Tracking Bodhidharma

by Andy Ferguson

  Sengfu wished to travel to Min [Sichuan] to visit Mount Emei [a famous scenic mountain that is the legendary home of the Bodhisattva Samantabhadra]. He met with Xiao Yuan-zhao [elder brother of Emperor Wu and the governor of Sichuan] and traveled to Sichuan. There he traveled widely to wherever he pleased, but though the road was difficult, he never forgot the “Three practices” [of Zen Buddhism, namely perception, meditation, practice], [and he] did not promote scriptural teachings. Only holding this [Zen teaching] did he pass his days and nights there. [In this way] Zen teachings flourished in Sichuan. After a long time [Sengfu] returned to Jinling [Nanjing], where he again lived at Kaishan Temple

  ... Soon afterward [Sengfu] died at Kaishan Temple. He was sixty-one years old. The date was the fifth year of the Putong era [524]. He was buried in front of the main gate of Lower Dinglin Temple. The Emperor [Wu] mourned him and submitted gifts [to the temple to honor him]. At the time [Sengfu] became ill, there were some who urged him to take expensive treatments. [But] Sengfu propped himself up [on his deathbed] and firmly said, “Prolonging one’s life through expensive means is far from the Way! Anything left in my room should be distributed to the monks. After I die my body should be discarded in a mountain valley. Isn’t it best that it provide food to birds and beasts? Don’t make a fancy coffin for carrying my body.” But his disciples wept and could not bear to follow [his instructions]. A memorial was carved [in stone] to commemorate his virtue. Princess Yong Xing [Emperor Wu’s oldest daughter] proclaimed acceptance of Buddhist vows in a public ceremony honoring Sengfu. She asked the Crown Prince [Zhao Ming] to compose [the words of the memorial].

  He ordered King Xiangdong [a relative to Emperor Wu] to make the monument. It was erected at the temple.

  It’s fascinating that while so much attention is traditionally paid to the meeting of Emperor Wu and Bodhidharma, the relationship between the emperor and Bodhidharma’s oldest disciple, reliably recorded above, is hardly known in Zen circles. Why is this so? No doubt it’s because this old record directly contradicts the official Bodhidharma story derived from later literature and passed down through generations until today. The biography quoted above is an early (circa 650 CE) and relatively impartial account of Sengfu’s life that connects him with Bodhidharma in the “cliffs and caves” of the Luoyang area about forty years (about 487—489) before the official Bodhidharma story says the latter arrived in China (in 527). But the Sengfu biography agrees time-wise with Bodhidharma’s story in the same book, enhancing the reliability of each account. Sengfu’s story also suggests that Bodhidharma had a wide reputation as a teacher, as Sengfu must have received such honor from Emperor Wu at least partly through his association with his teacher. By locating Bodhidharma in the mountains near Luoyang at the time in question, it suggests the possibility that Bodhidharma occupied his cave on Mount Song even before Shaolin Temple was formally established there by the Northern Wei dynasty emperor around the year 496. Perhaps it was Sengfu, not Bodhidharma’s more famous disciple Huike, that originally sought out Bodhidharma in his cave (more on this later). Its location on Mount Song, long China’s sacred central mountain, would have been a natural place for a missionary monk to live and practice, with Buddhist and Taoist temples already occupying its many slopes and valleys.

  As I ride the cable car, I can see the general area where Lower Dinglin Temple, Sengfu’s first residence, sat on Bell Mountain’s slopes. The exact site of that temple remains unexplored, and prospects for digging there remain uncertain because it currently sits on a closed military reserve. Another temple site within my field of vision, close to Lower Samadhi Temple, was Kaishan Temple, the place referred to in Sengfu’s biography as where Emperor Wu cajoled Sengfu to come and live. Kaishan was an especially important temple in Emperor Wu’s world. There the emperor invited his most eminent house monks to reside. Thus it is very noteworthy that Emperor Wu prepared a place at that temple for Bodhidharma’s oldest disciple, and that Sengfu did in fact spend many years of his life there. Given this scenario, it seems unlikely that Emperor Wu did not know of Sengfu’s teacher, Bodhidharma, and would not have invited him to present himself at the court if this were possible.

  As I look down from the cable car, the big question posed by Sengfu’s biography is obvious. If Sengfu died in 524 and spent a good portion of the previous thirty years living on the slopes of Bell Mountain, why did he never, even once, respond to invitations to visit Emperor Wu’s court? I can see both temple locations and the place where the palace once stood quite easily from my perch in the cable car. Why did Sengfu’s devotion to the “way of the ancients” keep him from even once visiting the most famous center of Buddhist activity of his age, along with its “Bodhisattva Emperor,” brilliant Buddhist crown prince, and its rich collection of Buddhist scriptures and other texts? All these things were only a short walk from his longtime home!

  Our gondola finally reaches the top of the mountain and my corider happily joins his waiting friends. I look around the mountaintop and quickly realize that nothing appears to remain of Emperor Wu’s grand Love and Honor Temple project except massive boulders, jumbled rocks, and scrubby trees. One could never guess what stood here once. But while the mountaintop itself has little to offer related to its ancient fame, the view in every direction is beautifully expansive. It’s clear today, and the vista covers hundreds of square miles, encompassing most of Nanjing and every other direction.

  The peak has a lot of uneven ground. It’s hard to imagine that about fifteen hundred years ago a huge monastery occupied this place where there is now so little flat area. The mountain seems to have only a small crown and the slopes around it are steep. But records indicate the monastery here in the year 510 CE housed more than one thousand monks and covered two hundred acres. Descriptions tell of scores of large and small halls and pavilions, with many monuments and stupas tucked in the mountain’s crevices. The place reportedly had grand dining and ceremonial halls. A passage describes the temple perched on the high mountain to appear “like heaven itself.” The temple’s basic completion required nine years, plus several more years to finish auxiliary structures like a famous seven-story pagoda. The number of people needed just to carry the building materials up the high mountain must have been enormous. And that was just the beginning. Maintaining a thousand monks high in the clouds was no small logistical feat. Somehow the temple’s Buddha statues, recorded to be fifty feet tall, had to be brought up here and either propped up or assembled. Now what remains of the entire colossal undertaking is nothing but rocky landscape. All things, say Buddhism, arise and pass away due to causes and conditions. Apparently there’s been a lot of erosive conditions on this mountain during the past fifteen hundred years.

  While this was Emperor Wu’s most ambitious temple project, it was far from being the only big one. During his forty-seven-year reign he built roughly ten new Buddhist temples every year. Hundreds of temples already existed in his empire from previous centuries, but the scope and speed of construction and renovation under Emperor Wu was unprecedented. The sums spent on buildings and grand Buddha icons evoked intense criticism from later Chinese historians.

  30. Mufu Mountains and Bodhidharma’s Nanjing Cave

  IT’S ANOTHER COLD November morning in Nanjing. A recent cold snap dropped temperatures all over North China by twenty-five degrees almost overnight. The inch or so of the snow that fell last night heralds colder days ahead. I wait until things warm a bit then leave my hotel on Huangpu Road, east of where Emperor Wu’s palace once stood, and walk north, then turn to walk west along Zhujiang (“Pearl River”) Road. After a short distance I cross the bridge over Clear Creek, a waterway that once ran around the northeast perimeter of Emperor Wu’s palace, and continue west on a small street comprised mainly of small eateries. Here is where the north protective ramparts of the palace once stood. A row of pastry shops, laundries, real estate offices, and sundry kiosks line the small road where battlements presided over siege armies.

  I turn
right and cross another bridge above Clear Creek then continue west along its opposite shore beneath some tall buildings. Around here is where construction crews reportedly uncovered some Liang dynasty ruins while they were doing work in 2006. Workmen uncovered the remains of old posts and other detritus about two meters deep. Experts claimed they were remains from Tongtai Temple. This was the temple where Emperor Wu lived each time he renounced the throne. Legends are not unanimous about whether Emperor Wu met Bodhidharma here at the temple location or at the Flowered Woods Garden within the rear of the palace walls, likely just to the south of where I am.

  Emerging from the walkway along the creek onto Peace Avenue, I hail a cab. I tell the driver I want to go to the Mufu Mountains, the low mountains that follow the Yang-tse River around the north side of Nanjing. He asks for a more specific location, but I’m at a loss to know exactly what to tell him. My map shows a spot called Labor Mountain in the midst of the Mufu Mountains, so I point at that. He nods, and after a ten-minute ride I emerge from the cab on a broad street, separated from the Mufu Mountains by new apartment construction. “I can’t get any closer,” the driver says. I pay him and walk up a lane through the developments, trying to find my way to a foot trail that the map indicates leads through the scrub forest on the hills’ slopes. As I walk back and forth at the end of the street, someone helpfully points me toward a trailhead, and I make my way up the steep grade. Along the hill are trails and small roads that appear ideal for hikers. At the top of the first hill I encounter a broad, impressive vista of the Yang-tse River flowing along the far side of the high ground; a score or more of barges and ships are navigating the river in each direction. Upriver I can see the Nanjing Bridge about four miles away. Acacia and low-lying pines line more trails that lead through low peaks to my right. In Chinese these hills are called mountains, and I suppose that in English a better word to describe them would be bluffs or palisades. On the river side of the hills their bare white rocks plunge steeply to the Yang-tse’s shore. The jagged, white dolomite exposed in the cliff faces and outcroppings is the source of one ancient name for Nanjing, Baixia, a name that means “Beneath the White.”

  These bluffs and shores have witnessed some momentous events. When Zheng He, China’s famous world navigator who, it has been suggested, circumnavigated the world before Magellan did, tested his ships for ocean voyages, he did so on the Yang-tse backwater sloughs that lie opposite these hills. From my vantage point I can see where he prepared and tested his famous five-hundred-foot-long ships.

  In Bodhidharma’s story, here is where he reportedly crossed the Yang-tse River standing on a “single blade of grass.”

  There are few other people on the hills today. I make my way along the trails to some high points overlooking the river and so get an ever-broader view of the place. For at least twenty-five centuries each of these small peaks has served as a military outpost, guarding Nanjing from military attacks. Everywhere beneath the low brush are broken rocks and shards, stuff from which ancient signal towers were constructed. Below, along the slopes facing the river, a few ghostly World War II—era pillboxes remind strollers of more recent tragic events.

  The Yang-tse is a true colossus among the world’s rivers. It drains a watershed immense enough to have a large number of its own species, like the Yang-tse dolphin. It is the world’s third-longest river after the Nile and Amazon and is probably the world’s greatest commercial waterway, for the number of ships and barges that can be seen at any point on the river is often startling. It’s a beautiful river to watch.

  From a high peak I look across the Yang-tse to the Liu He (“Six Harmonies”) district where Zen says Bodhidharma reached the far shore after crossing the river. Now, Six Harmonies has become a wide industrial zone dotted with chemical plants. Once the subject of poetry, the place now is marked by smokestacks and natural gas flares from refineries. But time is long. I wonder if a hundred years from now a wiser planet will restore the place to honor Bodhidharma instead of building new PVC plants to make feedstock for toy factories and plumbing pipes.

  I round a bend on the trail and come upon what at first seems to be some sort of homeless encampment. Then I notice that the tables and makeshift structures on the forested hillside are set under a very unusual rock formation that overhangs the place. The stone of the rock is gnarled, almost decorative, quite unlike the layered limestone in other parts of the Mufu hills. The position of this place, nestled away from the river’s exposure and under tall trees, gives it a measure of protection from the rain and wind. Under the rocky overhang I spy an elderly Chinese man dressed in the blue work tunic of a monk. He turns and smiles at me with a largely toothless grin and motions me to sit on one of many chairs set up near some tables in front of what appear to be two entrances into the rock overhang. The monk apparently lives here. The entrance’s makeshift doors of plastic and large wood branches lead into caves. Then I see the characters carved on the bluff between the two openings that say BODHIDHARMA’S CAVE. I sit down where the monk has indicated. He sits down across from me, smiling with a round, friendly face. I ask him about his story.

  Huiyuan (the name means “Wisdom Source” and sounds the same as the famous translator at East Woods Temple) took up residence here at Bodhidharma’s cave in 2002. He originally studied under a Buddhist master named Zhurong at Longchang Temple, not far from Nanjing. Longchang Temple is famous as a Precepts school temple, the same type of Buddhism practiced by Daoxuan, author of the Continued Biographies. There’s a resurgence of popularity for this Buddhist school in China. Longchang Temple is now the main temple of this Buddhist sect, and every year hundreds of people formally take the precepts there in grand ceremonies.

  Huiyuan and I exchange information. He’s happy to learn I’m from the United States, and before long I explain that I’m traveling through China looking for traces of Bodhidharma. Using an almost unintelligible local dialect, Huiyuan then starts relating Bodhidharma’s story, but the version he is telling me is an odd one. There’s an old text called the Bodhidharma Biography ( ) that dates from the late Tang or early Song period (around the years 900 to 1100). It’s widely known to be apocryphal (a fake record). Following that story, Huiyuan says that Bodhidharma “flew from India to China in two hours,” where he then met Emperor Wu. Emperor Wu didn’t understand Bodhidharma’s words, so Bodhidharma left. He also says that Bodhidharma then met the Second Ancestor Huike, who according to this account was teaching the Dharma somewhere in North China. Bodhidharma asked Huike where the Dharma was to be found in what he taught. This seemingly insulting question upset Huike, who responded by striking Bodhidharma in the face with his iron prayer beads, knocking out Bodhidharma’s two front teeth. Bodhidharma, magically knowing that if he spit out the teeth, China would experience a three-year drought, swallowed them instead. Bodhidharma then left Huike and traveled back to Nanjing, where he discovered this ideal cave, and he remained here sitting in meditation for a period of time. Emperor Wu, knowing that Bodhidharma was located near Nanjing, sent two people to get Bodhidharma and bring him back to his palace. However, when the two people got close to Bodhidharma as he sat on this mountain, two nearby mountains suddenly slammed together, closing off their path. Indeed, near the cave where Huiyuan, tells me this fantastical story sit two mountains that appear scissored together. Huiyuan points them out to me.