The Platform Sutra is the founding document of Chan and it reads like a novel. The fifth patriarch asks for verses; the head monk writes that the mind is a mirror to be constantly wiped clean; Huineng, an illiterate kitchen worker from the south, has a rival verse written for him saying there is no mirror and no dust to begin with. He receives the robe secretly at midnight and runs. Modern scholarship reads the whole account as a partisan document from the southern school's campaign against a northern rival, and the campaign worked completely: the sudden teaching became Chan, and the gradual school's name survives mainly as the loser in this story.