Sublime

it is clear that he and the early patriarchs of Zen preferred Gunabhadra’s version.

The Buddha’s physical body was said to include a set of thirty-two attributes that included a protuberance on top of his head, a curl between his brows, long earlobes, blue eyes, skin the color of burnished gold, arms that hung down to his knees, flat feet, a retractable penis—thirty-two attributes in all—each of which was acquired as the result of

enters the liver and kidney channels.

Hung-jan was apparently the first of the Patriarchs to have any large following, for it is said that he presided over a group of some five hundred monks in a monastery on the Yellow Plum Mountain (Wang-mei Shan) at the eastern end of modern Hupeh, He is, however, much overshadowed by his immediate successor, Hui-neng (637–713), whose life and teach

recension

The word alaya has different definitions based on context. It often refers to an underlying dullness in our mind that is the source of all our deluded experience. In this slogan, however, alaya refers to the enlightened nature that all beings with a mind possess. The bodhisattva’s ultimate aim is to realize this state of alaya and to bring all othe