Sacred Texts: Buddhism

A Buddhist Bible: Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch: Chapter II. Discourse on Dhyana and Samadhi

Dwight GoddardTaoism and ZenZen Buddhism

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This is a doctrinal sermon from the *Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch*, a foundational text of Chan (Zen) Buddhism, presenting teachings attributed to Huineng (the Sixth Patriarch). Its central argument is that Samadhi (meditative absorption) and Prajna (wisdom) are not sequential practices or distinct attainments but a single, inseparable reality — like a lamp and its light — such that debating which produces the other is itself a sign of delusion. The text advances the school's three governing principles: "non-objectivity" (not being absorbed in external objects), "idea-lessness" (not suppressing thought but refusing attachment to any particular thought), and "non-attachment" as the fundamental character of Mind-essence. A notably distinctive and polemical claim is the rejection of sitting meditation understood as the mere cessation of thought, which Huineng calls a stumbling-block that reduces practitioners to the level of inanimate objects and has driven some to madness. The teaching insists that the mind is intrinsically pure and that defilement arises solely from cherishing attachments, not from the functioning of sense-organs or thought itself. The overall thrust is anti-formalist: true Dhyana and Samadhi are qualities of inner freedom maintained under all circumstances, not states achieved through any particular posture or technique.

A Buddhist Bible: Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch: Chapter II. Discourse on Dhyana and Samadhi

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