Tracking Bodhidharma

by Andy Ferguson

  Meanwhile, a man named Xiao Yan, the aristocratic military governor in the distant city of Xiangyang, watched developments warily. As an official appointed as a result of his connections and distant blood relationship with the crown, he had long loyally served former Qi emperors. But he knew the situation the country now faced was indeed dangerous. The civil chaos and rebellion that wracked the country since Baojuan began his campaign of terror was threatening on many levels. Besides blanketing the country in a treacherous state of fear, it could open the door to invasion by the rival Wei dynasty of Emperor Xiao Wen that ruled North China. The Wei dynasty, ruled not by Chinese but “foreign” peoples called the Tuoba, was considered a barbarian state and must not be allowed to conquer all of China.

  In years prior, as a young official climbing the imperial ranks, Xiao Yan was a close friend of a royal Qi dynasty prince who ruled as king of a prefecture called Jingling. Xiao Yan and seven other literary-minded aristocrats met with the king to share literature and talk philosophy, practicing the then fashionable pastime of qing tan (pronounced ching tan), meaning “pure conversation.” The king often invited eminent Buddhist monks to lecture to the group, and Xiao Yan became deeply familiar with Buddhist thought.

  When the Emperor Baojuan seized power and started his crimes, Xiao Yan was already famous as a military commander for his actions against the Wei dynasty. A brilliant battlefield tactician, he had routed an enemy force with a surprise night attack by creating the illusion of having a large military force.

  Xiao Yan’s older brother, Xiao Yi, was a high-ranking military general who commanded forces loyal to the Qi throne. As the situation with the murderous boy emperor went from bad to worse, Xiao Yan tried to get his brother to join him against the youth on the throne, but his brother would have none of it, clinging instead to the ideal of Confucian loyalty to one’s sovereign. Xiao Yi refused to turn against the dynasty he had long served, so Xiao Yan, failing to persuade his older brother, quietly found other allies and secretly laid aside stores of war materials.

  Finally, events took a momentous turn. Xiao Yan’s brother Xiao Yi led a royalist counterattack that crushed the second rebellion against the throne. When the Tai Cheng Palace in Nanjing was surrounded by rebels, Xiao Yi crossed the Qin Huai River from the south in a lightning strike, routing the rebels’ perimeter defense, then killing or scattering insurgent fighters who had besieged the palace. This brilliant military victory should have earned Xiao Yi a lifetime of honors, but this was not to be. Within a month the emperor’s corrupt courtiers and eunuch allies, who dreaded Xiao Yi’s sudden status and power, trumped up empty charges of disloyalty against him. They convinced Baojuan that Xiao Yi coveted the throne, leading the boy to treacherously execute his military commander for treason.

  Upon hearing of the execution of his brother, Xiao Yan marshaled his secret allies and declared a new rebellion. Using stores of timber, he fortified warships he had secretly built in estuaries of the Han River near Xiangyang, then launched his forces downstream on that waterway, a tributary of the Yang-tse that would carry his forces to Nanjing.

  After more than a year of battles and a brilliant campaign, Xiao Yan’s forces arrived at the banks of the Huai Qin River, southeast of the city. That place, named New Woods, was where the bulk of the force defending the capital lay awaiting his arrival. In a brilliant flanking movement, Xiao Yan routed the city’s defenders at this spot, then marched on the capital itself to lay siege to the imperial palace and its young emperor, who even now continued to believe that his protector deity would rescue him.

  Xiao Yan established his command post at the spot called Stone Fortress, on a string of hills west of the city, then laid siege to the enemy force that still defended the Tai Cheng Palace. All the while the young emperor inside continued to make merry, believing himself divinely protected. Xiao Yan’s headquarters at Stone Fortress gave the benighted people of the city hope, providing the siege an air of inevitable success as time went on. The population waited anxiously for Xiao Yan’s final victory.

  At last the siege and war had its intended effect, for two generals who were defending the palace and its mad prince turned against the boy and capitulated. Baojuan was still partying when a soldier ran into his palace to chase him down. The boy ran out a back door of his musk hall (a room saturated with male deer musk, said to enhance virility) trying to escape. He tripped and fell and was overtaken by the soldier. One story describes him as arrogant and defiant to the end, saying to his assailant, “What is this then? A rebellion?” The soldier and others who ran to the scene then stabbed the defiant emperor to death.

  Upon the death of Baojuan, it fell to Xiao Yan to dispose of his property, including his substantial number of concubines. Records indicate that he selected certain of the women to be his own consorts, but Jade Slave did not appear among the survivors. One account says that Xiao Yan wished to keep this country-toppling beauty for his own, but his subcommanders demanded the death of a woman associated with so much murder and misery. Reluctantly, Xiao Yan sentenced her to die by the executioner’s sword.

  Xiao Yan, who would soon become Emperor Wu, demonstrated the strange convergence of Buddhist sensibilities and marshal prowess that ran through Chinese ruling circles. Devotion to Buddhism and the tools of war and intrigue required to seize and maintain the throne might seem contradictory, to say the least. But in this Xiao Yan was typical, not exceptional. Like other emperors before and after him, he paid homage to Buddhist ideals while manipulating every means necessary to seize and retain power. But he would carry this fusion of Buddhism and state power to a level previously unseen in Chinese history. This transformation would proceed further than those gone before due mainly to Xiao Yan’s skillful fusion of Buddhist and Confucian ideals, especially the literature and rituals of these two seemingly contradictory philosophies.

  After Baojuan’s death, Xiao Yan secured the imperial throne by methodically eliminating, mainly through execution, all the brothers and other male family members of the deposed boy monarch who might try to reestablish the vanquished dynasty. Thereafter, Xiao Yan, who would be known as Emperor Wu, ruled continuously for forty-seven years, an unusually long imperial reign in China’s long history.

  25. Tianchang City and Bodhidharma’s True Victory Temple

  ERIC AND I LEAVE OUR Nanjing hotel on Huangpu Road and take a taxi to a small bus station that offers routes to nearby cities. The air is bad. Low fog fuses with the stagnant haze to reduce visibility to a few hundred feet and is a tangible presence on the nostrils and tongue. After a taxi ride through the morning gloom, we arrive at a bus station and soon await a bus to Tianchang (the name means “Long Sky”). Other waiting passengers sit with us on bright red plastic seats beneath prominent signs put up by the bus company to guide employee and public behavior. One surprisingly detailed sign says FIX THE ROAD, FIX MORAL VIRTUE, BUILD A BRIDGE, BUILD WEALTH, DO THINGS PEACEFULLY, CREATE NEW ENTERPRISES. Other such signs exhort people to all other manners of country-building activities. I wonder how much longer the Chinese people, who are intelligent, creative, and perceptive, will put up with patronizing slogans. Just then a bus driver yells into the building so sharply that Eric and I both nearly jump out of our seats. Then we realize he’s just making the last call for a bus that’s departing. The driver must have inspired the “do things peacefully” part of the wall propaganda.

  China has long recorded its history in official records. Each emperor had archival and court historians. But a separate type of historical record was kept in local provinces and prefectures concerned solely with local affairs. These local records are called difang zhi (pronounced dee-fong jer), meaning “area record” or “gazette.” What remains of these old records, and they are numerous, offer a wealth of detail about events and life in old China.

  A paper by a Chinese scholar uncovered just such an old record that says that a temple once existed in a place called Tianchang County, a temple established by Bodhidharma. According to th
e record, a temple named True Victory Temple was built in the second year of the Putong era (the year 522), a time when Emperor Wu’s Imperial-Way Buddhism was in full flower. However, the scholarly paper says the record comes from the Qing dynasty (1644—1911). This is a late record in the scheme of things. However, it is interesting because it doesn’t follow the “official story” of Bodhidharma that was developed earlier. Instead of saying he arrived in China in 527, it indicates he was already in China before that time, and so it agrees time-wise with the more reliable record of his life found in the Continued Biographies. This is worth investigating. Another compelling facet to this story is that the place in question, Tianchang, is about sixty miles north of Nanjing. This places Bodhidharma in the general area of Nanjing during the time when Emperor Wu was in power.

  After first reading about this old record, I spent three years searching for clues about whether anything might be left of the old temple to which it refers. No “True Victory Temple” is listed among the famous temples of the era in question. Nor is there any record of the temple in general Zen literature. Finally I stumbled across a document online that is published by the Tianchang City government. It says that an old well still remains from the old temple and the well is located on Liuli Street in Tianchang. This is the place Eric and I have set out to find today.

  The buses at this terminal in Nanjing are not full-size long-haul coaches, but smaller vehicles for short service routes. I notice one that is decorated with the words VENICE TOUR BUS on its side.

  Soon, a door opens under a sign that says TIANCHANG, and we board and take our assigned seats. Presently the driver edges us into the Nanjing traffic jam, and we press our way toward the Yang-tse River Bridge that will lead us to the north side of the river and on to our destination.

  The Yang-tse River Bridge was constructed in 1968, during the heyday of revolutionary fervor in China. At that time China had quit its revolutionary alliance with the Soviet Union and the latter had withdrawn all its technical advisors. The construction of the Yang-tse River Bridge by Chinese engineers was a great symbolic victory meant to show that China could, through “self-reliance,” achieve greatness in feats of engineering without outside assistance. The “self-reliance” idea evolved into a political slogan that spread into every part of Chinese society, often with absurd consequences. Even in times of natural disasters, the “self-reliance” motto reigned, resulting in serious hardships for people needing assistance. This movement helped isolate China’s people from each other and the world. When the reforms of 1978 started the process of “opening,” years of “self-reliance” had spawned political provincialism and competition between localities, a situation whose effects continue in China today.

  But in 1968 the great Nanjing River Bridge symbolized a triumph of modernism, with two lanes running in each direction, a bus stop in the middle, and formulaic statues of revolutionary heroes portrayed as building the New China. Unfortunately the bridge builders did not foresee a China where private autos and trucks would jam the highways, making the four-lane bridge far too narrow to handle a modern city’s traffic flow.

  The final block before the bridge takes about ten minutes to navigate, with every vehicle jostling for each inch of competitive position. At last our bus makes it onto the span, and we move fairly steadily toward the Yang-tse’s distant shore. After another fifteen minutes, we are moving steadily along a multilane highway through a large residential and industrial district called Liu He, or “Six Harmonies.” The name comes from an old mountain there and is based on some Taoist philosophy. I know this is where Bodhidharma is said to have come ashore after he crossed the Yang-tse on a “single blade of grass.” It will be part of later explorations.

  As our bus exits a cloverleaf interchange to get on a major thruway, traffic comes to a dead stop. The long line of trucks filling both lanes in front of us doesn’t look good. Our driver lights a cigarette and hops out to check out the situation. I see him make his way forward through the traffic and he disappears for several minutes. After a time he returns, starts the engine, and somehow manages to turn our bus around and head back the opposite direction in the oncoming lanes of the turnpike we just entered. I clutch the edges of my seat hoping that some large trucks don’t appear around the corner as we proceed the wrong way on the highway. Luckily, no vehicles that can’t get out of our way appear, and the driver soon crosses the divider to ultimately end up on an exit ramp that leads to some side roads. For the next half hour or so we get an unscheduled tour of the back roads of Six Harmonies, bouncing through potholed pavement next to assorted construction sites and industrial facilities. At last we emerge back onto the turnpike we exited farther south. Traffic going our way now seems normal, and I wonder if the detour was worth it.

  Tianchang is another one of the typical Chinese cities with a population of six or seven hundred thousand people that the outside world has never heard of. We get off the bus at the downtown station and start looking for a place to eat lunch before we proceed with our expedition. After a fruitless search up and down a couple of streets, we stumble into a new, fast-food-sort of franchise place with a Korean name. Oddly, a Korean fast-food restaurant has apparently beaten out McDonald’s to set up shop in this big city. We order some items, and while we’re eating the young man who owns the restaurant engages us in conversation, curious about the rare foreigner. We explain we’re looking for the site of an old temple said to have once existed in the city, and we think now there is only a well remaining where it once stood. We want to find out more information about it. The young man, whose name is Huang, says he knows the spot, and furthermore he tells us his old classmate is the editor of the local difang zhi. If we want to find out anything from the old records, he can make an introduction for us. Guangxi (relationships) like Mr. Huang’s are the lifeblood of Chinese society.

  So after lunch Mr. Huang accompanies us in a taxi to the seat of local government where we intend to find the difang zhi bureau. We arrive to find a very colossal set of government office buildings, their polished granite reflecting the morning sun. The big buildings also reflect a strange thing that lingers all over China. The imperial mindset of government officials leads them to spend a big chunk of the people’s money on grandiose government office buildings, the better to show off government authority. Tianchang is almost unknown in the wider scheme of the world, but the building directory indicates it has a foreign-trade bureau, an external cultural-affairs office, and other huge bureaucratic wings of a city administration that doesn’t like to skimp on itself. The wide cement plaza in front of the main high-rise of this bureaucratic Disneyland is a few hundred meters across, decorated with an immense metal globe of the world at its center. On many occasions I’ve heard Chinese people swear under their breath at the vast sums spent to enhance the government’s stature. Tianchang offers an egregious example of this phenomenon.

  But when we peruse the big building directory that indicates the presence of almost every manner of government bureau, the difang zhi, where local historical records would be kept, is nowhere to be found. After numerous inquiries with different desks, Mr. Huang informs us that the difang zhi was never transferred here when the new buildings were built and remains at its old location a few blocks from his restaurant where we ate lunch.

  Not long after, we exit our taxi in front of an alley in the center of the city. Mr. Huang leads us past some buildings into a parking lot where some workers are enjoying their afternoon break, dancing to some pop rhythms played on a CD player. A little farther on we reach the old difang zhi office. Mr. Huang had gotten the telephone number of the place, and so his former classmate, a woman named Chu, meets us at the door and invites us in.

  Once in her office, I explain to Ms. Chu what we’re doing. I tell her that there is a gap in the record of Bodhidharma’s life in China. After the year 494 there is no clear record of where he lived or taught until he died, presumably around the year 530. I’m looking for hard evidence that Bodhi
dharma spent at least part of this time in the Nanjing area. While several places in the area claim a connection with the old sage, they offer no unimpeachable evidence. The myths and supernatural events that accompany some accounts make them implausible. Certain other stories are clearly false since they associate Bodhidharma with temples that didn’t come into being until later times. However, the story of True Victory Temple is different. The local difang zhi (historical records) provide the date of the temple’s construction and connect it directly with Bodhidharma. Difang zhi are widely considered reliable because they are not “histories” but simply local records of events, untainted by politics and myth. So this place, almost unknown in China and the West, may truly be where Bodhidharma established a Dharma seat and expounded his Zen teachings in China.

  Ms. Chu listens to the story for some time before commenting. When she does, she seems very accepting that the version of events I’ve put forth may have merit. She explains that in ancient times Tianchang was a well-populated, relatively rich agricultural area that was a crossroads between North and South China. Its feng shui, with “mountains behind and rivers in front” conformed to ancient ideas of an ideal habitat.

  Then, while we wait, Ms. Chu retrieves the story of the temple in question from the local electronic records. Soon she comes up with the description: “Our records of this temple come from the Jia Qing era of the Ming dynasty [circa 1480],” she says. That record refers to even earlier records from the Ming dynasty (circa 1380) that say that True Victory Temple was constructed in the second year of the Putong era (522) by Bodhidharma, and its name was later changed to Liuli Temple. (Liuli means “glazed tile” and is also an old word for colored glass). Ms. Chu is particularly adamant that because the records are difang zhi, they would not have been fabricated without any basis. Indeed, even skeptical Western scholars regard China’s difang zhi as dependable. They were simply records, not propaganda created to extol historic events, legendary or otherwise.