Manuscript copies of the Platform Sutra recovered from the sealed library cave at Dunhuang, discovered in the early twentieth century, preserve a version substantially different from, and generally shorter than, the later standardized editions that came to be read across East Asia, showing the text grew and changed considerably after its earliest layer was written.
Working from this manuscript evidence, modern scholars, notably John McRae, have argued that the Platform Sutra as it survives was shaped less by Huineng himself, who left no writing in his own hand, than by the teaching and political interests of Shenhui, a later disciple who campaigned vigorously to establish Huineng's branch of Chan as the sole legitimate successor to the Fifth Patriarch and to discredit Shenxiu's rival lineage. On this reading the text functions as much as a document of an eighth century succession dispute as a record of Huineng's own teaching. That contested textual history has not diminished the Platform Sutra's standing inside the tradition, where it continues to be read as scripture across Chan, Zen and related East Asian lineages regardless of how it came to take its current shape. That history has become, in its own right, a standard teaching example in university courses on Buddhist textual criticism, illustrating how a scripture's authority and its documented compositional history can be discussed as separate questions without one settling the other.