The Fifth Patriarch, A Poem, and Incompetence

The Zen priests tell a story of the Fifth Patriarch, and his disciple. When the patriarch became old, he held a contest among all the monks of the monastery, to see who could write a poem that best expressed their understanding of Zen. The chief monk at the time was Shen-xiu, who was a diligent meditator; all the other monks assumed Shen-xiu would be selected, and made no attempt to enter the contest.

Shen-xiu himself, however, was not so sure of his own accomplishments. In the night, anonymously, he posted a poem that read:

The body is the Bodhi Tree,
The mind like a bright mirror standing.
Take care to clean it all the time,
And allow no dust to cling.

Publicly, the Patriarch praised the poem and ordered incense to be burned before it. But when Shen-xiu went to the Patriarch in private to admit that he had written the poem, the Patriarch told him that he still had a long way to go in his understanding of the mysteries.

The story ends with a monk of much lesser reputation writing a poem that repudiates the basic assumptions of Shen-xiu's poem and shows a much more advanced grasp of the principles of Zen, and the Patriarch transmitting the office to the other monk in secret. But that's not what I'm concerned with right now.

I am much more interested in Shen-xiu himself, at the moment. Despite all the acclaim of his peers, he was worried. He was not confident in his ability or his understanding. He was concerned that maybe his reputation was much greater than his actual accomplishments, greater than he deserved.

And, obviously, he was quite right. I mean, honestly... "The body is the Bodhi Tree"? I'm no monk, and even I can see that's kind of weak.

This man was the head monk at the monastery, acclaimed by all the others there. And yet, he fundamentally did not understand what Zen was about. I wonder about my own skills, too. I hope that I am not like Shen-xiu... but I fear that I am.