Study Hall

I have just finished reading the 'Sutra of Hui-Neng', sometimes referred to as the 'Platform Sutra', and am working through his commentary on the 'Diamond Sutra', which is included in Thomas Cleary's translation. It is a work I have read two or three times before, and has many familiar and well-loved stories in it. These days scholars tend to discount the possibility that the Sixth Ancestor actually had anything to do with it - I was going to say wrote it, but he was famously illiterate - and that the whole thing was a propaganda exercise by his followers two or three generations later.
A few years ago, I was able to do one of Shohaku Okamura's Genzo-e sesshins here at City Center, and while the focus of the sesshin is studying Dogen and the Shobogenzo, Shohaku's breadth of knowledge means that he often draws in other subjects. I remember he was talking about how lineage was very important in Chinese culture, especially at the time referred to as the golden age of zen in the generations after Hui-neng; in fact, he said, the idea of having an authentically transmitted lineage was too important for them not to make one up. But does that make what is communicated in the sutra any less valid?
One of the stories I like most in the sutra concerns Yung-chia; the exchange between him and Hui-neng is perhaps my favourite dharma combat, although I have never found a translation of it that I feel really brings out the whole flavour of the exchange in clear language. I really wouldn't claim to understand it, although I did  try to present it during a class I did at Tassajara a few summers ago, where I spoke about Yung-chia's 'Song of Enlightenment', which I had been coming across in a few different books and anthologies, but which seemed to have been somewhat neglected, certainly within Zen Center.
This time I enjoyed the story of Fa-ta, who had recited the Lotus Sutra 'as many as three thousand times already', but whose head did not touch the ground when he bowed. Hui-neng admonished him: 'If you just laboriously keep reciting and consider that an accomplishment, how is that different from a yak admiring its tail?' Fa-ta said 'Does that mean I shouldn't bother to recite the sutra, as long as I can understand the meaning?' The Master said 'What's wrong with the sutra? How can it obstruct your mindfulness? It's just that delusion and enlightenment are in the individual; gain and loss depend on oneself. If you recite it and also act on it mentally, then you are reading the sutra; if you recite it but don't practise it mentally, then you are being read by the sutra.'