Once, as an assembly of his disciples gathered atop Vulture Peak, the Buddha held a flower in his hand. Everyone was silent, and only the venerable Mahakasyapa responded with a smile.

The Buddha then spoke: “I have the treasury of the true Dharma eye, the wondrous mind of nirvana, the true reality without form. It is a profound teaching that is not set down in written words, but is a separate transmission beyond the teachings. This I entrust to Mahakasyapa.”

The Buddha stepped in front of the Bahu-putraka Stupa, shared his seat with Mahakasyapa, and spread out his outer robe, enshrouding the two. The Buddha then said to Mahakasyapa, “I entrust the treasury of the true Dharma eye to you. Protect and maintain it for future generations.”

The above story is very famous in Buddhism. It is called the gongan of “holding forth a flower and responding with a smile,” and is recorded in the Combined Sources from the Five Lamps, which traces the lineage of the Chan School of Buddhism back to the Buddha’s transmission of the Dharma to Mahakasyapa at that very assembly on Vulture Peak. In front of all the people there, the Buddha and Mahakasyapa shared what is called “mind-to-mind transmission.” Rather than being an explanation mediated through language, such a transmission goes directly to the intrinsic mind, thus breaking the cycle of contradiction and misunderstanding created by language.

Later on, Bodhidharma, the twenty-eighth Indian patriarch of the Chan School, came east to China to teach the Dharma. Bodhidharma taught a style of wall-gazing meditation that could make the mind peaceful by pointing directly to the way things are, which is prajna itself. Five generations of disciples later this teaching was passed to Hongren and then onto Huineng, the sixth Chinese patriarch, under whom the Southern School of Chan witnessed a tremendous surge in growth, fulfilling Bodhidharma’s prophecy:

A single flower will open with five petals,
Bearing fruit when the time is right.

Source: Hsing Yun. Four Insights for Finding Fulfillment: A Practical Guide to the Buddha’s Diamond Sutra. Los Angeles: Buddhas Light Publishing, 2012.