Early Chan circles prized the Platform Sutra less as a strict biography than as a vehicle for pointing straight to the mind. Over the centuries, embellishments crept in—miracle stories, dramatic poetry contests and vivid origin tales—each layer adding more color than hard fact. Modern scholarship treats those details like river stones: fascinating in their own right but best handled with a grain of salt.

Compare the earliest Dunhuang fragment (circa 9th century) with the later Song editions that became canonical. New UNESCO-funded digitization projects have revealed striking discrepancies: passages present in later versions are absent in the Dunhuang scrolls. This suggests that disciples and compilers—eager to strengthen the Southern School’s claim to mind-to-mind transmission—wove in anecdotes that lack independent corroboration.

Some episodes, such as the famous poetry showdown between Shenxiu and Huineng, feel more like court intrigue than everyday monastic life. Contemporary researchers note that these scenes echo sectarian rivalries of Tang dynasty monasteries, much like today’s viral headlines get amplified through social media. Just as a trending TikTok can distort a simple story, the Platform Sutra’s polished lore often outshines barebones history.

That said, the Sutra remains indispensable for understanding early Zen’s self-image. Even if precise biographical facts—Huineng’s illiteracy, his mother’s death, or the exact date of his enlightenment—sit in a hazy zone between myth and memoir, the text captures the urgency of awakening better than any dry chronicle could. Those teachings persist, illuminated by the very form of their transmission: a blend of fact, flair and faithful devotion, inviting each reader to sift through legend and land on their own direct experience.