If we examine Hueneng's Path we can see that his Gladness, Compassion, Benevolent Affect and Equanimity were directed at all human creatures and any particular responses were only part of the Universal response of his Life Force.
It is this root that carries the Truth of Unity and Diversity, which formed, without conscious intellect, the base for Huineng's life's work and his daily Contemplation in action.
Both Qingyuan and Nanyue captured fully that idea, the former capturing also the necessity of other-directedness (all being one) and the later, it appears, the principal focus as a means of penetrating beyond mere conceptualization.
As a result, the progenitive ideas transmitted to Yunmen Wenyan, 雲門文偃, Fayan Wenyi, 法眼文益, and the Caodong (Soto) Masters Dongshan Liang-jie, 洞山良价, and Caoshan Benji, 曹山本寂, moved in a different direction than the Nanyue Huairang, 南嶽懐譲, Dharma heirs Linji Yixuan, 臨済義玄 (Rinzai), Guishan Lingyue, 沩山灵佑, and his disciple Yangshan Huiji, 仰山慧寂.
As a potential source of information regarding further clues of Huineng's Contemplation we can cast aside Heze Shenhui's rather paranoid position, though not his appraisal that Huineng's Practice was superior. We can also cast aside Guifeng Zongmi's practices of One-Word Awareness, which is also consistent with the Truth of Unity and Diversity.
While Diversity is seen as a part of the whole, and generated as illusion for expediency through the operation of Clear Comprehension, the Dharma emphases became varied.
The direction of Practice of the Qingyuan progenitive ideas is then a more productive line to follow. Yet there too we find a further divergence.
The Caodong Masters too took the essential idea, but were not sufficiently close to the idea of Huineng's ministry so they took the Contemplative part alone. Fayen Wenyi on the other hand, in accord with the principle that all things are one, made the oneness of the sense doors the focus and this allied him greatly with an affinity with nature, but also led him astray from the central Gladness and Compassion of Huineng, which for almost all was magnificent but unattainable for themselves before Awakening.
The development of the practice of Yunmen is more difficult to follow, except that seeing that the great problem was the impossibility of reaching out to all in an "other-directed" manner without destroying Identity, this became his focus.