Bodhidharma

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Bodhidharma, a semi-legendary Buddhist monk, first appears in a record compiled in 547 by the writer Yang Xuanzhi in the Chinese city of Luoyang. In that record, a traveler from the Western Regions stands before the Yongning stupa. Golden disks on its pole flash in the sun, and jewel-bells ring in the wind. The visitor exclaims, "Truly this is the work of spirits." He claims to be 150 years old and to have seen almost every country. He chants and holds his palms together for days.

  Nothing in that scene mentions meditation. Yet this monk would be remembered as the first Chinese patriarch of Chan Buddhism, known in Japan as Zen. Popular belief also made him the founder of Shaolin kung fu.

  So how did a few lines of travel writing grow into a founder's biography? Which stories come from early witnesses, and which were added centuries later? Where did he come from, and what did he actually teach? And who decided that a man with such a thin paper trail belonged at the head of a line reaching back to the Buddha himself?

  36476260

• 2. Two Early Witnesses

  ›

  Yang Xuanzhi's 547 record shows a wonder-worker rather than a meditator. Yang was a writer who also translated Mahayana sutras into Chinese. His Bodhidharma performs no seated practice at all. That miracle-working image may have played a part in his later link to martial arts and esoteric knowledge.

  Tanlin, who lived from 506 to 574, wrote the second surviving account by a contemporary. It sits in his preface to a treatise on the Two Entrances and Four Practices. He calls the Dharma Master a South Indian and the third son of a great Indian king. According to Tanlin, this prince exchanged a white layman's robe for the black robe of a monk. He mourned the decline of true teaching in distant lands and crossed mountains and seas to teach in Han and Wei.

  Tanlin is also the first to say that Bodhidharma attracted disciples. He names Daoyu and Dazu Huike. Tradition makes Tanlin himself a disciple of Bodhidharma, but he was more likely a student of Huike.

  In the 7th century, Daoxuan wrote Further Biographies of Eminent Monks, probably building on Tanlin's preface. He adds that Bodhidharma came from South Indian Brahman stock. He also supplies an itinerary. The monk first reached Nan-yüeh in the Song period, then turned north to the Kingdom of Wei. That implies a sea voyage and a crossing of the Yangtze. It also puts his arrival no later than 479, when the Song fell to the Southern Qi.

  Daoxuan records an ending too. Bodhidharma died on the bank of the Luo River, and Huike buried him, possibly in a cave. Because Huike later left Luoyang for Ye, the death must fall before 534, when the Northern Wei collapsed. The riverside setting has prompted a guess that he was among those killed in the mass executions at Heyin in 528. A report in the Chinese Buddhist canon says a monk was among the victims there.

  Huike, the disciple who buried him, would later figure very prominently in the Bodhidharma literature.

  3618164344

• 3. A Face From Elsewhere

  ›

  Buddhist art draws Bodhidharma as an ill-tempered man with a large nose, a profuse beard and wide eyes, plainly not Chinese. The epithets in Chan texts agree. He is the "blue-eyed barbarian", a general term for non-Han people from the Western regions. He is the "pierced-ear guest", because many Indian Buddhist monks wore earrings. He is also the "bearded man", the "golden rooster", and the "wall-gazing Brahmin", named for his nine years of staring at a wall.

  His name shifts with each language. Chinese texts shorten it to Bodhi or, more often, Dharma, written Ta-mo. The Japanese form is Daruma. Tradition says his teacher Prajnatara gave him the name Bodhidharma, and that as a layman he was Jayavarman or Bodhidhana. Tibetan sources call him Bodhidharmottara, meaning the highest teaching of enlightenment.

  The phrase Western Regions, used by the early sources, covered lands west of Yumen Pass. Usually it meant Central Asia, though the Indian subcontinent could be included. That looseness leaves the Persian label and the South Indian label hard to pin down. Dumoulin advises against taking the Persian claim too seriously. He also treats Tanlin's phrase about a great Brahman king as a later addition.

  Modern writers have tried to name a place anyway. Tsutomu Kambe reads the characters 香至 as Kang-zhi and identifies them with Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu, which would suit a Pallava prince. Acharya Raghu, in Bodhidharma Retold, points to Andhra Pradesh near Srisailam. The Pakistani scholar Ahmad Hasan Dani, citing popular accounts in the northwest of his country, suggested the Peshawar valley or the eastern edge of Afghanistan.

  Popular traditions pull in different directions. An Indian tradition makes him the third son of a Pallava king from Kanchipuram. Southeast Asian traditions describe a Tamil prince who awakened his kundalini and gave up royal life. Japanese tradition generally pictures a red-haired Persian. Broughton adds a point about caste. The word king suggests a warrior and ruler, while Brahman, to western ears, suggests a priest.

  The dates are no firmer. One early account has him arrive under the Liu Song, which ran from 420 to 479. Later accounts say the Liang, from 502 to 557. Buswell places him in the early 5th century. Broughton puts him in Luoyang between 516 and 526, when Yongning Temple was at its height. From 526 the temple suffered a series of blows, and it was destroyed in 534.

  3683355623

• 4. Wall-Gazing and the Sutra

  ›

  The Two Entrances and Four Practices is the only surviving work that scholars such as Yanagida Seizan will attribute to Bodhidharma. It describes two doors into the Dharma. The first is a direct grasp of the ultimate principle, the true nature or buddha-nature. The second consists of four practices. They are accepting suffering as the fruit of past karma, meeting circumstances with equanimity, living without craving, and dropping wrong thoughts while practicing the six perfections.

  Yanagida traces the first entrance to the sudden-enlightenment thinking of Tao-sheng. He sees the four practices as a reworking of the four foundations of mindfulness, which were popular in meditation circles of the late Six Dynasties.

  Then comes the puzzle of "wall-gazing", in Chinese bìguān. Tanlin and Daoxuan both link it to quieting the mind. The treatise describes those who "meditate on walls, the absence of self and other, the oneness of mortal and sage". Daoxuan declares that the merits of Mahayana wall-gazing are the highest. These are the first mentions of what may be a meditation practice tied to Bodhidharma.

  What the practice actually was remains uncertain. Daoxuan and Dumoulin treat it as an undefined kind of meditation. Writers working from within Chan often read it as seated zazen. Jeffrey Broughton offers a surprise from the Dunhuang manuscripts. The Tibetan version replaces the Chinese phrase with "rejects discrimination and abides in brightness". Since Tibetan translations of Chan texts are usually quite literal, Broughton concludes that early Tibetans did not read it as sitting cross-legged before a wall.

  A second anchor is the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra. In a late recension of his life of Huike, Daoxuan has Bodhidharma hand over the four-roll sutra with these words: "When I examine the land of China, it is clear that there is only this sutra." Early texts even call the emerging school the Laṅkāvatāra school. The sutra is described as difficult and obscure, and it distrusts language. It says that in some Buddha-lands ideas are conveyed by a steady look, a frown, laughter, yawning, or the clearing of the throat.

  Jingjue, who lived from 683 to 750, adds that Bodhidharma expounded the sutra's main portions for those who sat in meditation. He says these were gathered in a volume of twelve or thirteen pages titled "Teaching of Bodhi-Dharma".

  3616173371

• 5. Legends That Stuck

  ›

  In 527, according to the Anthology of the Patriarchal Hall of 952, Bodhidharma met Emperor Wu of Liang, a devoted patron of Buddhism. The emperor asked how much merit he had earned by ordaining monks, building monasteries, copying sutras and commissioning Buddha images. Bodhidharma answered, "None." Asked about the highest meaning of noble truth, he said there is no noble truth, only emptiness. Then the emperor asked who stood before him. "I know not, Your Majesty," came the reply. The exchange became the first kōan of the Blue Cliff Record.

  Unimpressed in the south, Bodhidharma is said to have gone to the Shaolin Monastery. He was either turned away or thrown out soon after arriving, and he settled in a nearby cave. There he "faced a wall for nine years, not speaking for the entire time".

  One version says he fell asleep in the seventh year. Furious with himself, he cut off his eyelids. Where they landed, the first tea plants sprang up, which is why tea helps Chan students stay awake in meditation. Other versions say he was finally admitted to Shaolin, or that he died sitting upright, or that he vanished and left the Yijin Jing behind. A last version says his legs withered from sitting, which is why Daruma dolls have none.

  Huike's entry into the story is harsher. After keeping vigil for weeks in deep snow outside, he cut off his own left arm to prove his sincerity, and only then did Bodhidharma agree to teach again.

  The Jingde Records of the Transmission of the Lamp, presented to the emperor in 1004, stages the succession. Bodhidharma, wishing to return to India, asked each disciple to show understanding. Dao Fu spoke of what is neither bound by words nor apart from them, and earned the word skin. The nun Zong Chi compared it to a glimpse of Akshobhya Buddha's realm and earned flesh. Dao Yu declared the four elements empty and earned bones. Huike simply bowed in silence, stood up straight, and earned marrow. Bodhidharma gave him the robe and bowl of succession.

  Then comes the story of the shoe. Three years after the burial, Song Yun, an ambassador of the northern Wei, met him in the Pamir Mountains. Bodhidharma was walking with one shoe in his hand and said, "I am going home." He warned Song not to mention the meeting. Song told the emperor anyway and was arrested for lying, since Bodhidharma was supposedly dead. When the grave behind Shaolin was opened, it held a single shoe.

  3624674722

• 6. Building a Lineage

  ›

  The idea of a chain of patriarchs in Chan goes back to the epitaph of Faru, a disciple of the 5th patriarch Hongren. That epitaph names Bodhidharma as the first. Yet in the early biographies, only Daoyu and Huike are explicitly named as his students.

  Early lineage lists varied. Writers such as Daoxuan, Du Fei and Jingjue traced the line through five to seven generations. Most agreed on Sengcan, who died in 606, then Daoxin and Hongren. They split over who came next, offering names like Shenxiu, Huineng and Xuanze.

  One text breaks the pattern. The Record of the Masters and Students of the Laṅka makes Bodhidharma the second ancestor, not the first. It names Guṇabhadra, translator of the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, as the first and calls Bodhidharma his student. The surviving Tibetan translation dates to the late 8th or early 9th century, so the Chinese original is older.

  The chain was later stretched back to India. By the time of the Anthology of the Patriarchal Hall in 952, Bodhidharma was a student of Prajñātāra, who was the 27th patriarch. The Song of Enlightenment by Yongjia Xuanjue then lists twenty-eight fathers in the West, beginning with Mahākāśyapa, a disciple of Gautama Buddha. It declares that Bodhidharma became the first father in China.

  D. T. Suzuki offered a motive. Chan's growing popularity in the 7th and 8th centuries drew complaints that it had no authorized record of direct transmission from the Buddha. Chan historians answered by making Bodhidharma the 28th patriarch.

  One scholar describes the compilers' attitude bluntly. Historical accuracy was of little concern, and new stories were invented and repeated until they, too, became legends. John McRae doubts that Bodhidharma's circle even thought of itself as a Chan school. In his view, a reliable biography is out of reach. Some scholars suggest the figure was assembled from several historical people over several centuries, and that a historical Bodhidharma may never have existed.

  That verdict makes the most famous claim about him all the more striking.

  3660627347

• 7. The Shaolin Fighting Myth

  ›

  Some Chinese legends say Bodhidharma was troubled by the poor physical shape of the Shaolin monks. He taught them exercises alongside meditation. These included the Eighteen Arhat Hands, an external set, and the Sinew Metamorphosis Classic, an internal practice. After he left, two manuscripts were said to have turned up in the temple, the Yijin Jing and the Xisui Jing. Copies and translations of the Yijin Jing survive, but the Xisui Jing is lost.

  Southeast Asian folklore gives him a martial route too. In this telling, he sailed from Jambudvipa to Palembang in Indonesia. He passed through Sumatra, Java, Bali, Malaysia and Luzon before entering China through Nanyue, teaching Mahayana doctrine and martial arts along the way. Malay legend credits him with bringing forms to silat. In Tagalog legend he reached Luzon by way of Palawan and introduced Arnis. A Vajrayana tradition separately links him with Dampa Sangye, a south Indian monk of the 11th century who traveled to Tibet and China.

  Martial arts historians trace the Shaolin claim to something much later. The Yijin Jing, or Muscle Change Classic, is a qigong manual dated to 1624. Its oldest surviving copy was published in 1827. The Shaolin monks credited their fighting skills to Vajrapani. The Daoist author, however, wrongly assumed they credited Bodhidharma, because Daoist tradition already linked daoyin gymnastics to him. The preface says he left the manual behind.

  Historians including Tang Hao, Xu Zhen and Matsuda Ryuchi reject the attribution. Lin Boyuan calls the manuscript "full of errors, absurdities, and fantastic claims". As the manual spread in military circles in the 19th century, Shaolin fighting slowly became associated with Bodhidharma.

  The association went mainstream through fiction. The novel The Travels of Lao Ts'an, serialized in Illustrated Fiction Magazine from 1904 to 1907, carried the new attribution to a wide audience. Henning calls the story a twentieth-century invention. He notes that writings from at least 250 years earlier mention both Bodhidharma and martial arts without connecting them.

  6852545866

• 8. Daruma's Long Afterlife

  ›

  Dogen's 13th-century kōan collection, the Shinji Shōbōgenzō, mentions Bodhidharma in fourteen separate kōans. In The Gateless Gate, a monk asks Zhaozhou why the ancestral teacher came from the west. Zhaozhou replies, "The cypress tree in front of the hall." Case 41 of the same book retells the story of Huike and Bodhidharma. A short addendum from 1245 gives a motto in his name, saying he came from the west, was unattached to any words, and pointed directly to the human mind.

  A similar four-line stanza, with the phrase "Not founded upon words and letters", is among the best-known Chan texts credited to him. Yet it is not his. It dates to 1108. The same fate met other works. Yanagida assigns the Treatise on the Destruction of Characteristics to Shenxiu. He links the Bloodstream Treatise to the Oxhead school and calls the Verses on the Heart Sutra clearly apocryphal.

  In Japan, his image became the Daruma doll, a good luck charm that began in Takasaki during the Meiwa era. The Shorinzan Daruma Temple there holds a yearly Daruma Doll Festival, celebrating the city as the doll's birthplace. More than 400,000 people attend to buy new dolls. Japanese children also play a version of statues called "Daruma-san ga koronda".

  Film has kept returning to him. The 1989 South Korean film Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East? takes its title from a kōan. It screened at the Cannes Film Festival that year and was the first South Korean film released theatrically in the United States. The 1994 Hong Kong film Master of Zen turned the legends into a martial arts drama. The 2011 Tamil film 7 Aum Arivu, starring Suriya, features a descendant of the monk.

  That last film drew criticism for historical errors, especially about Bodhidharma's age on entering China. The dispute led Indian followers of Bodhidharma to hold hunger strikes.

  246712729