Heze Shenhui

Heze Shenhui (荷澤神會, 684–758) was the Dharma heir of the Sixth Patriarch Huineng most directly responsible for the construction of the Southern-School orthodoxy of Chan. The decisive episode is the great debate at the Wuzhe assembly at Huatai in 732 (and again in 734), at which Shenhui publicly attacked the Northern-School teachers Shenxiu and Puji and argued that Huineng, not Shenxiu, was the true Sixth Patriarch and that *dùnwù* (sudden awakening) was the authentic doctrine^[1]. The polemic effectively determined later official Chan historiography, including the framing of the *Platform Sūtra* itself^[2].

Shenhui's own line did not survive past a few generations and he was largely written out of subsequent Linji-house historiography. Modern scholarship has reconstructed him from the Dunhuang manuscripts recovered in the early twentieth century — McRae and Yampolsky in particular argue that the "Southern" and "Northern" schools as transmitted to the rest of East Asia are essentially Shenhui's invention, the doctrinal binary used to win the Huatai debate rather than a description of two pre-existing teaching styles^[3].