Heze Shenhui (Chinese:菏泽神會/神会; Wade–Giles: Shen-hui; Japanese: Kataku Jinne, 684-758) was the Dharma heir of Huineng and propagator of the "Southern School" of Chan Buddhism. His influence on the Chan tradition cannot be understated. Shenhui's polemics against the "Northern School" were certainly a factor in its sudden decline, and his claims about his own teacher established Huineng as the Sixth Patriarch in the Chan tradition, and drastically altered the way that the history of Chan was viewed by both outsiders and its own adherents.
Shenhui was born in Xiangyang with the surname Gao. At the age of 14 he became a monk under Huineng, a disciple of Hongren and the founder of the Southern School of Zen. For a time Shenhui served as his attendant.
In the year 734, when Shenxiu's successor Puji was at the height of his influence, Shenhui made the following claims:
"Bodhidharma gave to Huike a robe (袈裟) as testimonial of the transmission of the true Law. This robe was handed down by Huike to his chosen successor, and in four generations it came to Hung-jen. But Hongren gave it, not to Shenxiu, but to Huineng … Even Shenxiu himself always said that the robe of transmission had gone to he South. That is why he never claimed in his life-time that he was the sixth successor. But now the Chan master Puji claims that he is the seventh generation, thereby falsely establishing his teacher, Shenxiu, to be the sixth successor. That is not to be permitted."
In 745 Shenhui was invited to take up residence in the Heze temple in Luoyang. Shenhui was a highly successful fundraiser for the government despite his criticism of Shenxiu for having governmental ties. During the An Lushan Rebellion, monks were asked to lecture, and sell certificates to the public in order to raise money for the counteroffensive. Shenhui was active in this endeavor in Luoyang, and reportedly very effective.
In 753 he fell out of grace, and had to leave the capital to go into exile. It is recorded that he died while meditating in 760. The most prominent of the successors of his lineage was Guifeng Zongmi. According to Zongmi, Shenhui's approach was officially sanctioned in 796, when "an imperial commission determined that the Southern line of Chan represented the orthodox transmission and established Shenhui as the seventh patriarch, placing an inscription to that effect in the Shen-lung temple".
His lineage most likely died out around the time of the Great Anti-Buddhist Persecution in 845. However, Shenhui's prestige lasted long after his lineage; as late as the 10th century, the founder of the Fayan school is quoted as stating, "The record of that time was indeed excellent. Today, if we point to a greatly awakened school, it is the Heze school."
Shenhui may have been largely responsible for the idea of a lineal sequence of patriarchs, as well as the concept of a robe and bowl as symbols of the office. According to Jorgesen:
It was through the propaganda of Shen-hui (684-758) that Huineng (d. 710) became the also today still towering figure of sixth patriarch of Ch’an/Zen Buddhism, and accepted as the ancestor or founder of all subsequent Ch’an lineages … using the life of Confucius as a template for its structure, Shen-hui invented a hagiography for the then highly obscure Huineng. At the same time, Shen-hui forged a lineage of patriarchs of Ch’an back to the Buddha using ideas from Indian Buddhism and Chinese ancestor worship.
Several scholars consider Shenhui's arguments against the "Northern School" to be fabrications or exaggerations. Heinrich Dumoulin, commenting on Shenhui's accusations, wrote that Shenhui was "unscrupulous", while Ui Hakuju wrote that he had "“traits deserving of moral censure and criticism for intolerance”. Philip Yampolsky wrote that Shenhui's claim that the Diamond Sutra and not the Lankavatara Sutra was the paramount sutra of Bodhidharma and his disciples was "pure fabrication". He has also suggested that one of Shenhui's disciples wrote the Platform Sutra in order to glorify his teacher; although McRae argues that it was the Oxhead School's attempt to rectify the sectarian rift between the Northern and Southern lines of transmission. In any case, even the Platform Sutra itself and the Record of the Masters and Disciples of the Lankavatara list several disciples that succeeded Hongren, casting doubt on the idea of a lineal transmission scheme.
John McRae has also cast serious doubts on whether or not The Platform Sutra or Shenhui portrayed Huineng and his teaching accurately; a great deal of the information given about him does not match with Huineng's extant epitaph. The birth of the many lines of Chan teachers following Huineng is thus highly questionable. By the last quarter of the eighth century, there began a great stampede in the Chan schools. Almost every teacher or school of Chan attempted to tie themselves to the school of Huineng and Shenhui. It was not easy, however, to claim a tie to Shenhui, who had died only too recently. But Huineng had died early in the eighth century, and his disciples were mostly unknown ascetics who lived and died in their hilly retreats. One could easily claim to have paid a visit to some of them. So, in the last decades of the century, some of those unknown names were remembered or discovered. Two of those names thus exhumed from obscurity were Huairang of the Heng Mountains in Hunan, and Qingsi of the Ch'ing-yuan Mountains. Neither of these names appeared in Shenhui's brief sketch of Huineng's life-story, which contains four names of his disciples, or in the oldest text of the Danjing, which mentions ten names.