Tracking Bodhidharma

by Andy Ferguson

  Other South Asian monks besides Bodhidharma braved the tortuous currents and typhoons of the South China Sea to spread Buddha’s teachings. Modern historians call those ancient sea lanes the Ocean Silk Road, the trading route that passes between South and East Asia through the Strait of Malacca.

  Bodhidharma stepped ashore in a China fractured with ethnic rivalry, feudal fiefdoms, and a prolonged civil war between the country’s north and south. In the centuries before his arrival, China experienced conflict, disintegration, and chaos. The people who embraced Bodhidharma’s teaching had endured much and suffered more. They had already known Buddhism for several centuries before Bodhidharma arrived. Yet his Zen caught the imagination of the world-weary populace, and so rulers, aristocrats, and commoners eventually embraced religious practices connected with his name. The teachings of one lonely sramana (holy man) who walked up a gangplank in Guangzhou into a chaotic country eventually conquered it, then spread far beyond its borders. I’ll start my search for Bodhidharma’s traces by going to where he stepped ashore.

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

  The white incandescent bulbs of the immigration hall cast pallor on the faces of people in slow moving lines waiting to cross the border into China.

  There is a short, pock-faced Chinese man with a leggy girlfriend standing ahead of me. She displays Italian fashion from hair to high heels, the shoes making her a head taller than her boyfriend. She is intently focused on everything he says. The man’s pocked face and eyes convey menace, and his tailored suit sticks out among a ragged line of people wearing street market clothes. His eyes skip back and forth, parodying some shifty-eyed stereotype. I remember news stories of Hong Kong triad godfathers and gangs and so avoid staring at the odd couple. My mind drifts to thoughts about the trip that lies before me.

  But my thoughts are scattered by a shrieking sound. It takes a few startled seconds to realize that I’m hearing the sound effects from the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. It’s the ree, ree, ree part where a shadowy figure is steadily swinging a broad-bladed knife under a gray light, plunging it into the naked body of Marion Crane (played by Janet Leigh) in the Bates Motel shower. I turn and look for the source of the sound. Then it grows louder, and I turn back to see that the pock-faced man has pulled his mobile phone from his jacket. He presses the button to talk. The shrieking sound stops. “Wei!” (Hello) he says. He begins talking in Cantonese. None of the other people in line pays any attention. Welcome to new China.

  When I first traveled this route into China in 1978, there were no stampeding crowds. On that morning a humid fog lifted on the Hong Kong side to reveal a landscape of ragged shacks and fish ponds where limp Kuomintang flags hung defiantly within sight of the border. After a few hours’ ride from Kowloon Station, our creaky train rolled across a splintered trestle to stop at the bare-brick Lowu checkpoint. Our group, a “U.S.-China People’s Friendship Tour,” looked excitedly at the rice paddies. Then, with entry chops pressed in passports, we rolled into the direct aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. The rice fields and shacks that met us just across the border in 1978 are now the supercity of Shenzhen, the export manufacturing zone that China’s leader Deng Xiaoping dreamed of when he said “to get rich is glorious.”

  Many Westerners, if they’ve thought about Zen at all, associate it with Japan. But the tradition flourished in China for about seven hundred years before it finally took root in the Land of the Rising Sun. By then its original incandescence was dimmed by devotional religious practice and literary artifice. Politicians, poets, and dilettantes laid claim to the religion. Even in that age, the word Zen was thought to be cool and hip, something hard to define, imparting an attractive and enigmatic air to anyone believed to understand it.

  Although after many centuries Zen suffered decline in China, it found a strange, fresh new life by leaping across the East China Sea to Japan. There its impact was widespread, stretching deeply into the country’s cultural life. It spawned enduring arts well-known today, such as ornate tea ceremonies, austere rock gardens, and poignant flower arrangements.

  In China, Zen interacted with China’s native Confucian and Taoist culture, and this meeting had a deep and lasting influence. The religion spread not just because of its engaging insight, but also because its literature coincided with the development of woodblock printing. In its late literary heyday, Zen rode this technological wave, then caught another with the Chinese invention of movable type by an alchemist named Bi Sheng.

  Zen is a Sinicized form of Indian Buddhism. The hybrid came about partly because translators introduced Buddhist ideas from India to China using Chinese words already pregnant with meaning. The meanings came mainly from China’s nature-loving, magic-imbued Taoist philosophy. For example, when Buddhism arrived in China, the country already used the phrase “The Way” to describe an exalted path of philosophical or aesthetic insight and practice. “Attaining the Way” was a phrase imbued with both Taoist and Confucian ideals, China’s native modes of thought. Buddhism exploited this phraseology, and “attaining the Buddha Way” nimbly introduced Buddha’s enlightenment to a Chinese audience. Chinese language and thought molded and culturally reinterpreted Buddhism in China. This pattern was widespread and long-lived.

  Buddhism was long established in China before “Zen” became its dominant current. The religion arrived about five hundred years before Bodhidharma sailed up the Pearl River. In fact, even Zen and Zen practice were common in China before Bodhidharma reached its shores and was crowned Zen’s “First Ancestor.” So a major question about Bodhidharma concerns why it was he, and not any of his many Zen predecessors, who got that sobriquet.

  Some commentators suggest that Bodhidharma was called the First Ancestor of the Zen school because he was the first to emphasize directly observing the nature of the mind. But I haven’t found evidence that this is so, for “observing mind” and equating the mind with Buddha’s teachings was taught in China before Bodhidharma arrived there. Evidence suggests that as novel as Bodhidharma’s approach to teaching Zen may have been, it was his politics that secured his importance to the tradition.

  Bodhidharma’s spiritual descendents flourished in China and spread his message to Korea and Vietnam within a century or so of its arrival in China. Now there are Zen teachers and students in China, other East Asian countries, and many other places. In the West, Zen has a small but growing group of followers.

  THE TRAIN TO GUANGZHOU

  On the fast new train to Guangzhou, a train attendant passes out complimentary bottles of water. She hands two bottles to a middle-aged Chinese man sitting next to me and he offers me one of them. I thank him in Chinese, and he says, “You must live in China.” I tell him I’m just a tourist, and he says, “No, you speak well. You must live here.” I ask him where he’s from. He says he’s from Guangzhou and is returning from visiting his son in Hong Kong. We chat a little about what we’re doing. His name is Li. He’s over sixty and is a businessman with a factory in Guangzhou that makes metal products. He sells die-cast parts and castings to some big-name tool companies in North America.

  He says he recently visited the United States as a tourist.

  “What did you think?” I ask him.

  “You have a nice environment in America, with lots of land and not many people.” Then he says, “Here in China, we have too many people. That’s the biggest problem. Many other problems come from that.”

  While we chat, a young boy a few seats away sits entranced with a video game. He erupts with an exclamation. Mr. Li looks at the boy for a long moment then turns to speak to me again.

  “Ah! When I was a boy, I lived in a poor village. We had to make up our own games. We didn’t have toys or even a radio. We would make straw figures or mud balls. Even if we only had mud balls, we would play all day and half the night. I remember that the best thing was when some grown-up would dress up in a costume and walk around on high stilts. We kids wo
uld run down the street after him, all excited, jumping up and down, pointing and yelling. That was our entertainment.”

  After we talk a while more, I ask Mr. Li a question. “Do you know who Bodhidharma is?”

  “I do,” he says. “When I was a child, my grandmother kept a little shrine in the house where she prayed. The statue in the shrine was of the bodhisattva Kwan Yin, but a little figure that sat next to it was Bodhidharma. She called him ”Saint Bodhi.” That’s what I remember. The figure was carved out of wood.”

  2. Guangzhou

  IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON, the train arrives at Guangzhou Station, and I find my way to a nearby subway station and make my way to my hotel. Unlike the barren and broken city that met me in 1978, in the truly new China of free enterprise there are many small hotel chains. My lodging tonight is typical, an inexpensive but comfortable chain named Like Home.

  When first I arrived here in 1978, Guangzhou and the entire mainland lay crushed under the debris of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Then there were no evident traces of Bodhidharma in the city where he arrived in China. The night streets of Guangzhou in 1978 were quite literally dark, for even streetlights were rare. We walked long boulevards illuminated only by the headlights of an occasional public bus or belching truck. The Chinese pedestrians still sported the blue or gray Mao jackets of the day. But even then, just before economic reforms were unleashed, things were changing. One night I walked with two young women from the tour past a dark intersection. Emerging from the drab landscape, we discovered an advertisement for a local business hotel’s coffee shop (Guangzhou was already the site of China’s annual foreign trade fair). The ad was a near-life-size, cutout figure of a Western woman with long, wavy blond hair, the word welcome printed awkwardly on her torso. It was a portent of the future. “Look,” said one of my feminist companions dejectedly, “she’s windswept!”

  We found little else of interest in Guangzhou then. The tour visited the Wampoa Military Academy where, in the early twentieth century, cadets of Sun Yat-sen’s nationalist army trained to help build a new Chinese nation. We walked the barracks and looked at old photos above the spartan beds, sad shots of young men born in an unfortunate time, most fated to die in China’s early but aborted attempt at modernity.

  I remember a banquet we attended. It was in a well-known restaurant used by foreign traders and local officials. A high-level Communist cadre came to join us for dinner. He didn’t say much but seemed to relish the good meal being paid for by our Beijing-based guides. I ventured to try out my Chinese language skills on him by asking him the following bit of nonsense.

  “Wasn’t the smashing of the Gang of Four important because the failures of their radical policies only dampened the peasants’ enthusiasm for socialism?”

  He didn’t look up as he slurped his soup, a few drops glistening on his chin. “Yes, yes, of course,” he mumbled. “That is fundamental ...” He slurped another spoonful and stuffed a dumpling in his mouth, then repeated himself. “That is fundamental.”

  Whether in 1978 or today, knowing how to read and speak Chinese is almost necessary for traveling alone in China, since there are few English or other European language signs to help guide you through the country. Yet some language facility is no panacea. I’ve spent considerable time searching for places shown on maps that are maddeningly hard or impossible to locate. Locals don’t always know the places I’m looking for and, anyway, seldom provide good directions to find something. Asking directions often goes like this:

  Me: “Excuse me, can you tell me where Western Happiness Temple is located?”

  Direction-giver: “Go straight.”

  Me: “Is it on the right or left?”

  Direction-giver: “Just go straight.”

  To “go straight” means that you are going in the right direction but doesn’t necessarily mean there are no further corners or intersections to be navigated correctly and provides no clue about how much longer you need to keep going. Similarly, I might be in a big department store that covers an entire block in China and ask a clerk where I can find a camera shop. He or she is likely to say, “Next door,” without any indication of which direction one should go to find the store “next door.”

  But my schedule and route for the next couple of days will be without such problems. An old friend of mine who is now abbot of a famous Zen monastery in Northern China has made introductions on my behalf. Bright Sea, of whom I’ll speak more later, called a friend of his named Yaozhi (whose name means “Brilliant Wisdom”), the abbot of Grand Buddha Temple here in Guangzhou. He explained the reasons for my coming and asked Yaozhi to assist me. So now I call Yaozhi on my mobile phone, and he already knows who I am and why I’ve come. He’s ready to help me search for Bodhidharma’s trail and will be at my hotel tomorrow morning at nine.

  There’s no restaurant in the Like Home. I spend twenty minutes or so walking in the area of the hotel to find a restaurant, but there doesn’t seem to be anything that offers passable vegetarian food. Finally I go back to the hotel and ask the desk clerk to direct me to a supermarket where I can buy some things to hold me over. She directs me to a big modern place about eight blocks from the hotel. I eventually find it tucked in a shopping center that offers the usual array of dress shops, sneaker stores, and ginseng sellers that abound in China. I ride an escalator to the second floor to where the market offers a wide variety of groceries, a fair portion of them imported. Well-dressed shoppers move up and down the aisles with brimming carts. Visiting stores in China’s big cities today is no different from such places in any modern city in the world.

  After buying a few things, I return to my hotel by way of the nearby Pearl River shoreline, along the banks where Bodhidharma came ashore in China.

  The most widely believed account of Bodhidharma’s life claims that he arrived in China in the year 527 in Guangzhou. He then immediately traveled to Nanjing at the invitation of Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty. Emperor Wu believed deeply in Buddhism, elevating it to the status of a state religion. He invited Buddhist teachers from all over Asia to visit his palace and teach the religion’s philosophy, and tradition says that Bodhidharma was likewise invited to perform this service. The central story that Zen has preserved about Bodhidharma is that when he met Emperor Wu in Nanjing at the latter’s invitation in 527 CE, the two did not have the same views about proper Buddhist theory and practice. Emperor Wu expected Bodhidharma to praise him for the material and public support he had provided to Buddhism, but instead Bodhidharma rejected the emperor’s religious activities. This was, of course, a big affront to the “Bodhisattva Emperor.” Thereafter, says this traditional account, Bodhidharma crossed the Yang-tse River (folklore says he did so on a single stalk of bamboo) and proceeded north to live at Shaolin Temple in North-Central China. He allegedly lived in a cave on a mountain behind Shaolin Temple for nine years before dying in the year 536. This traditional story claims that Bodhidharma was then buried at Dinglin (“Samadhi Woods”) Temple, a place west of the ancient city of Luoyang.

  FIGURE 1. Bodhidharma Arrives in South China in the Year 527 CE (Traditional Story).

  This widely believed traditional story, which is first seen in texts from about four hundred years after Bodhidharma lived, is almost certainly not an accurate account of Bodhidharma’s life.

  Serious scholars believe that a book called the Continued Biographies of Eminent Monks (which I’ll hereafter call the Continued Biographies), a book written around the year 650, a time much closer to when Bodhidharma lived, provides a far more reliable account of his life. The author, the monk Daoxuan, probably knew Zen monks who were Bodhidharma’s second generation of disciples. Daoxuan’s book is written in a terse and hard-to-read style of classical Chinese writing, difficult even for well-educated Chinese scholars. Despite its obtuseness, prying information out of Daoxuan’s old text is essential for getting the best understanding about Bodhidharma and his early disciples. Through examining this old text carefully, and rev
iewing commentaries about it by Chinese scholars, I have discovered some new clues about Bodhidharma. Those clues figure heavily in my plans for this trip along his path in China.

  Daoxuan’s Continued Biographies were called “continued” because the text followed a similar book that appeared a hundred years earlier. That earlier text, called Biographies of Eminent Monks, was written during the time Bodhidharma lived but makes no mention of him. This is an important first clue about Bodhidharma’s life in China, for it indicates that official and literary circles didn’t know much about him, perhaps, it seems, because he purposefully avoided them.

  Daoxuan was a towering figure in both the history of Chinese Buddhism and Chinese scholarship. He established his own “South Mountain” Buddhist sect that, in its heyday, had enormous influence and prestige in China’s imperial establishment. His Buddhism emphasized the “precepts,” the rules of discipline by which Buddhist monks and nuns live. But as time went on, his sect shrank in size, losing ground to Zen and other Buddhist schools. During the early twentieth century, his Chinese Precepts school (also commonly referred to as the Vinaya school) nearly died out, but has recently started growing again.

  To know the most reliable story we have about Bodhidharma, we must look at what Daoxuan had to say about him. Here’s what he wrote in the Continued Biographies:Bodhidharma: A Brahman from South India. His spiritual wisdom was expansive. All who heard him became enlightened. He was devoted to the Mahayana practice of the profound solitary mind. He attained high comprehension of all aspects of meditation. Through compassion for this place [China] he taught the Yogacara [teachings]. He first arrived in South China during the Liu-Song dynasty [before the year 479]. At the end of his life he again traveled to live under the Wei [the dynasty that ruled North China]. Wherever he went he taught Zen. During his time he taught throughout the entire country. Upon first hearing the samadhi [meditation] teaching there were many who reviled him. [But] there were two monks named Daoyu and Huike who became his disciples. Although they were older [than typical new disciples] they were highly astute. Upon first hearing the teaching they immediately realized the Way and took their vows [became Bodhidharma’s disciples]. They studied closely with him for four or five years, receiving his instruction. [Bodhidharma] understood their sincerity and conveyed to them the true Dharma, such as pacifying the mind [by the method of] meditation while facing a wall, such as undertaking the practice known as the “Four Methods,” such as liberating beings in the face of criticism, and such as not using [demons to scare people] as an expedient. [Bodhidharma said,] “There are many paths to enter the Way, but essentially there are only two, which are [entering through] principle and [entering through] practice. [The first is] accepting the enlightened doctrine that all beings possess the same true nature which is obstructed [from our view] by worldly attachments. [This doctrine] leads us to forsake the false and return to the true by sitting and facing a wall, with no self or other, [and where] sacred and mundane are the same; resolute and unmoving, not pursuing some external teaching, remaining solitary in non-action in accordance with the mysterious Way, this is called ”entering the Way through principle.“ Entering the Way through practice entails four essential practices derived from ten thousand . . .