少室六門

Shǎoshì liù mén 少室六門

The Six Gates of Shǎoshì

“The Six Gates of Shǎoshì” — a compendium of six short Chán treatises and one set of verses, collectively attributed to Bodhidharma 菩提達磨 (d. ca. 535), the legendary Indian monk who, per the founding narrative of Chinese Chán, meditated facing a wall for nine years at the Shǎoshì 少室 Cave at Shàolín sì 少林寺 on Mount Sōng 嵩山; compiled into its received six-gate arrangement between the mid-Táng and early-Sòng periods from texts of diverse actual authorship, and transmitted as anonymous Chán zǔshī 祖師 (“patriarchal-master”) writings

About the work

A Táng / pre-Sòng aggregation of six short didactic-doctrinal texts of the Chán tradition, formally presented as the collected writings of Bodhidharma and subsequently received as such throughout East-Asian Buddhism. Taishō T48 n2009. The compilation consists of:

1. Dìyī mén: Xīn jīng sòng 第一門 心經頌 — verse-by-verse commentary in gatha form on the Mahā-prajñāpāramitā-hrdaya-sūtra (Xīn jīng 心經).
2. Dìèr mén: Pòxiàng lùn 第二門 破相論 — “Treatise Smashing Appearances”, a dialogue on meditative practice stripped of xiàng (characteristics).
3. Dìsān mén: Èrzhǒng rù 第三門 二種入 — “The Two Entrances (and Four Practices)”, the short treatise usually considered the most authentically near-Bodhidharma text in the collection: the lǐ rù 理入 (entrance-through-principle) and xíng rù 行入 (entrance-through-practice) schema, with the four practices of bàoyuān 報冤, suíyuán 隨緣, wúsuǒqiú 無所求, and chēngfǎ xíng 稱法行.
4. Dìsì mén: Ānxīn fǎmén 第四門 安心法門 — “Dharma-Gate of Pacifying the Mind”, the dialogue-form treatise whose core is the celebrated Bodhidharma-慧可 Huìkě exchange (Huìkě: “my mind is unpacified, please pacify it for me”; Bodhidharma: “bring me your mind and I will pacify it”; Huìkě: “I cannot find it”; Bodhidharma: “there — I have pacified it for you”). An editorial interlinear note identifies this gate as also preserved in the Zōngjìng lù 宗鏡錄 and Zhèngfǎ yǎnzàng 正法眼藏.
5. Dìwǔ mén: Wùxìng lùn 第五門 悟性論 — “Treatise on Awakening-Nature”, a theoretical treatise on buddha-nature and its recognition.
6. Dìliù mén: Xuèmài lùn 第六門 血脈論 — “Treatise of the Blood-Lineage”, concluding with the transmission-gatha “Wú běn lái cí tǔ, chuán fǎ jiù mí qíng; yī huā kāi wǔ yè, jié guǒ zìrán chéng 吾本來茲土，傳法救迷情；一華開五葉，結果自然成” (“I came to this land to transmit the dharma and save the confused; one flower opens five petals, the fruit ripens of itself”), the classical Bodhidharma-to-Five-Houses lineage prophecy that subsequently became the single most-cited gatha in Chán genealogical literature.

Not a commentary on a single parent text; commentedTextid omitted (though Gate 1 is a verse-commentary on the Xīn jīng, the compilation as a whole is not a commentary-text in the conventional Kanripo sense).

Tiyao

Not a WYG text; no 四庫 tíyào exists. No editorial preface or postface: the six gates follow one another without connective apparatus, terminating on the transmission-gatha and the single closing line Xuèmài lùn zhōng 血脈論終. This absence of editorial framing is itself the signature feature of the compilation: the texts are presented as if self-authored by Bodhidharma, without the intervening editorial hand a Sòng-dynasty compiler would normally acknowledge.

Abstract

Scholarly consensus since the early 20th century is that none of the six gates is the work of the historical Bodhidharma in its received form; the texts are Chán-tradition compositions of varying later dates, attributed retrospectively to Bodhidharma as the tradition’s founding patriarch. The stratigraphy, per Yanagida Seizan’s Daruma no goroku and subsequent scholarship:

• Èrzhǒng rù (gate 3) preserves, in its core four-practices schema, teaching material plausibly from the Bodhidharma-Huìkě milieu of the early-to-mid sixth century; this is the single text in the collection with a respectable claim to early-Chán archaic origin. The material is also cited in the Dūnhuáng Erru sixing lun 二入四行論 manuscript tradition, predating the compilation here.
• Xīn jīng sòng (gate 1) cannot pre-date Xuánzàng’s Chinese translation of the Xīn jīng in 649; the verse idiom points to Táng composition.
• Pòxiàng lùn and Ānxīn fǎmén (gates 2, 4) are broadly Northern-School Táng Chán compositions, probably late-7th to mid-8th century.
• Wùxìng lùn and Xuèmài lùn (gates 5, 6) are the latest layers, Hóngzhōu-school or post-Shénhuì compositions of the mid-to-late 8th century at the earliest, with Xuèmài lùn possibly extending into the 9th.
• The aggregation of all six into the single received “Six Gates of Shǎoshì” compilation is a late-Táng or early-Sòng editorial act; the collection is cited under this title from the Northern Sòng onward.

Dating bracket: notBefore 700 (the earliest plausible composition of the later textual strata), notAfter 1000 (the compilation’s stabilisation in six-gate form by early Sòng). The dynasty tag 唐 reflects the dominant compositional period; the received recension is early-Sòng at latest.

Doctrinally the six texts share the signature early-Chán emphases: bìguān 壁觀 (wall-contemplation), lǐxíng èrrù 理行二入 (the two entrances), ānxīn 安心 (pacifying the mind), the identification of buddha-nature with ordinary mind, and the blood-lineage (xuèmài) construction of a direct mind-to-mind transmission from Śākyamuni through twenty-eight Indian patriarchs to Bodhidharma as the First Chinese Patriarch. The closing transmission-gatha is the classical lineage-of-five-houses prophecy, fundamental to later Chán lineage-thinking.

Translations and research

• Red Pine (Bill Porter). 1987. The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma. North Point Press. English translation of the Shǎoshì liù mén texts (minus the Xīn jīng sòng, included elsewhere in Red Pine’s corpus).
• McRae, John R. 1986. The Northern School and the Formation of Early Ch’an Buddhism. Hawai’i. The foundational English-language study of the early-Chán doctrinal milieu in which these texts took shape.
• Yanagida Seizan 柳田聖山. 1969. Daruma no goroku: Ninyū shigyōron 達摩の語錄：二入四行論. Chikuma Shobō (Zen no goroku series vol. 1). The definitive critical edition of the Èrzhǒng rù / Èrrù sìxíng lùn stratum and its textual relationships.
• Broughton, Jeffrey L. 1999. The Bodhidharma Anthology: The Earliest Records of Zen. California. Englishes the Dūnhuáng Erru sixing lun material and its satellites.
• Faure, Bernard. 1993. Chan Insights and Oversights: An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition. Princeton. Examines the genealogical construction the compilation serves.
• Faure, Bernard. 1997. The Will to Orthodoxy: A Critical Genealogy of Northern Chan Buddhism. Stanford. Further critical-theoretical treatment.
• 柳田聖山 1988. 《禪の語錄》 17 《信心銘 證道歌 十牛圖 坐禪儀》. Chikuma Shobō. Paired with Daruma no goroku for the archaic Chán didactic-text corpus.
• Adamek, Wendi L. 2007. The Mystique of Transmission: On an Early Chan History and Its Contexts. Columbia. Background on the lineage-thinking these texts embody.

Other points of interest

The Xuèmài lùn’s closing transmission-gatha (“yī huā kāi wǔ yè 一華開五葉”) is the canonical textual warrant for the “Five Houses of Chán” (Línjì, Wéiyǎng, Cáodòng, Yúnmén, Fǎyǎn) self-identification, since the five Houses retrospectively read themselves as the “five petals” of Bodhidharma’s flower. That the Xuèmài lùn itself post-dates the Five-Houses formation (early-to-mid 10th century) rather than preceding it means the causal direction implied by later tradition is inverted: the gatha is a retrospective genealogical charter, not a predictive one.

The three-pǐn structure (some scholars count yīrù sānxíng 一入三行 as one gate) + the anthology’s seam-less, editorially-unframed presentation show the compilation as positioned at the threshold between the Erru sixing lun / Xiūxīn yàolùn 修心要論 anonymous-treatise style of the late-Táng and the fully named-author yǔlù 語錄 genre of the Sòng; it is a transitional-genre compilation whose Bodhidharma-attribution is itself an editorial act.

The transmission of the Shǎoshì liù mén to Japan, and its subsequent place in early Kamakura Zen curriculum (particularly in the Sōtō tradition’s study of the Èrzhǒng rù four-practices), made it one of the relatively few Chinese Chán texts to achieve canonical status in both Chinese and Japanese Zen without intermediation through a yǔlù genre form.

Links

• Kanseki DB
• 菩提達磨 DILA