臺 “a stand” → Suzuki: “nowhere shining.” The object Huineng negates is deleted; a predicate no recension contains is added.
The confrontation
The consensus
| Translator | Renders it | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Yampolsky | “the clear mirror also has no stand” | The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch |
| Red Pine | “a mirror with no stand” | The Platform Sutra |
| Cleary | “no stand for the mirror” | The Sutra of Hui-neng |
| Suzuki sole outlier | nowhere shining | Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, p. 155 (and Essentials pp. 84, 173; Introduction p. 48) |
The dictionary's evidence
明鏡亦非臺 occurs 98 times across 83 files. The Dunhuang variant (T48n2007, 0338a07) reads 明鏡亦無臺: still “no stand.” Every recension keeps 臺; none contains a “shining” predicate.
Bodhi originally has no tree; the bright mirror too is no stand; originally, there is not a single thing: where could dust alight? (same line · 2 recensions)
The same 臺-deletion appears in Suzuki’s rendering of Shenxiu’s verse, where 明鏡臺 “bright-mirror stand” becomes simply “a mirror bright”; see the companion case on 心 → “soul.” The exhaustive sweep adds a fourth work to the witness list: in The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind (1949) the stand is gone again, “And our mind a mirror bright” (ledger CTU-002507), the same deletion in the very book whose “cage” passage is this site’s flagship.
The literal reading
Shenxiu offered two props: a tree (樹) and a mirror-stand (臺). Huineng’s answering verse negates exactly those two, term for term: 本無樹 // 亦非臺, no tree, and also no stand. Nothing is added; two objects are denied.
The alteration
The couplet is built on a strict object-for-object parallel: Shenxiu names a tree and a mirror-stand; Huineng negates precisely those two props. Suzuki deletes the stand from both verses and, in Huineng’s, invents a predicate no recension contains: “nowhere shining.”
Two losses follow. The reader can no longer see that Huineng answers Shenxiu term for term; the retort’s architecture is gone. And a flat ontological negation, “also not a stand,” becomes a mystical-luminosity claim, “does not shine”: a different assertion, imported. Because both 樹 and 臺 survive in every recension, the shift is Suzuki’s, not a variant’s; and with the two mirror-lines carrying 86-plus-98 corpus occurrences, it is among the most checkable alterations in his whole œuvre.