The sixth Chinese patriarch did not appoint a successor. The monastic habit and rice bowl that had descended to him were in accordance with what Bodhidharma had said, not communicated to a new patriarch. In the five petals the flower, as he had expressed it, would be complete, he himself, the first of the six, being the stem on which the others grew. The last of the patriarchs resided at Ts'au-k'i, in Kiang-si. Two schools were formed by his disciples, denominated Nan-ngo (South Mountain) and Ts'ing-yuen, from the spots where the teachers resided. The former is near Heng-cheu, in Hu-nan, the latter near Ts'iuen-cheu, in Fu-kieu. In these schools there was no very real difference in sentiment from the doctrine of the parent stem.

Heng-shan is the old Confucianist mountain known by that name, and also as Nan-ngo. The tablet of Yu was said to be discovered there, and we can see the reason of this. It was the southern limit of the Chinese empire of that time. He was the traditional civiliser, the canal maker and embankment engineer of the Hia dynasty, and of his work the geographical section in the "Book of History" is the record.

Though Bodhidharma was nominal founder of the esoteric

schools in China, the real philosophic thinker, who gave them the impulse to reflection, was Nagarjuna, the most important founder of the Mahayana school. He specially originated the Madhyamika system, which reduces everything to bald abstractions and then denies them. The soul has neither existence nor non-existence. It is neither permanent nor non-permanent. Such was his teaching.--(See in Eitel). His system influenced Kau Hweiwen, who studied the Shastra Ta-chi-tu-lun, and mastered the idea of "central gazing," chung-kwan, and also that of three branches of wisdom--viz. matter is nothing; the mind's annoyances are nothing; the temptations through the senses are nothing.

Li Hwei-si, of the Nan-ngo school, built up his ideas on those of Hwei-wen, and transmitted to Chi-k'ai the "triple gaze," the empty, the hypothetical, and the medial.

Such is the statement of Chi-p'an, the orthodox authority. But, according to San-kiau-yi-su, the chief influence in the formation of the Nan-ngo and of the Ts'ing-yuen was that of the sixth patriarch upon the mind of Tu Hwai-jang and Lieu Hing-si.

The founders of these two schools, the first of the Tsung-men, were Hwai-jang and Hing-si. Their successors were Ma-tsu in Kiang-si, and Hi-k'iau or Shi-t'eu, who, while they changed their residences and became themselves teachers of the esoteric doctrine, retained the names, Nan-ngo and Ts'ing-yuen, of the schools where they had been taught.