Laycock - Dialectics of Nothingness; Shenxiu and Huineng英文文献资料.pdfVIP

STEVEN W. LAYCOCK THE DIALECTICS OF NOTHINGNESS: A Reexamination of Shen-hsiu and Hui-neng I have long been intrigued by the facing gothus of Shen-hsiua and Hui-neng,b the one an apparently inverted “image” of the other. As legend has it. Shen-hsiu stole into the quarters of the aging master, Hung- janC (c. 601675), a t night and affixed the following poem t o the wall: Body is the Bodhi tree, Mind is like a bright mirror-stand. Take care to wipe it continually, And allow no dust to cling.’ The next night, Hui-neng, described no doubt apocryphally as a barely- literate rice pounder from “the South” (prerhaps Vietnam’), tacked the following rejoinder o n the Fifth Patriarch’s wall: There never was a Bodhi tree, Nor bright mirror-stand Oril!jnally, not one thing exists So where is the dust t o cling?3 The two gurhus seem to fit hand-in-glove, the one denying precisely what the other affirms. And, indeed, my initial impression of the diptych went little farther than this. The two verses merely stood in a relationstup of logical contradiction. If‘ one was true, the other was false. And the point of the Hui-neng legend was simply to demonstrate the doctrinal Journal ofChinese Philosophy 24 ( I 997) 1 9 4 1 Copyright 0 1 9 9 7 by Dialogue Publishing Company, Honolulu. Hawaii,U S A 20 STEVEN W. LAYCOCK superiority of Hui-neng’s position over that of Shen-hsiu. Since Hui-neng had clearly wo