本来無一物 honrai muichimotsu By Nature, Having Nothing

In 本来無一物, 本来 is how things have always stood, not where they came from, and 無一物 means not one thing. In everyday Japanese 無一物 also means having nothing to one's name. The Daijisen and the Nihon Kokugo Daijiten both gloss the five characters: since all things are empty from the beginning, there is not one thing to cling to. The Nihon Kokugo Daijiten adds a mind free of everything. Its readers have had to say what it does not mean: Ōbaku, asked whether it means that nothing exists, answers that nothing is just as wrong, and Tōzan warns that saying it outright is not yet enough. Whether you take it as a teaching or as a reminder to let go is yours.

The line is the third of the verse that, in Chan legend, won the illiterate Huineng 惠能 the Sixth Patriarch's robe; it is absent from the oldest surviving text of the Platform Sutra, a Dunhuang manuscript copied in the ninth century, is quoted in Ōbaku's recorded teaching, whose preface is dated 857, stands in the verse in a Chan history of 952, and has been in the sutra's received text since 1291.

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