While Hui-nêng was working for the cause of Zen in the south, Shên-hsiu representing another school was active in the north. Before he was converted into Buddhism, he was a learned Confucian and thus destined from the start to cut a different figure, compared with his brother-disciple, Hui-nêng. The Emperor Wu of the T‘ang dynasty was one of the devoted followers of Shên-hsiu, and naturally around him were gathered a large number of courtiers and government officers. When the Emperor Chung-tsung came to the throne, A.D. 685, he was all the more treated with reverence, and it was Chang-shuo, one of the state ministers, who inscribed a biographical sketch and eulogy on the memorial stone erected over his grave when he died. One of his sermons recorded reads: “The teaching of all the Buddhas In one’s own Mind originally exists: To seek the Mind without one’s Self, Is like running away from the father.” He died in A.D. 706, seven years prior to Hui-nêng. His school known as the Northern in contrast to Hui-nêng’s Southern School prospered in the north far better than the latter did in the south. But when Ma-tsu (died 788) and Shih-t‘ou (700–790) began their active propaganda in the south and finally established the foundations of Zen teaching, Shên-hsiu’s school failed to find able successors and finally disappeared altogether so that all the records we have of their movements come from the rival school. It thus came to pass that Hui-nêng, and not Shên-hsiu was recognised as the sixth patriarch of Zen Buddhism in China.