Tracking Bodhidharma

by Andy Ferguson

  An old record that claims that Bodhidharma came to East Woods Temple is in a book called Record of the Dharma Treasury [through the] Generations, written about the year 760 CE, more than two hundred years after Bodhidharma died. It relates a strange story that says that two of the old master’s disciples traveled to China before Bodhidharma himself arrived in the country. According to the story, these two monks brought the teaching of Sudden Enlightenment to a skeptical Chinese society. For their efforts they were thrown out of all the temples in which they tried to stay and finally ended up at East Woods Temple by Mount Lu where they encountered the abbot, the famous Buddhist translator named Huiyuan. When Huiyuan asked them why they had been driven out of other temples, they explained their revolutionary doctrine to him along with the insight that “nirvana is the same as samsara.” It was truly a radical idea that nirvana and samsara were the same thing, with the critical difference only existing in the mind of a deluded observer. They reportedly used an odd example to describe this idea, saying that “a hand is also a fist; a fist is also a hand.” This supposedly profound insight was said to have awakened Huiyuan to the truth of the “Sudden” doctrine of enlightenment. The story goes on to say that Huiyuan helped the two monks translate a Buddhist scripture called the Zen Gate Sutra, a text that emphasizes a teaching on the Sudden way. Then the story says the two monks passed away. Word of their death eventually reached their teacher Bodhidharma, who was still in India. In order to complete their mission, Bodhidharma himself then came to China and traveled to East Woods Temple to live.

  This story is fanciful, at best. Nevertheless, like many old tales, it may be based on a grain of truth. As I’ve explained, Bodhidharma probably did come here.

  Huiyuan, the temple abbot who met the two monks in the story, is famous as one of the most important scholars of Chinese history. His translation of scriptures laid the basis for the Buddhist Pure Land sect. East Woods Temple is thus the mother temple of that widely followed branch of the Buddhist religion.

  Among his many important contributions to Chinese Buddhism is Huiyuan’s treatise entitled “A Monk Does Not Bow to a King.” This essay strongly proclaimed that a Buddhist monk is not subject to the normal relations of loyalty and fealty required of other subjects toward their monarch. As an early statement on the need to separate church and state, Huiyuan’s essay is notable and fascinating. Even more surprising is that it was widely acclaimed and accepted in many Buddhist and even official circles in the south of China during his age. The writing weighs in on the meaning of Bodhidharma legend that says he met with Emperor Wu. I’ll refer to “A Monk Does Not Bow to a King” again later.

  From my perch high on the mountain, I can barely make out the front gate in front of East Woods Temple on the plain far below. There’s an interesting legend about that spot that concerns Huiyuan. It seems he befriended the great poets and philosophers of his time, the early fifth century. A legend tells how he had two special friends, a famous Confucian poet named Tao Yuanming and the Taoist Master Lu Xiujing, who once came to visit him at East Woods Temple. The three spent a long afternoon engaged in lively conversation. Their famous friendship symbolizes how the three Chinese teachings of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism should live in harmony. As a monk that had “left the world,” Huiyuan had vowed to not leave the monastery, never crossing the bridge that spanned a creek in front of the temple. As his friends were leaving, Huiyuan accompanied them to the front gate, seeing them off in the Chinese fashion. The legend relates that the trio began to cross the bridge that passes over the creek when suddenly a tiger roared from the nearby woods, as if warning Huiyuan not to venture any further and thus violate his world-leaving vow. The three friends all laughed in surprised delight, and the saying “Tiger Creek three laughs” was thereafter remembered and depicted in Chinese folklore and art.

  The teachings of East Wood Temple’s Pure Land sect, the same teachings cited by the young monk I talked to at Baizhang Temple, remain popular in China and elsewhere and provide a way for people in distress to find solace in religious practice. Many years ago I visited a Chinese nunnery whose inhabitants followed Pure Land teachings. The abbess, a young Chinese woman of about thirty years old, greeted me and my friend and travel business associate Eric Lu warmly, inviting us to have tea. “So, the women here practice Pure Land Buddhism?” I said to her to start the conversation. Her reply surprised me. “Yes,” she said, “but of course there is really no such thing as a ‘Pure Land.’ We’re all going to the same place. That place is enlightenment. There are just different ways to get there. It’s like taking a trip to Shanghai. Some people will take a train, and other people can take an airplane.” Most of the women who lived in the temple, she explained, came from situations of abuse or abandonment and had established a new and happier life in the monastic setting. I was struck by the dignity and poise of the young woman’s manner, apparently the result of dedicated practice and dedication to her charges. Later, when I viewed a group photo that we had taken, I was shocked to realize she was extremely short, maybe four foot nine. Her upright poise had left me with the impression she was quite tall.

  After being ravaged by the Cultural Revolution, East Woods Temple sat dormant and empty for many years, waiting for political conditions to allow it to be reopened and refurbished. Like other temples, its statues and other valuables were smashed by the Red Guards, the fanatics that attacked China’s cultural treasures in a spasm of violence and bloodshed during the late 1960s. Westerners don’t widely understand the reasons for the Cultural Revolution, often thinking that it was an ideological struggle where Marxism was carried to extremes in its repudiation of religion and traditional culture. The truth is a little more subtle and interesting. The Cultural Revolution was much about Mao Zedong’s attempt to continue holding power when others in the Communist Party felt he should step aside. The Red Guards were not members of the Communist Party. They were youths who, at Mao’s urging, decided that the Communist Party was too conservative. Mao famously called on the youth of China to “bombard the headquarters,” meaning the Communist Party itself, and overthrow the officials that threatened Mao’s position. In the resulting insanity, which was intense for three years and disrupted the society for another decade, life was turned on its head as countless factions were created, aligned, and dissolved, all laying claim to revolutionary purity, the disparate groups fighting with each other throughout the country.

  When I first visited mainland China in 1978, ten years after the worst days of the Cultural Revolution, no revival of religious culture was yet evident. It was not until a visit to the country in 1982 that I saw religion making a hesitant reappearance. That year I visited the recently reopened and well-known Yong He Temple in the northeast part of Beijing. In the back hall, where a colossal standing statue of the Buddhist bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara is situated, a very elderly woman was prostrating herself repeatedly on some dusty old cushions before the statue. As surprising as this brave display of religious devotion was, the reaction of bystanders was more interesting. In stunned silence a large crowd gathered around the woman, watching her intently as she kowtowed in front of the statue. The surprise on people’s faces betrayed the fear haunting religious expression at that time. Happily, before long, such outward displays of faith became very common, and soon a large number of important religious sites were being rebuilt and reopened.

  During my earlier China trip in 1978, the country’s reforms under Deng Xiaoping had not yet begun, and normalization of relations with the United States was just in the offing. I saw the country just after the steely grip of the Cultural Revolution around the country’s neck began to falter, letting in a little gasp of air. The miserable conditions under which most people were existing at that time were obfuscated by political rhetoric about the then current “great leader” Chairman Hua Guofeng and the “joy of the people due to the smashing of the ‘Gang of Four.’”

  Then, like now, there was an uneasy relationship between the cen
tral government and local officials. At that time, local officials seemed nervous about anyone who came to visit from Beijing. As a member of a “U.S.-China People’s Friendship Association” tour, we were accompanied throughout the country by Beijing guides. These guides appeared well-educated, spoke good English, and often offered bemused “read between the lines” interpretations of many things we saw in the country. It took little effort to see evidence of the hardships that people endured. One guide suffered from chronic headaches that resulted from her persecution during political struggles. The other guide, an admitted Communist Party member, actually seemed very sophisticated. You might even describe him as “suave,” with a nice-fitting Mao jacket and sunglasses. He clearly had personal ideas about how China had gone haywire.

  I remember how local officials, most of them unable to speak English, were uneasy when they came into contact with these central government guides. To a person, they never deviated from parroting the official line on the current political situation, saying things like “since the smashing of the Gang of Four, production has increased by threefold blah blah blah ...” We all understood that the “smashing of the Gang of Four” meant “since the end of the Cultural Revolution.” At that time the “Gang of Four,” a group close to Mao that was denounced after his death, was an acceptable target for criticism. But the Cultural Revolution was not directly denounced openly by name (a phenomenon that still lingers in China). People then were still trying to pretend that the impressive-sounding “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” was something other than a disaster. China groped for a face-saving way to deal with its aftermath. In this atmosphere, our questions concerning the real situation in China were deflected as skillfully as a kong fu fighter slips a blow. Local guides avoided meaningful conversation. I remember a guide in Guilin, the famous scenic city on the Li River, talking about the banal expressions Chinese use in everyday speech. “When Chinese people arrive somewhere, we say, ‘Daole’ [‘We’ve arrived’].” Then he would laugh at his own weak joke. This was about the deepest thing I remember him saying to us.

  A gruesome parroting of the then prevailing political line extended to a kindergarten we visited. I recall a group of five- or six-year-olds greeting us warmly with expressions of “Shushu, Aiyi, huanying!” (“Welcome, Uncles and Aunts!”) and then performing skits where the boys happily brandished toy weapons to shoot the heads off of Gang of Four puppets that had been bound and subdued by the girls. To Western liberal sensitivities, recently affected by the violence of the Vietnam War and the nonviolent philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr., viewing kindergarteners act out a pageant of political violence was rather startling, to say the least. When they finished their bloody little skit, they warmly sent us off with chants of “Shushu, Aiyi, zaijian!” (“Uncles and Aunts, good-bye!”).

  Another astonishing example of the fear that our central government guides instilled in the locals occurred at a hospital we visited in Shanghai. Some of the propaganda coming from China in those times centered on the use of acupuncture and its applications in therapy. To witness this medical marvel, our tour group was led into an operating theatre in a hospital to witness the use of acupuncture as an anesthesia for serious surgery.

  Apparently the hospital was originally built by Westerners and was used for education, because the operating room was a theatre where students could sit and observe surgeries. We all donned operating masks and entered the darkened theatre under poor lighting. Little did we know how accurately the term operating theatre matched reality.

  The operating table looked like a long-overused model from the 1930s, left from when Western medicine was predominant in the hospital. Besides that and one other small table that held some instruments and acupuncture needles, there was no other furniture, not even a drug cabinet. Two buckets sat on the floor as receptacles for refuse, and there was little else. When we entered, the patient was already on the operating table, fully conscious. The guides explained that she was about to have a thyroid operation. Whether her thyroid would be removed, or perhaps have some growth excised, was not explained.

  Two female nurses had erected a small stand and tiny curtain over the woman’s chin. This kept her from seeing the operation that was about to be performed at the base of her neck. Then a surgeon entered with a man who seemed to be a male nurse or assistant. He picked up some acupuncture needles from the table and began applying them to some that already protruded from the woman’s neck, arm, and legs. After a short time, with the woman fully conscious and her eyes wide open, the physician made an incision at the base of her neck. As he did this, a nurse placed pieces of a mandarin orange in the woman’s mouth, demonstrating that she not only was not feeling any pain from the incision, but also that she was capable of enjoying a fruit snack while they operated on her. The medical miracle of acupuncture notwithstanding, the patient looked distinctly nervous.

  After making the initial incision, the doctor paused and spoke some words with the other man, as though giving him instructions. The man removed some bloody gauze from the area of the incision, putting it in one of the buckets. Both men then stood quietly, occasionally muttering a few words we could not hear. After a few minutes, the doctor left the room, and the orderly appeared to be looking at something in the bucket. The woman receiving the operation remained dutifully conscious, eating an occasional piece of fruit placed in her month by an attending nurse.

  Oddly, nothing happened for several minutes. The orderly would shuffle back and forth along the operating table, first looking at the incision on the woman, then talking to the nurse about something or other, then putting a bloody piece of gauze in the bucket. This went on for what seemed a very long time. Occasionally, the man would look up into the theatre where we were sitting and then look down again. For some reason, after making the initial incision, which was not very large, the procedure stopped and nothing more happened for perhaps a total of ten minutes or so. We didn’t know what the hell was going on.

  All at once one of the guides jumped up from her seat and said, “It’s time to go. We are late for our next place!” She jumped out of her seat so fast that it startled me, and in a few moments we were all up and filing out of the operating theatre into the hall of the hospital.

  Oddly, after beating such a hasty retreat from the operating room, we walked only a short distance before the guide told us to wait. She disappeared for several minutes, apparently arranging for us to enter the children’s ward, where we were directed next. Nothing seemed to urgently require our attendance. When we finally entered the children’s wing, it didn’t appear that anyone was particularly expecting us. Everything seemed quite normal and relaxed.

  It took me a year or so for me to finally realize what had happened in the operating theatre. It appears that perhaps the visiting Beijing guides suggested to the hospital that the foreigners see acupuncture being used as an anesthetic, and the doctors simply faked an operation for us. After making a superficial incision, the doctor was clearly biding his time for ten or fifteen minutes while waiting for us so to leave so he could sew up the unfortunate “patient.” Somehow, the message that the group should leave immediately after the first incision did not get communicated clearly to the guides, and as a result we watched the doctor depart after the first cut and then the orderly do his best to stall, stall, stall, not inflicting any more cuts on the “patient” before we got out of there. When it finally dawned on our guide what was happening, she shooed us out so fast you’d have thought the building was on fire, but then we just dawdled for the next half hour or so, visiting a nursery that didn’t know we were coming. China in 1978 was straddling two eras. It was about to embark on an era of important reform. But some attitudes of the earlier era, like fear of high officials, was very pervasive at that time, and I’m sorry to say it is still lurking around today.

  When I visited East Woods Temple on a recent trip to China, I tried to inquire about any connection between the place and Bodhidharma. One person in the tem
ple bookstore seemed unclear about who Bodhidharma was, and the only available monk seemed disinterested in the whole topic. As important as East Woods Temple was in Chinese history, it appears that any connection between that place and Bodhidharma today remains only in a few books. Still, I think he was there.

  19. Jiujiang City

  Old Shakyamuni had four great vows. He said,

  “Though the many beings are uncountable, I vow to save them;

  Though delusions rise without end, I vow to end them;

  Though Dharma Gates are limitless, I vow to study them;

  Though Buddha’s way is inconceivable, I vow to embody it.”

  But as for me, I have my own four great vows. They are

  “When I get hungry, I have something to eat; When the weather

  is cold, I put on more clothes; When I get tired, I lie down and

  take a nap; When it’s warm, I look for a cool breeze.”

  —Zen Master Baiyum (“White Cloud,” active 1025—1072 CE) of Nengren Temple in Jiujiang City, addressing the monks in the Dharma Hall

  THE YOUNG MAN who has just boarded the bus to Jiujiang and sat down next to me looks at me expectantly and says, “You’re the first foreigner I’ve ever spoken to.” When he saw me sitting here, he knew it was his lucky day. Millions of Chinese are busily learning English without any native English speakers to talk to.

  For the next hour or so during our trip to Jiujiang, I give English instruction to a twenty-year-old Chinese man trying to make his way in the crowded world.

  “Yes, I am studying at Jiujiang Technical Institute. There I study international business, management, and marketing. I like American NBA basketball. Do you know my favorite team?”

  “Is it the Houston Rockets?” I venture.

  “Yes!” For someone who has never spoken to a foreigner, his English is surprisingly good. And of course, like many young Chinese, he loves NBA basketball and is devoted to the Houston Rockets, meaning he’s a fan of the famous Chinese NBA basketball player Yao Ming. “I want to have a job in international business,” he says.