Tracking Bodhidharma Read online

  Ms. Chu then goes on to offer more reasons why Tianchang would have been a good location to set up such a temple in ancient times. Old records indicate that several other temples existed in the area, a sign that there was enough local wealth to support such activities. She says she’s heard stories that the temple we’re talking about once had large murals depicting Bodhidharma and many statues of him as well. However, no one has ever paid much attention to the old record because the date of the temple construction doesn’t fit with the prevailing story that Bodhidharma arrived in China in the year 527. Since the local record doesn’t fit with other widespread accounts of Bodhidharma’s life, no one has been certain how to interpret it. In particular, the dominant account of Bodhidharma, which does not say he lived in the area of Nanjing for an extended period, is completely contrary to what this old local record indicates.

  I then ask Ms. Chu about the old well that is said to still exist where the temple once stood.

  “That well is right in front of that building over there.” She points out a large building that sits between the office bureau where we’re sitting and the main street (Liuli Street, the same name that the old temple had) we came from earlier. “There’s a movie theatre and an appliance store in that building. In front of them is the well. Before, the wellhead had a protective cover that was about a meter high. After some new construction was built, what remains is only a few inches off the ground now, but it’s still there.”

  It occurs to me, as I look out the window at the building in question and consider our south-facing direction, that where we’re sitting was likely inside the original perimeters of Bodhidharma’s temple. In fact, given the layout of China’s old temples, we might be sitting where the abbot’s quarters once stood, the place where Bodhidharma would have lived.

  After we exchange cards and promise to exchange information in the future, Ms. Chu accompanies us to the front door. “That’s the building right there,” she says pointing to the south. “You’ll find the well in front of it.”

  A couple of minutes later, we reach the street and almost immediately see a rimmed hole in a small red-brick plaza in front of the appliance store that Ms. Chu told us about. The hole is less than a meter across and has a grating just below the ground’s surface to allow water to drain into it. The rim around it is only a few inches high and, given its location on a busy sidewalk on a major street, it’s amazing that it has been preserved, as someone could easily trip over the edge and fall into or across the thing in the dark. The same architectural artifact in the United States would have surely led to a lawsuit. Somehow, when this major modern street and modern shops were built, someone decided the old well was worth hanging onto, even though there is no indication that this well holds cultural significance.

  Eric and I both start taking pictures of the well, and this draws a lot of curious observers wondering what the heck the foreigner and his friend sees in the otherwise unremarkable hole in the pavement. Then we take pictures of each other standing next to it and of the surrounding buildings, eliciting more stares and surprised looks.

  The colossus of today’s China sits upon an incalculably large pile of history. Certainly some of the old culture remains intact or well-reconstructed, but it is such a tiny fragment of what the country has known that it can’t even suggest the infinite dramas and pathos of the civilization. Occasionally a fragment of the old grandeur simply juts out of the ground. I remember looking for the remains of the temple where a famous ancient Zen master named Deshan (Japanese: Tokusan, 782—865) lived and taught. The day I arrived looking for the place was the same day that a large backhoe was knocking down the temple cemetery where Deshan and other old high-ranking monks were buried. An old woman guided me to the spot where his burial stupa had been removed moments before. “Deshan was there,” she said. The old woman then took me to where an apartment complex had been built on the site of his old temple. Some stone lions, once the guardians of the temple’s Buddha Hall, now jutted out of the ground between two buildings. No one had bothered to retrieve them from the new soil of progress.

  FIGURE 15. Badhidharma’s wellhead positioned in front of an appliance store in Tianchang City. Photo taken in October 2009.

  Likewise, here on the pavement in front of an appliance store on a busy street, is the last tangible remnant of a temple reportedly occupied by Bodhidharma. Somewhere, someone who understood its significance had made sure it was not totally abandoned to modernity. Unseen forces work to preserve.

  A light rain begins to fall harder, so Eric and I finish our photos and hail a taxi, making our way back to the bus station. This is but the first of Bodhidharma’s traces I plan to ferret out in the Nanjing area.

  26. Linggu Temple on Bell Mountain

  TWO DAYS LATER on a comfortable and sunny fall afternoon, Eric and I are stooped over examining the soft ground, brushing soil and leaves off old stones to read faded inscriptions. We are standing in the soft dirt of Bell Mountain’s forest among old monuments that protrude from the fallen leaves and autumn undergrowth. On close examination we realize that the old monuments are stone carvings eulogizing old Zen masters of the Caodong (Soto) Zen school whose remains were placed here a couple hundred years ago.

  Virtually everything older, including any tangible remains from Emperor Wu’s time, fifteen centuries ago, is now removed, decayed, or lost beneath Bell Mountain’s forests. The mountain has seen so many battles, fires, and other misadventures over long centuries that only the mind’s eye can imagine the grandeur that once presided amid its trees and meadows.

  The place we’re exploring is called Ling Gu (“Departed Spirit Valley”) Park. It now serves mainly as a war memorial, as there were pitched battles around this location during World War II. The original temple that stood here, called Departed Spirit Temple, was built in the year 514 by Emperor Wu to honor Baozhi, the famous monk who helped Emperor Wu establish the Water and Land Ceremony and who also was an early Zen foil to Emperor Wu’s religious questions.

  Even though he lived before Bodhidharma’s Zen tradition took root in the country, the monk Baozhi is remembered as the quintessential Zen personality. His biography is filled with fanciful stories. The emperor often questioned Baozhi about the meaning of Zen, and his odd answers displayed a teaching style made famous by China’s later generations of seemingly enigmatic Zen masters.

  Once Emperor Wu asked Baozhi, “My mind is still plagued with troubles and doubt. Why can’t I rid myself of them through practice?”

  To this Baozhi is said to have answered, “Twelve.”

  This was a typical Zen-like response. Baozhi’s record says he was referring to the twelve hours of the Chinese day. Ancient Chinese divided a day into twelve time periods of two hours each. Baozhi meant that as long as Emperor Wu’s “practice” was concerned with actions in the twelve hours of the day, the karmic realm of time, of cause and effect, he could not solve his troubles. In Zen, even time and space are regarded as empty karmic abstractions.

  According to one legend, Baozhi also performed some magic for Emperor Wu so that he could see former emperors suffering in hell for their misdeeds. Other bizarre stories are sprinkled in the record of Baozhi’s life.

  A stupa dedicated to Baozhi rests near where Eric and I are looking around. It is not the original stupa that Emperor Wu made for him. That one succumbed to long-forgotten disasters that have plagued this place. Actually, this one isn’t even near where the original one sat. That place, a few kilometers from here around the slope of Bell Mountain, became a burial ground for the first Ming dynasty emperor. I guess he was jealous of the good feng shui of that spot and took it over, as emperors were allowed to do. So now this new stupa honors Baozhi. The old rocks and monuments that Eric and I spy beneath the bushes and undergrowth are just an echo of an echo, tiny tailings of the splendor of ancient Bell Mountain.

  27. Emperor Wu, the Chakravartin King and Bodhisattva Emperor

  ON THE EIGHTH DAY of the fourth lunar month of
the year 502, Xiao Yan ascended an outdoor platform at the summit of a mountain south of Nanjing and proclaimed his acceptance of heaven’s mandate to rule the land. He would be known to history as Emperor Liang Wudi, a name that translates as “Martial Emperor of the Liang Dynasty.” The date Wu accepted heaven’s mandate to rule was not picked at random. It coincided with the Buddha’s birthday, long celebrated by Buddhists with a ceremony that includes bathing a statue of the baby Shakyamuni Buddha, and it signified a new political and religious beginning.

  From the start of his rule, Emperor Wu used Buddhism as his reigning ideology, exploiting its dates and symbols in this manner. Deeply sincere in his personal belief and devotion to Buddhism, he unerringly played the role of the august and wise Buddhist sovereign fighting the forces of Mara (delusion and evil) in a Buddhist universe. He immediately began to build Buddhist temples and increase the number of monks and nuns in the country. He invited translators and eminent monks from around China and abroad to live and teach in new or newly refurbished temples as well as in his own palace, where they translated or retranslated uncounted Buddhist scriptures that flowed into the country from the home of Buddhism in the Asian subcontinent.

  Emperor Wu was less interested in the affairs of state than to devoting himself to the study of Buddhist scriptures. He personally selected the texts that his retinue of “house monks,” as he called his favorite clerics, must study and translate. This core group of monks, numbering about twenty, directed extensive translation work on a wide range of scriptures. Among the group were several monks who gained great distinction for their work and contributions.

  The Sanskrit word chakravartin literally means “[one] whose wheels are turning,” and in India it was anciently applied to a king whose chariot wheels went everywhere spreading the Buddha’s teachings. A chakra, or spoked wheel, symbolized a king’s righteous Buddhist rule and his actions to spread the religion. The famous early example of such a Buddhist king was the Indian monarch Ashoka (304—232 BCE), who first used Buddhism as the reigning ideology of a wide empire. The chakra not only symbolized Ashoka’s rule, but also remains the symbol of political rule today in modern India. The idea of “turning the wheel of the teaching,” often cited in Buddhism, is connected with the idea of the turning wheels of the chakravartin king’s chariot, and thus the propagation of the Buddha Dharma or law.

  According to Emperor Wu’s imperial propaganda, a chakravartin in the mold of India’s Ashoka the Great had now ascended the throne in China, and this was an event of millennial importance.

  Among the first scriptures that Emperor Wu had translated and propagated was the King Ashoka Sutra. That scripture purported to be the prophetic words of the Buddha praising Ashoka, who of course was born long after the Buddha’s death. Wu made a point of holding up King Ashoka as his righteous predecessor. On the twenty-sixth day of the eleventh month (lunar calendar) in the year 513, the translation of the King Ashoka Sutra was begun under the direction of an Indian missionary house monk in Emperor Wu’s court named Sanghabhadra. Emperor Wu attended this event and personally made notes on what was said. The full translation of the sutra translated by Emperor Wu’s monks is preserved in the Taisho canon, the one-hundred-volume collection of Buddhist writings compiled in the 1920s to honor the reign of Emperor Hirohito. It remains as the definitive collection of Mahayana Buddhist scriptures used by scholars throughout the world today.

  Ashoka is remembered and honored even today in India and in Buddhist history as a great humanitarian ruler who spread Buddhism’s influence far and wide. Stone monuments created during his reign tell some of his story and indicate that his Buddhist teachings even reached the shores of ancient Greece. He famously established burial stupas that housed the cremated remains (known as “sacred relics”) of the Buddha’s body. According to legend he divided up and left tiny remnants of these relics at eighty-four thousand places throughout the known world. Various places in China, drawing from the legend of King Ashoka, claim to have been among the places where King Ashoka consigned sacred relics for later generations to venerate (though there are no early records in China that confirm this). Recently Nanjing archeologists unearthed a jade stupa repository, several feet tall, purportedly holding relics of the Buddha, that was interred during the reign of Emperor Wu. It’s likely that Emperor Wu obtained and venerated these relics to strengthen his association with his revered predecessor, Ashoka the Great.

  While the chakravartin ideal that Ashoka represented was used by Chinese emperors before him, Emperor Wu went to the greatest lengths to reinforce his connection to that Indian monarch and enhance his own reputation as a chakravartin emperor. He may have found this necessary because Huiyuan’s famous treatise entitled “A Monk Does Not Bow to a King” caused Buddhists in Southern China to be less deferential to kings than Emperor Wu demanded. Emperor Wu strengthened his religious role by compiling and even retranslating scriptures that enhanced his religious position. He also directed the country’s citizens, including the aristocracy, to embrace Mahayana Buddhism and even personally expounded Buddhist scriptures and philosophy in grand public assemblies.

  Emperor Wu utilized other symbols to build his Imperial-Way Buddhism. Tellingly, after gaining power he constructed his first of many Buddhist temples at New Woods, the site where he defeated the main body of Baojuan’s forces southwest of the capital. He named it Dharma King Temple, evoking a story of the Dharma King (Buddha), who was likened in scripture to an enlightened sovereign. The exact scriptural passages used to justify this fusion of politics and religion came from the famous Lotus Sutra, which proclaimed, in the most widely used translation of that day, the following:And so the Tathagata [Buddha] appears, utilizing the strength of samadhic power [literally “Zen,” or meditative concentration], to obtain the land of the Dharma realm, becoming the king of the three worlds [past, present, and future]. And when the demon kings refuse to submit to him, the Holy One and his generals give battle with them ... And so the Tathagata appears in the midst of the three worlds as the Great Dharma King, using the Dharma to save all beings [emphasis mine].

  Moreover, the term Dharma King was the name of an important Buddhist scripture, the Dharma King Sutra, which espoused the Bodhisattva Precepts with a Confucian twist. I’ll talk more about that interesting sutra later.

  Equating himself and his specific battle to seize power with the actions of the Dharma King in this fashion was typical of Wu’s fusion of political with religious symbols to enhance his own status.

  The Buddhist scriptures that Emperor Wu promoted and spread often contained thinly veiled political meaning that was interpreted to nurture Imperial-Way Buddhism. A cornerstone of Emperor Wu’s Buddhist order was the Lotus Sutra, cited above, a text that effusively praises the role of bodhisattvas in the world and links those exalted beings to wise kings. This was the same text that the Nichiren sect in Japan used to justify their praise of the Japanese emperor during World War II.

  Among the house monks who helped lead the translation, building, and other religious projects undertaken by Emperor Wu was the monk Zhizang (pronounced Jer-zong). He resided at Kaishan Temple, where the most honored of the house monks lived. Zhizang was among the two or three highest-ranking monks who taught the Buddha Dharma to the emperor and his family. He was the preceptor for the emperor’s oldest son, Crown Prince Zhao Ming (pronounced Jow Ming, meaning “Shining Bright”), when the youth himself ceremonially accepted the Bodhisattva Precepts. Zhizang is often included in the lists of monks from Kaishan and other temples who lent their efforts to Emperor Wu’s translation and other Buddhist projects.

  The teachings set forth in these and other scriptures were not accepted by the entire Buddhist community uncritically. Some Buddhists of the day criticized doctrines advanced by Mahayana Buddhism (bodhisattva-style Buddhism) as being fundamentally non-Buddhist in nature. Such critics were often in the Precepts school, and they were dismissively referred to by Mahayanists as “Hinayanists” (small-vehicle Buddh
ists that are concerned only about their own salvation, not with saving all beings). Concepts of “Buddha nature” and “emptiness” advanced in the Mahayana texts that Emperor Wu emphasized, like the Nirvana Sutra and Prajnaparamita Sutra, were highly contentious, for they suggested metaphysical ideas that seemed to transcend the basic Buddhist teaching of cause and effect. But Emperor Wu was undeterred by the doctrinal contradictions some Buddhists found in the scriptures he promoted. He glossed over the delicate theological questions Mahayana Buddhism’s metaphysics created and embraced its messianic vision. Metaphysics had always been part of the mysticism used to extend Chinese imperial rule. Astrology, feng shui, and medicine were all products of China’s long-developed metaphysical proclivities. In such a society, it wasn’t too hard for these new Mahayana Buddhist metaphysical ideas to gain acceptance.

  Emperor Wu ranked the sutras in importance, composed his own commentaries on them, which he espoused publically, and placed them solidly in the ideological foundation of his rule. He saw this as the proper exalted role, after all, of a chakravartin and bodhisattva monarch in China’s burgeoning Buddhist society.

  The Bodhisattva Path that was so exalted in Emperor Wu’s era represents a critical divergence between Mahayana Buddhism of East Asia and Theravada Buddhism, the branch of the religion that remains dominant today in certain South and Southeast Asian countries. The split between these two groups might be traced to different views among the earliest factions of Buddhist sects and how they viewed the historical Buddha. Some scholars suggest that Mahayana Buddhism may have developed with an emphasis on supernatural occurrences credited to or associated with the Buddha, either miracles reportedly performed by him or strange phenomena associated with events in his life. For example, flowers were said to rain from the sky when he spoke, and an earthquake was said to have occurred at the time of his death. On the other hand, Theravada Buddhism tended to emphasize Buddha’s more mundane side, especially the practical guidance and logic found in his teachings.