Visiting the Chan master in Guangdong

The recent spate of news stories about a 1,000-year-old Buddha statue with a mummified monk inside it, which is in the possession of a Dutch collector and which may have been stolen from a temple in China, reminded me of a mummified monk who is the seminal figure in Chan (or Zen) Buddhism.

The mummy is of Hui-neng (638-713 AD), the sixth and last patriarch of Chan, and is housed in Nanhua Temple in Caoxi city, about 22 kilometers from Shaoguan in the north of Guangdong province. It is about three hours by car from the provincial capital, Guangzhou.

The temple is more than 1,500 years old, and has been restored many times over the years.