By Nature, Having Nothing

本来無一物 (honrai muichimotsu): from the beginning, not one thing. 本来 says how things have stood all along; 無一物 is not a single thing, and in everyday Japanese also a man cleaned out. The line is the third of the verse that, in the Platform Sutra's story of itself, won Huineng the Sixth Patriarch's robe: awakening has no tree, the bright mirror no stand; from the beginning not one thing, where could dust settle? The oldest text to carry these five characters is a Chan history of 952; the sutra's received text has them from 1291, and Dōgen quoted the verse in the 1240s. The dictionaries end where a Japanese reader's ear does: since all things are empty from the beginning, there is not one thing to cling to.