"The Sixth Patriarch"

French Title: "Le Sixième Patriarche"

Genre: adventure / historical drama
Circa: 7th Century
Main Location: China
Duration: 2h 00 min
Format: 35mm
Estimated Budget: 5 millions USD

This film project is copyrighted and protected under international laws.

Project outline:

Inspired by on a true story and actual events dating from the 7th Century, the film is a historical 'biopic' in costumes, a screen adaptation of the extraordinary life of a chinese illiterate who became the 6th Patriarch of Zen, one of the most famous figures in Chinese Zen history after Bodhidharma, whose influence will spread all over Asia. The 6th Patriarch is the only Chinese man in history whose words and teachings are considered as precious as Sutras, i.e. canonical scriptures that are regarded as records of the oral teachings of the Buddha himself. His legendary life, full of adventures, has become a source of inspiration and a wisdom manual for numerous zen practitionners in the East as well as in the West.

"When you hear me speak of emptiness, don't become attached to it, especially don't become attached to any idea of it. Merely 'sitting' still with your mind vacant, you fall into notional emptiness. The boundless emptiness of the sky embraces the 'ten thousand things' of every shape and form - the sun, moon and stars; mountains and rivers; bushes and trees; bad people and good; good teachings and bad; heavens and hells. All these are included in emptiness. The emptiness of your original nature is just like that. It too embraces everything. To this aspect the word 'great ' applies. All and everything is included in your own original nature." Hui Neng

Pitch/synopsis:

China, 7th Century. Hui Neng is a poor, illiterate peasant from Southern China, living far away from the center of civilized China. Hui Neng’s father died when he was a child, leaving his mother in poverty. To find money to support his ageing mother, Hui Neng hikes mountains and chops wood to sell at the marketplace. One day, after delivering firewood to a shop, he hears a layman reciting the Diamond Sutra, a sacred buddhist text: "A bodhisattva* should develop a pure heart. He should develop a heart which does not depend upon forms, sounds, smells, tastes, tangible objects or phenomena. He should develop a heart which is nowhere supported." Instantly, upon hearing this stanza, Hui Neng suddenly achieves Enlightenment! His destiny then changes radically. He begins a new life of adventure and wandering, braving numerous dangers, guiding and transforming all beings he meets on his way, either friends or enemies…

* A bodhisattva is a being who, out of compassion, devotes his life to the task of reaching enlightenment in order to liberate all beings from their suffering.

Author's comments:

A copy of the Diamond Sutra, found sealed in a cave in China in the early 20th century. It is the oldest known dated printed book in the world, (868 CE).

"Letting go of our conceptualizations, or conceptualized world, is how we drop body and mind. What we are dropping is separation, the self that creates the feeling of separation. When we let go of the artificial separation created by discrimination, the boundaries of our own body and mind as well as the boundaries we perceive between inside and outside fall away, and we are left with our direct, unmediated experience." Taitaku Pat Phelan

Hui Neng, the 6th Patriarch, is a Spiritual Master like no other. He was a social outcast, an illiterate woodsman who never got any contacts with Buddhism before. He led a very ordinary and simple life, having no kind of religious faiths or beliefs. However, hearing one single stanza of a buddhist Sutra will suffice for him to get enlightened. How can it be possible? Is there such a thing as Sudden Enlightenment as realized by Hui Neng or is Enlightenment an exclusively gradual process, solely based on meditative practices, prayers and a thorough study of the sacred texts, the Sutras? Covered in the film, these fundamental questions still divide numerous zen practitionners and some buddhist schools today.

Hui Neng teaches us through his life example that spiritual progress on the path doesn't depend on knowledge, erudition or the intellect but on a transcendent wisdom, an intuitive intelligence that goes beyond language, concepts and reason. In this meaning, spirituality is not a path reserved to an elite but is a path accessible to all, without any distinctions. Getting attached to conceptualization, theories and a rational understanding of reality can become in itself a majour obstacle to reaching enlightenment. We have to renounce all our thoughts and all our discriminating and judgemental habits so that our original nature, our true and pure mind, that has always been there, can emerge from itself. His teaching exemplified by his life, Hui Neng, the 6th Patriarch of Zen, will have a decisive impact on the transmission and understanding of this key notion of zen, what we call "Letting go", i.e. having a mind that dwells nowhere, a "pure heart which is nowhere supported"...

"When all our feelings of joy and sadness, of the cold of hunger and the warmth of one's fill, of honour and dishonour, of birth and death, of happiness and misery, of blessing and calamity, of praise and censure, of gain and loss, of safety and danger, and of handicap and help, are all cast aside, this is the true laying down (letting go) of everything. To lay down a thing is to lay down everything for ever, and this is called the laying down of all concurrent causes. When all concurrent causes have been laid down, false thinking will vanish with the non-arising of differentiation and the elimination of all attachments. When one reaches this state of the non-arising of a single thought, the brightness of self-nature will appear in full." Master Hsu-Yun, from Hui Neng's lineage.

To get further information on "The Sixth Patriarch" film project, obtain the final script (in English or in French), take part in the production or join the cast, please feel free to contact me. Thank you.

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