Tracking Bodhidharma Page 4

  We then walk back to the temple gate and into the pedestrian street out front. Along Jade Street, shops sell every manner of jade ornaments and jewelry. We walk south along the street for a short distance and make a turn to pass under a paifang, one of those big ornamental Chinese gates made from stone. It commemorates and marks the spot of Bodhidharma’s arrival in China. The characters written on the stone cross beam at the top of the paifang literally read WEST COMING FIRST PLACE. A small paved plaza sits on the other side of the gate, nestled between some buildings. At one end of the plaza is a cement railing enclosing a small area. Within the enclosed area, five round cement blocks lie on the ground. Each is a wellhead of an ancient water source. The well with its five round wellheads is called the Five Eyes Well. Four of the holes covered by the cement blocks form a square with the fifth hole placed in the center of the others. The guide explains that the hole in the center was the well discovered by Bodhidharma, while the four around the outside were enlargements dug by Bodhidharma’s disciples. A legend says that after arriving in Guangzhou, Bodhidharma was walking along near the shore of the river, then struck the ground with his staff and said, “There’s treasure there!” Some men standing nearby heard these exciting words from a foreign holy man and started digging on the spot. Instead of gold, sweet water came up from the ground in the middle of the brackish tidal area. The well, I’m told, continued to be used as a unique source of fresh water in the brackish soil around the city until 1953, when the government installed water pipes to area homes.

  FIGURE 5. “West Coming First Place” Gate. The legendary place where Bodhidharma is said to have come ashore in China by the Pearl River, Guangzhou. Now a pedestrian shopping street.

  After a group picture, our car pulls up on the side street nearby and we climb inside, ready to proceed to visit my host abbot Yaozhi’s Grand Buddha Temple.

  Whether or not Hualin Temple has any real connection to Bodhidharma is tenuous. While tradition says that Bodhidharma set up a hermitage and started teaching after his arrival in Guangzhou, nearly everyone would admit that simple logic defies this story. First, there are no contemporary records that say exactly when or where Bodhidharma arrived in China. Even the most reliable record, the Continued Biographies , was written roughly 160-odd years after it claims Bodhidharma arrived. It says he came during the Liu-Song dynasty. That dynasty fell in the year 479, nearly fifty years before the sign on Hualin Temple says Bodhidharma first arrived at this place. One very strange thing is that the temple claims to have been established in the year 526, a year before an often-cited version of Bodhidharma’s legend says he even arrived in the country. Hualin Temple definitely raises more questions than it answers about Bodhidharma and his real story.

  Bodhidharma’s life has been hotly debated by scholars. Most of his traditional story comes from accounts and legends created after he lived, most of it long after. This tardiness led to some Japanese and Western scholars downplaying his importance during the time he lived or even denying that he existed. In the post—World War II period, scholars in Japan and the West “deconstructed ” East Asia’s prevailing myths, especially the divinity of the Japanese emperor, lately the cause of so much misery and pain. Bodhidharma’s was among the stories reexamined in the glare of new intellectual fashions such as “postmodernism” and “deconstructionism.” In my view, the result was that Bodhidharma was cut loose from his cultural and religious moorings to become, not just in the eyes of scholars but even the Western Zen tradition, a sort of placeholder—just a symbol in history’s parade. Though he was the founder of arguably the main religious current in the world’s longest surviving civilization, his life has been strangely marginalized, demoted to the status of a footnote appended to an obscure place and time. Bodhidharma’s “deconstruction” by scholars is reflected in pronouncements like the following by the Buddhist scholar Bernard Faure: “Bodhidharma does not ... deserve attention as a historical person ... [and] should be interpreted as a textual and religious paradigm and not be reconstructed as a historical figure or a psychological essence.”

  Influenced by such writings, even people who practice Zen and consider themselves familiar with the tradition express surprise when I tell them there should be no doubt that Bodhidharma actually existed. He wasn’t a mythical figure made up later or a composite of other religious figures cobbled together by later writers. That he may represent a certain “paradigm” is true enough, but that is just a fancy way to say he lived in and was a product of an age, of causes and conditions that can be examined. He most definitely was a flesh-and-blood person who walked on China’s yellow soil. To divorce his “paradigm” from his “historical person,” whatever that is supposed to mean, is simply a postmodernist attempt to eviscerate him as a flesh-and-blood person whose life’s story meant something and is worth considering.

  Admittedly, what we can say about the facts of his life is limited, but even those limited facts, meager as they are, are not without value.

  During the ride to Great Buddha Temple, Yaozhi and I get better acquainted. He is one of many young abbots now running Chinese temples. With a good education and dedication to the Dharma, he and young abbots like him are working hard to get the Chinese Buddhist tradition back on track after the problems of the twentieth century and despite continuing obstacles in the twenty-first.

  Chinese Buddhism, called Hanchuan Buddhism or “Han transmitted” Buddhism, is generally different from Tibetan Buddhism or much of the Buddhism practiced in Japan. Having developed much earlier than in either of those places, Chinese Buddhism retains some religious practices that have disappeared or been overlooked elsewhere. The most obvious difference between Han Buddhism and the Buddhist tradition of Tibet and Japan is the former’s strict observance of vegetarianism. Chinese Buddhist monks avoid eating hwun, meaning meat or foods derived from animals. Hwun also includes some vegetables like onions and garlic, believed to give rise to sexual energies and thus also proscribed. Han Chinese Buddhist monks and nuns are vegans. Emperor Wu, the same emperor who had the legendary encounter with Bodhidharma, was instrumental in the spread of vegetarianism in Chinese Buddhism. Contemporary records of his day claim that monks of the old Hinayana school of Buddhism ate meat under certain conditions. Supposedly they believed that if the meat in question did not come from an animal specifically slaughtered for the monk who was going to eat it, then it could be consumed without violating the Buddhist precept against killing, one of the “commandments” for proper behavior. But Emperor Wu and Chinese Buddhism rejected this idea and decided instead to interpret literally the precept of “don’t kill or cause to kill.” Thus they avoided all meat consumption. Emperor Wu was the first Chinese emperor to widely promote this view, and his influence was lasting. This was just the beginning of his long-lasting influence on Chinese Buddhism and society.

  As we ride, Yaozhi talks to me about other key differences between Japanese and Chinese Buddhism. In particular, many Japanese Buddhist monks marry and have children. Japanese government reforms carried out during the late 1800s directed that Buddhist monks could marry (in part to make the country stronger in an age of imperial conquest), and ultimately this practice was widely adopted by heretofore celibate monks in that country. Japanese monks could not only marry but might even own temples as personal property. Through selling religious services on the venue of these properties, they derived personal income. So by allowing monks to marry, own property, and earn money, the line between Buddhist monks and lay people became blurred. Through this blurring of a clear distinction between the life of a Buddhist monk and a lay person, the status of the clergy was naturally degraded, its sacred legitimacy placed in doubt. Thus the word priest was adopted to describe them and help differentiate their spiritual status from that of the lay community.

  In the course of our conversation, Yaozhi says that the differences between Japanese and Chinese Buddhism became embarrassingly apparent during the late 1980s when certain Chinese monks went to live in Jap
an. Yaozhi says, with a slight grin,“One person went and three came back.” In other words, some Chinese monks traveled to Japan to live and practice their religion and returned to China with a wife and child.

  Yaozhi tells me that the Chinese Buddhist Association then spoke to these issues by stating that “Japanese Buddhism is Japanese Buddhism, and Chinese Buddhism is Chinese Buddhism.” In other words, a clear demarcation would be made between practices in Japan and China, and China would adhere to its own tradition of demanding that “home-leavers” remain celibate.

  While I was studying and sitting at San Francisco Zen Center during much of the 1990s, I didn’t give a lot of thought to the differences between Japanese and Chinese Zen. If anything, I simply thought that the way the practice is done in Japan and the West is more modern and nonsexist than the traditional way in China. I think my views coincided with new prevailing social mores that came from the ’60s, and seemed to be a proper and “modern” perspective.

  But my perspective on this question began to change when I visited Chinese Zen temples in earnest during the 1990s. On my second or third visit to a temple where a famous ancient Zen master named Zhaozhou (Japanese name Joshu, 778—897) once lived and taught, the issue came to the fore.

  At the time of my visit, the abbot of the temple was a monk named Jinghui (“Pure Wisdom”), a prominent teacher now widely known in China. The temple’s head monk, whose position was immediately under Jinghui in the temple’s administration, was named Minghai (“Bright Sea”). Bright Sea was immensely welcoming and helpful each time I came to the monastery to visit. He is the same individual who set up my meeting with Yaozhi.

  It was during one such visit to the monastery that Bright Sea invited me to give a talk to a class of Buddhist monks there. I asked him what he wanted me to talk about, and he said it would be good if I spoke about the development of Zen Buddhism in America. I reflected on this a moment, then told him I didn’t really consider myself qualified to speak on this topic, since I was only somewhat familiar with only one Zen Center in the United States (San Francisco) and knew about others only through reading or occasional visits to a few places. Bright Sea assured me that what I knew would be enough for the talk.

  In the end, the talk went badly. I told the sixty or seventy young monks assembled in the monastery classroom about various Zen centers in the United States, the names of their teachers, and how they mostly originated from lines of Japanese Zen teachers. I talked of what I knew about Shunryu Suzuki, the founder of San Francisco Zen Center, plus a Kamakura-based Japanese lineage derived from the Japanese teacher Yamada Roshi, and a few other Japanese teachers like Taizan Maezumi of Los Angeles. But I sensed as I gave the talk that my knowledge of the subject matter was entirely insufficient and I was definitely not connecting with the audience. The monks sat quietly with blank looks on their faces, and when I asked for questions, almost nothing was forthcoming.

  When I finished speaking, Bright Sea thanked me and I returned to my guestroom in the monastery. I lay on my bed there, wondering about the deeply unsatisfactory feeling I carried away from my first attempt to communicate with a big group of Chinese monks. There was a knock on the door. I opened it to find a little monk standing there, looking at me rather timidly. He asked if he could ask a question. I said of course he could, and then he said, “Is it true that in America monks get married?” I was taken aback by the question, and it took me a few moments to realize its import, but then I managed to mumble something about how monks in America usually married persons of the opposite sex who were also monks or at least interested in Buddhism. This answer simply stumbled out of my mouth in an attempt to fill the void that the monk had exposed. When I told this story to someone later, they said the monk had simply pointed out the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the classroom where I gave the lecture, as I had abjectly failed to notice it.

  Our SUV is traveling in a nice shopping area. Yaozhi is explaining some points about how the Buddhist religion is surviving today, in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. He says that that event, although a tragedy for China on virtually every level, nonetheless provided Buddhism in China with one thing of value. For centuries, from the time of the Western Jin dynasty (265—316 CE) until the rule of Emperor Shun Zhi in the Qing dynasty (died 1661), monks in China were required to pass stringent examinations in order to enter the Buddhist orders. They needed to commit to memory long passages of Buddhist scriptures, plus they were required to understand and speak in an informed fashion on points of doctrine. Emperor Shun Zhi ended the examination system in a bid to have more people enter the Buddhist orders. The result, says Yaozhi, actually harmed Buddhism greatly. Without standards of knowledge, standards of conduct also declined, and improper behavior or practices reared their heads. After Japanese Buddhism underwent fundamental changes during the Meiji era in the late 1800s, changes that allowed monks to marry, inherit property, and so on, such phenomena started to spread and take root in China as well. I remember that some of the things Yaozhi is talking about were described in a book I read on pre-1949 Buddhist practices in China. The Cultural Revolution, says Yaozhi, caused harm to China, but it also had a certain beneficial effect. It allowed the Buddhist community there a chance to purify and reinvent itself, to reestablish stricter standards of conduct for its home-leaving monks. Yaozhi says this has been positive, as Buddhism has become ever more popular in China. Today, the need for Buddhism to provide a moral compass for society is recognized even by the nominally atheistic government. Accepting and following the traditional Buddhist precepts, the guidelines for moral behavior, is now seen as contributing to the rebirth of a “spiritual society.”

  Suddenly, a large paifang (an ornamental gate like the one where Bodhidharma came ashore) indicates we’ve arrived at Grand Buddha Temple, one of the five great Buddhist temples of Guangzhou. We exit the car on the traffic street and walk up a lane leading to the first hall of the temple. What greets us is typical of what one finds when entering a Zen temple in China, and is called the Heavenly Kings Hall.

  4. The Layout of a Traditional Chinese Temple

  ZEN MASTERS OF OLD often talked in a manner that seems, at first blush, like a riddle. Take for example this old story about a Zen master named Linxi (pronounced Lin-see):

  A monk asked Zen Master Linxi, “What is the essence of your teaching?”

  The master said, “Mountains and rivers.”

  The monk then asked, “Who lives among these mountains and rivers?”

  The master said, “Behind the Buddha Hall. In front of the temple gates!”

  This story doesn’t make any sense unless you are familiar with some basic ideas of Zen Buddhism and also familiar with the typical layout of old Zen temples. The arrangement of the buildings in those temples, oddly, provides a basic lesson in Zen Buddhist psychology. The positions of the main halls and gates have special significance, and their symbolism is enhanced by the placement of the Buddhist icons and statues, or lack of such items, inside the halls.

  To understand this we need to step back for a moment and look at a little of the philosophical background of Zen Buddhism. Different Indian Buddhist traditions influenced the growth of Zen in China, but the Yogacara school of Indian Buddhism was a key contributor to the Zen world view. A fundamental idea in Yogacara (I’ll call adherents of Yogacara the “Yogis”) philosophy was called the Three Natures (San Xing). These “natures” were three different ways of looking at human perception, the way the mind observes the world.

  There was one other school of Buddhist philosophy that had a big influence on Buddhism during Bodhidharma’s time. That school was called the Madhyamaka school, and it emphasized the idea of “emptiness.” I’ll call people who emphasized this idea the “Empties” from now on, because we’ll see their influence come up again in Zen and Buddhist discussions. The point to remember is that there were Yogis (people emphasizing “mind” as their essential idea) and “Empties” (people emphasizing “emptiness” as the essential idea
) in the Buddhist tradition of Bodhidharma’s age.

  FIGURE 6. Heavenly Kings Hall at Yun Men Temple, Guangzhou Province.

  Bodhidharma’s famous teaching (at least it is credited to him) instructed people to observe the “nature of the human mind,” and this idea dovetails nicely with the Three Natures teaching. So what are the Three Natures that correspond to Zen temple architecture? We’ll take a quick walk through an old Zen temple to make this clear.

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

  The main front hall of Zen temples, called the Heavenly Kings Hall, is a representation of the “first nature” of consciousness (for anyone who cares, the Sanskrit term for this “nature” is parikalpita). The hall contains an arrangement of statues of certain deities toward whom Chinese people often prayed (and still do) to receive benefits and blessings. The “Heavenly Kings” referred to in the name of the hall are four mythical deities that guard the “four continents” of the world, as believed and taught in the ancient Upanishad tradition of India. Each statue of a heavenly king occupies one of the four quadrants of the hall. At the center of the hall, facing you as you come in the front door, there is typically a statue of the big fat happy Buddha widely recognized in both East and West. Even if you’ve never visited a Chinese temple you’ve seen this happy fat Buddha, named Maitreya (in Japan, this Buddha is called “Hotei”), in East Asian restaurants or your local garden supply where he’s often sold as a yard ornament. For centuries, Chinese people have prayed to the deities in this hall for blessings and assistance. The “nature” of people’s relationships with these deities is that of “self and other.” This can be understood as “I’m here and there’s a deity over there that I’m praying to, and I want some blessing to come from him.” This “self” and “other” relationship characterizes normal human thinking about the world and how we see it. This sort of thinking also typifies usual religious belief and practice.