Tracking Bodhidharma Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  1. An Auspicious Date

  LOWU STATION, ON THE BORDER BETWEEN HONG KONG AND CHINA’S GUANGDONG PROVINCE

  THE TRAIN TO GUANGZHOU

  2. Guangzhou

  3. Hualin Temple

  4. The Layout of a Traditional Chinese Temple

  THE FRONT HALL OF HEAVENLY KINGS: THE “NATURE” OF SELF AND OTHER

  THE BUDDHA HALL: THE “NATURE” OF DEPENDENT CO-ARISING

  THE DHARMA HALL: THE “PERFECTED NATURE” OF CONSCIOUSNESS

  5. Grand Buddha Temple

  6. Guangxiao Temple

  7 Another Visit to Hualin Temple

  8. Traveling North

  9. Zen at War

  FROM GUANGZHOU TO SHAOGUAN

  10. The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Ancestor

  11. Nashua Temple: The Sixth Ancestor Huineng’s Dharma Seat

  SHAOGUAN CITY

  12. Yunmen Temple

  13. Danxia Mountain

  14. Separate Transmission Temple

  15. Nanchang City

  16. Youmin Temple

  17. The Trip to Baizhang Temple

  18. Baizhang Temple

  ANCIENT TEMPLE GATES

  ZEN MASTER BAIZHANG’S TEACHINGS

  BAIZHANG AND THE BODHISATTVA WAY

  A TOUR OF BAIZHANG TEMPLE

  MOUNT LU AND EAST WOODS TEMPLE

  19. Jiujiang City

  20. Up or Down the Yang-tse River?

  21. Meeting Gunabhadra?

  BODHIDHARMA IN LUOYANC 488—494?

  FOURTH ANCESTOR’S TRUE ENLIGHTENMENT TEMPLE

  THE FOURTH ANCESTOR’S TEMPLE

  22. Laozu Si, the Old Ancestor’s Temple

  BODHIDHARMA LEAVES THE LUOYANG MOUNT SONG REGION IN 494?

  23. Nanjing City

  24. Emperor Wu and Imperial-Way Buddhism

  25. Tianchang City and Bodhidharma’s True Victory Temple

  26. Linggu Temple on Bell Mountain

  27. Emperor Wu, the Chakravartin King and Bodhisattva Emperor

  28. Emperor Wu and His Family

  CROWN PRINCE ZHAO MING (ALSO NAMED XIAO TONG)

  29. Emperor Wu and the Temples of Bell Mountain

  30. Mufu Mountains and Bodhidharma’s Nanjing Cave

  31. The Fusin of Confucianism and Buddhism under Emperor Wu

  32. The Tai Cheng Palace and Hualin Garden

  EMPEROR WU’S RELATIONSHIP WITH HOME-LEAVING BUDDHISM

  33. The Poem by Crown Prince Zhao Ming (Xiao Tong)

  34. Stone Fortress and Refreshing Mountain

  THE MEETING

  35. Dingshan Temple

  DAOXUAN’S VIEW OF NANJING IN THE AGE OF BODHIDHARMA

  36. Changlu Temple

  37. Train to Wuhan

  38. Xiangfan City

  39. Mount Song and Shaolin Temple

  40. Shaolin Temple

  SHAOLIN TEMPLE AND IMPERIAL-WAY BUDDHISM

  41. Bodhidharma’s Cave

  42. Huishan Temple

  43. Ordination Platforms: The Battle Ground between Imperial and Bodhidharma Zen?

  44. The Temples of Luoyang

  45. Empty Appearance Temple

  46. Bodhidharma’s Memorial Stele: Written by Emperor Wu?

  47. Bodhidharma Memorial Ceremony

  48. Train to Shanghai

  NANJING IN CONTEXT

  ON THE TRACK TO SHANGHAI

  THE DEATH OF EMPEROR WU

  49. Bodhidharma’s Fate

  DRAGON GATE: DID BODHIDHARMA DIE NEAR CHINA’S ABANDONED HEART?

  50. Epilogue

  51. Was Japan to Blame?

  Appendix:

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  THIS BOOK TRAVELS a path at the heart of Chinese culture. It follows the tracks left by Bodhidharma, a fifth-century Indian monk and important religious figure remembered as the founder of Zen Buddhism. I trace his path in China to unearth forgotten stories that shaped a civilization and reveal the roots of the religion that dominated East Asia for fifteen centuries.

  This is also a personal journey, for it explores the origins and significance of Zen, a tradition I have practiced and studied for several decades.

  The trail also leads into some little-known corners of Chinese history, places in the shadows of East Asia that continue to influence the region’s development.

  Bodhidharma, an Indian Buddhist missionary, traveled from South India to China sometime around the year 500 CE. Although his Zen religion spread relatively quickly from China to Korea and Vietnam, it was another seven hundred years before Zen finally took root in Japan, the country Westerners most frequently associate with the religion.

  While Bodhidharma’s teachings are known in the West as Zen, a Japanese word, the term is equivalent to the modern Chinese word Chan. This book uses the word Zen because it is familiar to Western audiences. Bodhidharma was the “First Ancestor” or “First Patriarch” of the Zen (Chan) sect in China.

  Zen claims that successive generations of teachers have relayed its essential insight by “mind-to-mind” transmission. The religion’s founding myth claims that this transmission started when the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni, sat before a crowd of his followers at Vulture Peak, a place in ancient India. There, says the legend, he held up a flower before the assembly. In response to this gesture, his senior disciple Mahakasyapa smiled, whereupon the Buddha uttered the words that purportedly set in motion centuries of awakening:I have the treasury of the true Dharma Eye, the sublime mind of nirvana, whose true sign is signlessness, the sublime Dharma Gate, which without words or phrases is transmitted outside of the [standard Buddhist] teachings, and which I bestow upon [my disciple] Mahakasyapa.

  The Zen tradition thus declared and originated its essential insight into the “signless” mind of nirvana, which can be interpreted as the nature of normal human (or any sentient being’s) consciousness, which by nature is outside of time and space. In the story, the Buddha metaphorically refers to the field of consciousness (which is usually translated as “mind”) as the “Treasury of the True Dharma eye.”

  As Zen developed in China, it claimed that Bodhidharma taught a refined summation of this essential Zen teaching. Bodhidharma purportedly said, “Not setting up words, a separate transmission outside the [scriptural] teachings, point directly at the human mind, observe its nature and become Buddha.” ( )

  The Zen tradition that coalesced from this perspective held sway as China’s dominant and orthodox religion for the next fifteen hundred years. The cultural impact of Zen on East Asia can hardly be understated. This impact is perhaps best known as underlying the aesthetics of much East Asian art and literature, where landscape paintings, poetry, and other arts often reveal Zen’s spare perspective.

  In China, Bodhidharma taught his Zen to a Chinese disciple named Huike (pronounced Hway-ka). This “Second Ancestor” is credited to have transmitted Bodhidharma’s teachings to others in that country. Some records indicate that China’s religious and political establishment initially rejected Bodhidharma’s Zen movement, persecuting Bodhidharma and Huike as heretics. Accounts claim that certain religious rivals poisoned Bodhidharma and that others denounced his disciple Huike to the authorities. Those authorities reportedly executed Huike, then cast his corpse into a river.

  Trouble with high authorities notwithstanding, Bodhidharma and his movement had wide impact even during his lifetime. A reliable record indicates that the sage traveled widely, and that his followers were “like a city.” Having a large following and operating outside the political and religious establishment is often, of course, highly dangerous, so accounts of Bodhidharma’s persecution by religiou
s rivals and political circles seem credible.

  Bodhidharma’s legendary life grew in mythical detail as time passed and his religious message gained acclaim. This book examines the traditional account of his life. It also offers a different perspective, a view removed from prevailing religious and scholarly orthodoxy about Bodhidharma held in East Asia and the West. The narrative reinterprets and pieces together evidence to support a new perspective about this critical figure’s life and importance. The accounts make use of the most reliable sources and shed new light on why later generations regarded Bodhidharma as such an important religious leader.

  This is not simply an academic question. The ramifications of Bodhidharma’s life and what he symbolized to China are only now becoming fully clear, and they extend to events that have shaped recent East Asian history. On the macro level, unraveling Bodhidharma’s story reveals the roots of a narrative still being argued and even fought over in East Asia.

  Besides Bodhidharma, two other figures who lived at or about his time play prominent roles in this narrative. One is China’s great Tang dynasty Buddhist historian and scholar Daoxuan (pronounced Dow Swan) (596—667 CE). This remarkable man not only personally unified much of Chinese Buddhism but also chronicled in detail its people, thought, and movements. We can thank him for keeping Bodhidharma’s life planted on the earth instead of floating in mythical clouds. Daoxuan’s historical records play heavily in this story.

  The other figure is an emperor. At the core of Bodhidharma’s legend is his fabled encounter with Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty, called the Bodhisattva Emperor (in East Asian Buddhism, a bodhisattva is an exalted spiritual being). Wu’s reign (502—549 CE) represents the fusion of the Buddhist religion with Chinese state power and authority. Emperor Wu wedded his brilliant understanding of Buddhist tradition and theory with Confucian statecraft. The result served as the ideological basis of Wu’s empire and reverberated through East Asian history. No thorough understanding of China and East Asia can overlook the critical developments that came from Emperor Wu. For this reason, this book looks at Emperor Wu’s life in some detail. His intriguing story is the essential counterpoint to Bodhidharma, and the significance of each of these historic figures cannot be calculated without an understanding of the other.

  As I said, I explore these questions while tracking Bodhidharma’s ancient trail through China. Along the way are places that Bodhidharma lived and taught, places that reveal the cultural aftermath of his passing.

  People with little prior knowledge of Zen may here have a first look at part of this deep wellspring of Chinese and East Asian culture. For readers with more prior knowledge of Zen history, the book should throw new light on the tradition’s early years. But I hope that thoughtful readers with no knowledge whatsoever about Zen, about Bodhidharma, or even about Chinese history can here find an illuminating account of a critical story of East Asia history, a story that informs a better understanding of that region.

  Zen, often called the “essence” of Chinese culture, had an important political component. This is not surprising. Politics has always engaged or lurked near the heart of religious movements. This is not to say that the Zen spiritual tradition is not important or that its insight is without gravitas. The tradition is engaging on both the spiritual and aesthetic plain, and its observations reach the limits of our understanding of the human condition. Arguments advanced by some modern physicists and even cosmologists fall in line with what the old Zen masters and the Buddha himself said about the world—that it is created by the mind. Scientists and philosophers still debate whether this is true only metaphorically or in some far stranger sense.

  The Zen cultural tradition has bequeathed to the world a treasury of fine art, prose, and poetry. A solitary moon suspended in the void, a sweet-watered spring, a lonely mountain peak—the old Zen masters used such metaphors to suggest the nature of “signless” mind. The tradition’s intimate love of nature and natural metaphor conjures a scenic trail in both fact and imagination. Bodhidharma’s China road affords the traveler a chance to see how ancient landscapes of the Earth and the mind are withstanding China’s exploding population and modernization. That critical question alone makes tracking Bodhidharma compelling. It is only one of the important questions an examination of his life and ancient path evokes.

  Andy Ferguson

  The Tao Po Hermitage

  Port Townsend, WA

  August 16, 2011

  1. An Auspicious Date

  From high above,

  Sublime the vision,

  Islands beneath the rising sun.

  —Poem composed by Emperor Hirohito of Japan in 1939, submitted as his contribution to an imperial poetry contest

  ON DECEMBER 7, 1941, Japanese Zeros flew out of the rising sun of a Hawaiian morning to rain destruction on the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor. Personally planned and approved by Emperor Hirohito, the attack plunged the United States into the most catastrophic war in human history. But the date that flashed across the screens of Japan’s war propaganda films celebrating the attack was not December 7, but December 8, the date that had already arrived in Japan when the first bombs fell in Hawaii.

  The date was not serendipitous. Emperor Hirohito selected December 8 as particularly auspicious and meaningful, for according to Japan’s Buddhist tradition, that date corresponds with Buddha’s enlightenment day, the day when the historical Buddha Shakyamuni sat in meditation as dawn approached, then suddenly experienced enlightenment as he observed the morning star that accompanied the sunrise.

  The symbolic date of the attack punctuates the role that Buddhism and its doctrines played in Japan’s militarist and imperial ideology. Recently the historian Brian Victoria has detailed how Buddhism, including Zen Buddhism, played a critical role in the ideology of emperor worship in Japan before and during the war. The religion meshed deeply with native Shintoism to underpin the country’s war propaganda. How, one might ask, did a pacifist religion, known as dedicated to peace and brotherhood, travel so far from its fundamental teachings to become a weapon in Japan’s arsenal of imperial war?

  These strange developments belie the notion that Buddhism has unerringly sided with pacifism and opposed armed conflict. As a Zen practitioner and researcher for the past three decades, I confess that Brian Victoria’s narrative of the events of WWII presents me with a troubling set of questions that beg for an explanation.

  Fully understanding Zen and its perplexing history has led me here to Hong Kong where I sit today on the shore in Kowloon watching the Star Ferry shuttle back and forth to Hong Kong Island under a bright autumn sun. I plan to follow the long overgrown trail of the figure credited with establishing Buddhist Zen in China, a legendary and enigmatic Indian holy man named Bodhidharma. What, after all, did he stand for?

  Much about Bodhidharma’s life remains obscure, and scholars debate almost everything about him. What we know comes from old Chinese records of varied reliability, complemented with legends and folklore blown up to mythic proportions.

  Bodhidharma (?—528?), a Buddhist missionary from South India, arrived in China about fifteen centuries ago near where I write these words. His ship sailed into China on the Pearl River, the waterway that flows past the Chinese city of Guangzhou (previously called Canton) and empties into the South China Sea. He would ultimately be remembered as the First Ancestor of Zen, China’s dominant religious tradition. Many in China say that Bodhidharma and the Zen masters that followed him, his “spiritual descendants,” comprise the essence of Chinese culture.

  Guangzhou, where he landed, has long been a gate of intercourse between China and the world. It is where British gunboats compelled China to import British opium, a drug that helped anaesthetize Chinese resistance to Western and Japanese imperialism, in the infamous Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century. Guangzhou is also where Sun Yat-sen and other luminaries of the 1911 Republican Revolution organized a failed attempt to introduce Western-style democracy to China.


  Bodhidharma’s influence on China was far greater than the Opium Wars or even the Republican Revolution.

  Who was he? We know little of certainty about his origins beyond that he was a Buddhist monk who was born a Brahman, India’s highest caste. He reached China after years at sea had thinned his cheeks, but his eyes, says his legend, matched the ocean’s blue waves. They may have betrayed a Greco-Aryan bloodline. Perhaps his ancestors came from where Alexander’s army rolled across India and his soldiers settled to intermarry with the local population. The earliest statues of the Buddha, which appeared where Alexander’s colonies prevailed, look more like Greek gods than Hindu deities. The Chinese nicknamed Bodhidharma the “Blue-Eyed Barbarian.”