Yuquan Shenxiu

Yuquan Shenxiu (玉泉神秀, c. 606–706) was the senior disciple of the Fifth Patriarch Daman Hongren and the most prominent Chan teacher of his generation. Patronised by Empress Wu Zetian and her successors, he served as a *guóshī* (National Teacher) at the Tang court in Chang'an and Luoyang and received imperial honours on a scale unmatched by any other Chan teacher of his era^[1]. The verse attributed to him in the *Platform Sūtra* — "The body is the Bodhi-tree, the mind is a bright mirror; constantly polish it, let no dust alight" — is read in that text as the gradual-cultivation foil for Huineng's sudden-awakening response^[2].

Modern scholarship since John McRae's *The Northern School and the Formation of Early Ch'an Buddhism* has substantially complicated the standard later-tradition portrait of Shenxiu as the loser in the Sudden / Gradual debate: his surviving teachings, recovered in part from the Dunhuang manuscripts, articulate a sophisticated doctrine of "viewing the mind" (*guānxīn*) that is not reducible to mere gradual cultivation, and his northern school was the dominant institutional form of Chan throughout the early eighth century until it was eclipsed by Heze Shenhui's polemic^[3].