Despite his lack of formal training, he demonstrated his understanding to the fifth patriarch, Daman Hongren, who then supposedly chose Huineng as his true successor instead of his publicly known selection of Yuquan Shenxiu.

The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch (六祖壇經), which is said to be a record of his teachings, is a highly influential text in the East Asian Buddhist tradition.

[3] According to John McRae, it is ...a wonderful melange of early Chan teachings, a virtual repository of the entire tradition up to the second half of the eighth century.

"[14] He inquired about the reason that the Diamond Sutra was chanted, and the person stated that he came from the Eastern Meditation Monastery in Huangmei District of the province of Qi, where the Fifth Patriarch of Chan lived and delivered his teachings.

Since Huineng came from Guangdong and was physically distinctive from the local Northern Chinese, the Fifth Patriarch Hongren questioned his origin as a "barbarian from the south", and doubted his ability to attain enlightenment.

[13] The first chapter of the Ming canon version of the Platform Sutra describes the introduction of Huineng to Hongren as follows: The Patriarch asked me, "Who are you and what do you seek?

Shenxiu's stanza is as follows:[16] The body is the bodhi tree.The mind is like a bright mirror's stand.At all times we must strive to polish itand must not let dust collect.

[note 1]The Patriarch was not satisfied with Shenxiu's stanza, and pointed out that the poem did not show understanding of "[his] own fundamental nature and essence of mind.

[13] Two days later, the illiterate Huineng heard Shenxiu's stanza being chanted by a young attendant at the monastery and inquired about the context of the poem.

[13] According to the traditional interpretation, which is based on Guifeng Zongmi, the fifth-generation successor of Shenhui, the two verses represent respectively the gradual and the sudden approach.

Huineng immediately responded with a clear understanding of Hongren's purpose in doing so, and demonstrated that he could ferry to "the other shore" with the Dharma that had been transmitted to him.

[13] The Sixth Patriarch reached the Tayu Mountains within two months, and realized that hundreds of men were following him, attempting to rob him of the robe and bowl.

[13] The earliest and most important source for the teachings of Huineng is the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch (Chinese: 六祖壇經; pinyin: Liùzǔ Tánjīng).

[25] According to Peter Gregory, the most important ideas in the Platform Sutra, for which it is best known, form a set of three key interrelated doctrines: no-thought (wunian), nonform, also translated as nonattribute (wuxiang), and nonabiding (wuzhu).

What we have to do is to purify our mind so that the six vijñānas [aspects of consciousness], in passing through the six gates [sense organs], will neither be defiled by nor attached to the six sense-objects.

Just as non-thought does not eradicate thoughts, non-attribute for Huineng likewise is not a world-denying negation of the attributes of sensory experience, the vast array of things and characteristics which make up the basic features of life in the world.

That is, unlike the traditional Buddhist emphasis on stillness and quiescence, which register no attributes and give rise to no activity; for Huineng, non-abiding means that true motionlessness is a kind of hyperintense motion that never dwells or stays in the same place.

[44][note 4] In this way, as Ziporyn observes, Huineng's teaching resonates with indigenous Chinese notions which give a positive value to change and transformation.

[27][note 5]Huineng taught that meditation and wisdom were not sequential, with one being prior to and giving rise to the other, since in that case "the Dharma would have two characteristics.

[4][3] Modern scholarship has questioned his hagiography, with some researchers speculating that this story was created around the middle of the 8th century, beginning in 731 by Shenhui, who supposedly was a successor to Huineng,[8] to win influence at the Imperial Court.

At the same time, Shenhui forged a lineage of patriarchs of Chan back to the Buddha using ideas from Indian Buddhism and Chinese ancestor worship.

[58] According to Zongmi, Shenhui's approach was officially sanctioned in 796, when "an imperial commission determined that the Southern line of Ch'an represented the orthodox transmission and established Shen-hui as the seventh patriarch, placing an inscription to that effect in the Shen-lung temple".

[59] According to Schlütter and Teiser, the biography of Huineng explained in the Platform Sutra is a compelling legend of an illiterate, "barbarian" layman who became a Patriarch of Chan Buddhism.

"[5] After Huineng's death, Shenhui wanted to claim his authority over Chan Buddhism, but his position was challenged by Shenxiu and Puji, who supported the Northern lineage that taught gradual enlightenment.

[5] It is reasonable to assume that this autobiography was likely an attempt by Shenhui to relate himself to the most renowned figures in Zen Buddhism, which essentially enabled him to connect to the Buddha through this lineage.

[5] "As far as can be determined from surviving evidence, Shenhui possessed little or no reliable information on Huineng except that he was a disciple of Hongren, lived in Shaozhou, and was regarded by some Chan followers as a teacher of only regional importance.

"[5] It seems that Shenhui invented the figure of Huineng for himself to become the "true heir of the single line of transmission from the Buddha in the Southern lineage," and this appears to be the only way he could have done so.

[5] On a related note, the Chan Buddhist practices, including the wordless transmission and sudden enlightenment, were much different from the traditional training of a monk.

According to Kieschnick, "The Chan accounts ridicule every element of the scholar-monk ideal that had taken shape over the centuries in traditional hagiography," with examples found in the immense literature of the "classical period.

This reaffirms the focus of the Southern Chan Tradition, which is to attain sudden enlightenment without having to train to be a monk in the conventional way or to study Buddhist scriptures.