Osho on Hui Neng Enlightenment It is said that Hui Neng, one of the greatest Zen masters, the sixth patriarch in the Zen tradition, became enlightened by hearing four lines of The Diamond Sutra. And he was just passing by in a marketplace. He had gone to purchase something, he was not even thinking of enlightenment, and somebody by the side of the road was reading The Diamond Sutra.
That man had been reading The Diamond Sutra for his whole life — he must have been a kind of scholar, or a parrot — and it was his usual thing, his ritual, to read the sutra every morning, every evening. It was evening and the market was just closing and people were going home and Hui Neng was passing. He heard just four lines. He was struck dumb. He stood there, it is said, for the whole night.
The Diamond Sutra finished, the market closed, the man who was chanting it went, and Hui Neng was standing there and standing there and standing there. By the morning he was a totally different man. He never went home, he went to the mountains. The world became irrelevant. Just hearing? Yes, it is possible if you know how to hear. This Hui Neng must have been of a very very innocent mind. He was a wonderful man.
Buddha says that even if somebody demonstrates one stanza of four lines from The Diamond Sutra, his merit is more, his merit is immeasurable and incalculable, more than the merit of a man or a woman who were to renounce their belongings as many times as there are grains of sand in the river Ganges.