at the age of 19. He spent the next decades devoted to meditation and studying precepts. He was 45 when he came to the Fifth Ancestor’s monastery. He studied there about six years, he got certified as a teacher, and he moved on—all before Huineng even arrived. They were not at the monastery at the same time. There was no poetry contest. Huineng did not leapfrog Shenxiu in his Zen career.
Furthermore, the Fifth Ancestor wouldn’t have even called himself that. He wouldn’t have said, “I’m making you the Sixth Patriarch.” That idea of a numbered lineage had not been invented at the time.
After Shenxiu was certified, he disappears from the historical record for a couple of decades, and then reemerges at 70, leads a monastery, teaches scores and scores of students, is honored nationwide. When he’s in his 90s, the empress invites him to the capital. His path is strewn with flowers. The empress bows in front of him and touches her forehead to the ground at his feet. He died at 100. He was called the “Dharma Lord of the Two Capitals, Teacher to Three Emperors,” and the emperor himself walked in Shenxiu’s funeral procession.
Huineng the woodcutter, on the other hand, barely appears in contemporary records. So why are we chanting Huineng’s name instead of Shenxiu’s in our lineage?
Well, decades after both had died, there was an ambitious monk named Shenhui, who started preaching that there was this true, correct southern school founded by Huineng, and this bad and wrong northern school founded by Shenxiu. He made this up. Before this, there was no idea that there was a correct instant-enlightenment style of Zen and a wrong gradual-enlightenment style. He created a controversy in order to take advantage of it and advance his own career.
Then decades after that, when Shenxiu and Huineng had been dead for 100 years, somebody comes along and writes the Platform Sutra—or several somebodies—and they write it in the voice of Huineng, as if it’s his memoir. We don’t know exactly where the Platform Sutra came from. The oldest known edition was found in the Dunhuang cave with a lot of old Chinese texts, and that edition contains two different versions of Huineng’s verse, and neither of those is the one that we know today.
Whoever wrote the Platform Sutra was trying to take down the temperature on this northern versus southern controversy. In the Platform Sutra, Shenxiu is not the bad guy. He’s just not the spiritual genius that Huineng was.
I don’t love the vocabulary that we use. Why are we arguing about who is the real patriarch, instead of dismantling the patriarchy? Chanting the names of 80 men in a row excludes everybody else who brought the tradition to us: all the people who weren’t men, all the people who weren’t monks. The Village Zendo also made a women’s lineage that we chant on alternate days, to start to correct this.
And when we say that a teacher transmits the dharma—like it’s a radio transmission, like it’s an email—what sense does this make?
The first dharma transmission supposedly was when Buddha was on Vulture Peak. The assembly had gathered, but instead of lecturing to them, the Buddha just held up a flower. Or maybe, in some versions, he twirls the flower. The whole assembly is dumbfounded. Only the monk Mahākāśyapa smiles. The Buddha says,
I have the True Dharma. It does not rely on letters and is transmitted outside scriptures. I now hand it to Mahākāśyapa.
Of course, this is a Zen story that was made up 1,400 years after Buddha died. It’s a beautiful myth. The Chinese teacher Mumon commented on this story:
Yellow-faced Gautama is outrageous.
There’s a myth that the Buddha’s skin was like gold, so Mumon calls him “yellow-faced.”
Yellow-faced Gautama is outrageous. He sells dog-flesh advertised as sheep’s head. If everyone in the assemblage had smiled, to whom would the True Dharma have been handed? Or if Mahākāśyapa hadn’t smiled, would the True Dharma have been transmitted at all?
If you say the True Dharma can be handed on, the yellow-faced old man is swindling simple villagers at the city gate. If you say it cannot be handed on, then why did he entrust it to Mahākāśyapa?
In other words, what are we all trying to get here?
Wherever you are in your Zen practice, maybe there’s something you wish you had, something that makes you jealous. Maybe you wish you had a dharma name and a rakusu. Or you’re hoping you’ll be chosen as the next shuso. Maybe you’re jealous of me getting to shout, laugh, and run my mouth for half an hour and make everybody listen to me—maybe you wish this was you. Or maybe you wish you could just sit still for half an hour. Or you wish you could break your addiction. You wish you could get over a loss. You wish you could stop worrying about the future.
There’s something that you want out of practice, and that’s good. Desire is good.
I have some superficial desires. I desire recognition of the time I’ve put in. I want a title. I want people to think this is a good talk. But that’s irrelevant. What I really want is the wisdom to liberate myself and everyone. And the wisdom is recognizing that there’s nothing to gain. The desire to gain the wisdom of non-gaining is called bodhicitta. It’s the desire to wake up, and it’s the beginning of the bodhisattva path. It’s essential.
So we should all figure out what we really want out of this, and then tune our practice to achieve that. Usually what we want is not going to come in a flash. It’s daily polishing.
But also, the true dharma isn’t a mirror. It can’t be polished. There’s no place for dust to settle. Suffering is empty. Liberation is empty. There’s no dharma. There’s no one to transmit it. There’s no one to receive it.
Both poems are true. There’s no Huineng without Shenxiu, and Shenxiu is incomplete without Huineng.
So when we last saw Huineng, our hero the woodcutter, according to the story, he’d just been named the Sixth Ancestor, and he had the old abbot’s robe and bowl, and he was booking it south, home, trying to stay ahead of the posse of monks who were coming after him to take them back.
The story goes, one of the monks was a former general in the army. He ordained late in life, and he still had that vibe. This old general hunted Huineng. He saw his sandal prints in the muddy riverbank, he saw the broken twigs on the path, he tracked Huineng and ran him down.
Huineng saw the general coming, and just placed the robe and bowl in a little stack on a rock and stepped back. The old general grabbed them. He strained and he struggled and grunted, and he could not lift them up.
Eventually the general stopped trying. He stopped trying to get anything. He said, “You know what? I didn’t actually come for this robe and bowl. I came for the dharma. Will you speak the dharma to me?”
Huineng said, “Don’t think good or evil. What’s your original face?” And the old general had a great insight! Then he said, “Do you have any other secrets to tell me?” Huineng said, “What I said isn’t secret.”
The old general chased Huineng because of jealousy and greed—his greed for this thing that he called dharma transmission. And what he found was that the dharma can’t be picked up and taken away. It can’t be transmitted, only recognized. His real desire was just to wake up to this.