James Baquet

    jamesbaquet@gmail.com

    I HAD visited most of the important sites in the life of Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch of Chan (Zen): his birthplace and place of death; the temple where he taught for years (and where his mummy still resides); and even small places where he is thought to have meditated.

    But it wasn’t until after all those that I visited the place where the most famous event of his life took place: his meeting with the Fifth Patriarch, Hongren.

    The place where they met is today called simply Wuzu (Fifth Patriarch) Temple. It lies in the Huangmei area of Hubei, where Hongren was born.

    As the story goes, after his first awakening, the layman Huineng traveled hundreds of kilometers across the mountains to the temple where the Fifth Patriarch presided. Once admitted, he was assigned to do chores in the kitchen.

    A competition was set to determine who would succeed Hongren and become the Sixth Patriarch. Through a series of events, Huineng, the illiterate “barbarian” from Guangdong, won!

    Hongren then gave his robe and bowl to this upstart in the dead of night, and hurried him out under cover of darkness. It was years before Huineng took his proper place.

    Today, there are traces of Huineng here — a rice-pounder on display in the kitchen, a series of plaques telling his story. But my favorite sight in the temple was the Fifth Patriarch’s hall and pagoda on the hill behind.

    The temple was quite hard to reach, entailing one bus after another from Jiujiang, up to Huangmei, then Wuzuzhen, and finally in a hired car to the temple gates — and harder coming back!