your bridge home
Saints and Poets
The abbot tells him a southern barbarian cannot become a buddha, and he has an answer ready.
He could not read, and he became the sixth patriarch of Chan Buddhism, and there is a serious possibility he never existed.
I will tell you the story first, because it is one of the best, and then I will be honest with you about it.
Huineng was a woodcutter in Guangdong, in the far south, poor, illiterate, selling firewood to keep his mother.
And one day in the market he heard a man reciting a line from the Diamond Sutra.
One line, and something in him opened so completely that he asked where it came from, and walked north to the monastery of the fifth patriarch Hongren.
Hongren looked at him and said the thing southerners were always told: you are a barbarian from the south. How can you become a buddha?
And Huineng said: people may be northern or southern. Buddha-nature is not.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.