On Sudden Enlightenment

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Shenhui said to the assembly: "The Northern School teaches gradual purification and thereby falls into the error of stages. The Sixth Patriarch's teaching is sudden enlightenment: the self-nature is originally pure, and this original purity does not require polishing. To polish what is already pure is to add dust. When you know in one instant that your original nature is free from the beginning—this is what is meant by sudden enlightenment. It is not that you become enlightened suddenly, but that you see what was never obscured."

license: public_domain

Attribution

• Attributed To
  Heze Shenhui

Lineage: Early Chan

By Heze Shenhui

• The Debate at Huataidialogue

From Jingde Chuandenglu

• On Gradual Cultivation
• Watch the Mind
• The Debate at Huatai
• Before Thinking Arises
• The One Who Has No Rank
• The Arrow on High
• Meeting the Poet Li Ji
• Just This Is It
• Cold Ashes, Dead Tree
• The Encounter with Linji

Sources

• contentZen Editorial Overlay - Originals Curation

  Zen project editorial

  Shenhui Yulu (Discourses of Shenhui); Jingde Chuandenglu, Vol. 5

  Jingde Chuandenglu: On Sudden Enlightenment