unimpeded. Every movement of yours will come out of an innocent heart and the ignorant and the wise will have an equal treatment in your hands. Subject and object will lose their distinction, and essence and appearance will be of one suchness. [When a world of absolute oneness is thus realised,] you have attained to eternal samadhi.” To make the position of the sixth patriarch on the subject of meditation still clearer and more definite, let me quote another incident from his _Platform Sutra_. A monk once made reference to a gāthā composed by Wo-luan which read as follows [4.59]: “I, Wo-luan, know a device Whereby to blot out all my thoughts: The objective world no more stirs the mind, And daily matures my Enlightenment!” Hearing this, the sixth patriarch remarked: “That is no enlightenment but leads one into a state of bondage. Listen to my gāthā: “I, Hui-nêng, know no device, My thoughts are not suppressed: The objective world ever stirs the mind, And what is the use of maturing Enlightenment?” These will be sufficient to show that Hui-nêng, the sixth patriarch, was on the one hand no quietist, nor nihilist advocating the doctrine of absolute emptiness, while on the other hand he was no idealist either, in the sense of denying an objective world. His dhyana was full of action, yet above a world of particulars, so long as it was not carried away by it and in it. 4. Hui-nêng’s method of demonstrating the truth of Zen was purely Chinese and not Indian. He did not resort to abstract terminology nor to romantic mysticism. The method was direct, plain, concrete, and highly practical. When the monk Ming came to him and asked for instruction, he said, “Show me your original face before you were born.” Is not the statement quite to the point? No philosophic discourse, no elaborate reasoning, no mystic imagery, but a direct unequivocal dictum. In this the sixth patriarch cut the first turf and his disciples quickly and efficiently followed in his steps. Notice how brilliantly Lin-chi made use of this method in his sermon on a “true man of no title.” (See the “Introduction.”)