Tracking Bodhidharma

by Andy Ferguson

  The scriptures hide the Buddha realm,

  The source reaches its end, returning from light to what is nameless,

  When people hear it they reach the solitary stillness ...

  Overall, the tone of this poem and of his poem of the meeting at Kaishan Temple is similar. Moreover, the phrase “scriptures hide the Buddha realm” can be taken to mean that the speaker that day, whoever he was, counseled against relying on scriptures to understand the Dharma. This suggests a link to Zen’s mind teachings, the practice that relied on “just observing” and that avoided the metaphysics of the sutras.

  Connections between Bodhidharma’s memorials and the poetry of Zhao Ming and his younger brother do not prove that Zhao Ming composed even a portion of the memorials. But taken altogether, the first part of the memorials text and Zhao Ming’s poetry are suspiciously of the same flavor.

  Yet there is a major reason why the Zen tradition and many scholars will not accept that Zhao Ming could have composed any part of the memorial to Bodhidharma. That problem lies in the fact that the date given for Bodhidharma’s death that appears on the monuments, the fifth day of the twelfth (lunar) month of year 2 in the Datong era, or 536, occurred five years after Prince Zhao Ming himself is known to have died (531). This contradiction is found in some other old records.

  There is a text called the Baolin Biography, generally thought to have been composed around the year 801. The Baolin Biography agrees with the date offered on the Bodhidharma memorials for his death, yet the text also specifically claims that Bodhidharma’s memorials were composed by Crown Prince Zhao Ming. One or the other, or both, of these facts must be wrong.

  How can these confusing and contradictory accounts be reconciled? Remember that the Continued Biographies, the earliest datable account of Bodhidharma and his disciples’ lives, places his death sometime prior to 534, the time when Huike left Luoyang and traveled to the territory of the Eastern Wei dynasty. If that account is roughly accurate, and it is the best account we have regarding the times involved, then Bodhidharma’s death could have occurred as much as three years or so prior to Prince Zhao Ming’s death due to illness in 531. In that case, Zhao Ming could indeed have composed, or helped compose, a document memorializing Bodhidharma before his own untimely death in the year 531.

  The appearance of the phrase “Mind illuminates a dark room” in Prince Xiao Wang’s poem raises another possibility. That is that the memorial was composed not by Zhao Ming but by Xiao Wang, Emperor Wu’s second son. In that case, it may have been composed long after the death of both Bodhidharma and Zhao Ming. Xiao Wang lived until the year 551, even ascending the dynastic throne for a brief period under difficult circumstances two years before his own death.

  Could Jingjue or some other author of the steles have added the 536 date to an earlier text? And why would he do so? I believe there was a great deal of confusion about the precise date that Bodhidharma died. The Continued Biographies offers contradictory information on the year, and this confusion is revealed in later records.

  For whatever reason, the “official” story of Bodhidharma, the story that the steles provide as a cautionary tale, places his death in the year 536. Later accounts that say Bodhidharma arrived in China in 527 appear to be calculated by subtracting the nine years he reportedly spent meditating in a cave from the listed date of his death on the memorial steles, namely 536.

  What seems plausible, but not provable, is that Emperor Wu and the rest of his court met Bodhidharma on one or more occasions on or before the year 524. Bodhidharma and Huike both may have come to visit Bodhidharma’s ailing oldest disciple, Sengfu. Or they may have come to visit during the grand funeral described in Sengfu’s biography. Then, perhaps Bodhidharma at long last consented to give a talk at Kaishan Temple or even to the court at Tongtai Temple or Flowered Woods Garden. Upon Sengfu’s death, Emperor Wu’s oldest daughter, Princess Yong Xing, declared her allegiance to his teachings and petitioned the Crown Prince Zhao Ming to write his memorial. Could Xiao Wang, younger brother to the same crown prince, have already received the precepts from Sengfu or Bodhidharma at Tongtai Temple, thus honoring their ideal of not entering the actual palace that stood across the street from the temple’s front gate?

  And what if there was a meeting? What if Bodhidharma did in fact come to visit Sengfu from his little temple in Tianchang, sixty miles away? Perhaps Bodhidharma told the court that it was Huike, not Sengfu, who really understood his teaching. Then, to avoid their new celebrity, Bodhidharma and Huike left the area and returned to the north either on foot or by sailing up the Yang-tse and Han Rivers, returning to the area where Bodhidharma first took Sengfu as a disciple thirty years earlier. Bodhidharma may have thereafter had even more stature because of an encounter with Emperor Wu. Then, around the time 528 to 530, Bodhidharma died. Although Emperor Wu had not grasped what Bodhidharma had said during their encounter, he may have still tried to share the spiritual limelight with the famous Indian sage by declaring him to be his teacher. Prince Zhao Ming, assigned to issue a proclamation of praise for Bodhidharma, wrote something along the lines of the first half of the memorial text, and this was, or served as the basis for, the text used when the steles were carved and erected in the early 700s.

  This version of possible events conforms and takes into account the narrative of the Continued Biographies, the best available source about Bodhidharma’s life. It also suggests an origin for Bodhidharma’s memorial steles that was not fabricated out of thin air. Yet the date given for Bodhidharma’s death on the steles, 536, cannot be reconciled with the version of events provided in the Continued Biographies. The mystery continues.

  There are other unanswered questions here. If the phrases about illuminating a “dark room” and references to a “sea of wisdom” were only added to the memorial steles because the author, two centuries after Bodhidharma lived, was aware of the poems by the Liang princes and tried to give authenticity to the steles, why are there no other allusions to those princes or their writings on the steles? This implies that the writer of some of the steles was one of the princes. And could it mean that the year 536 given for Bodhidharma’s death is, after all, reliable, and that Xiao Wang, not his older brother Zhao Ming, was the author?

  But Daoxuan, author of the Continued Biographies, did not make any reference to the 536 date of Bodhidharma’s death, although he worked on the Continued Biographies over a twenty-year period and had access to disciples intimate with Bodhidharma’s Zen tradition.

  In my view, the memorial steles attributed to Emperor Wu have a connection to the Liang Court, though the exact nature of the connection is obscure. The text indicates that Emperor Wu’s sons influenced, directly or indirectly, the first part of the memorial’s contents. It appears that certain legendary aspects of Bodhidharma’s life, such as his “nine years” of sitting meditation, his mythical return to “western regions,” and his meeting with Emperor Wu, were known and widely circulated at the time the stelae were made. The contents also suggest these old memorials were not composed in a single sitting by a single writer.

  Scholars contend that different religious factions, whether Buddhist, Taoist, or Christian, advance mythologies that will enhance their political positions with the state. This is clearly true. Bodhidharma’s story, based on impartial historical accounts and relatively reliable records, also suggests a political element was central to the plot, but not a political element of ingratiating his life to emperors and their families. Indeed, his story seems to indicate just the opposite. Bodhidharma’s life, related in the Continued Biographies and the memorial steles, and even possibly by the poetry of the Crown Prince Zhao Ming, was of a life devoted to solitary practice that avoided emperors and perhaps even the religious metaphysics that darkened his age.

  47. Bodhidharma Memorial Ceremony

  AS THE SUN slowly brightens the morning fog, I sit in a late-model black sedan waiting to be driven to the Bodhidharma memorial ceremony at Empty Appearance Temple. This
Dharma meeting takes place every year on the fifth day of the tenth lunar month, usually falling sometime in early November by the Western calendar. At the first such convocation, which occurred in the autumn of the year Bill Porter and I sought out the place, more than fifty thousand people attended. Every year since then on that date, monks from around China and even other countries have joined with lay people to commemorate Bodhidharma in big public observance at the same site.

  The celebration features groups of lay people who have traveled from afar, bands of peasant musicians and dancers, demonstrations by young martial arts practitioners from Shaolin Temple, and other colorful sights. There’s an art exhibition in one of the temple halls that is devoted to Bodhidharma, a few speeches by government officials and high-ranking monks praising “Bodhidharma Culture,” and general China country fair festivities.

  Every year at this Dharma convocation, there is a contingent of lay Buddhist women from Luoyang City who attend. Wearing beautiful lay Buddhist robes, they carry a banner announcing their group, and they take an active part in the celebrations. I saw them during my first visit to the ceremony. They were coming up the road to the temple in a long procession. Every three steps they’d make a full prostration on the road, followed by three more steps and another prostration. They always seem, to me, the most dedicated and enthusiastic supporters of this blood vein of Zen culture, this link to China’s “cultural essence.”

  A half mile or so from the temple is a big paifang, a wide gate that arches above the entrance road. This morning I ask the driver of the sedan giving me a ride to the celebrations to stop there. I get out and stand watching while the lay ladies of Luoyang pass in their slow, noble procession of bowing and devotion. When they have finally all passed the paifang, I fall in behind them and follow suit.

  48. Train to Shanghai

  THE TRAIN FROM Luoyang to Shanghai is a communications trap. It leaves at 9:00 PM, so I need to book an extra half day, at least, on my hotel room in Luoyang. Crowds stretch across the plaza in front of the train station. I arrive more than an hour before I need to because my time in my hotel has run out. I stand in the cold wondering if the scene inside the station is more depressing than the square in front of it. Should I go in or not? Then, even though I have a first-class ticket, I find there’s no first-class waiting room, so I place my backpack and suitcase in some strange unknown liquid beneath the only seat I’ve found open in the Number 4 Waiting Hall. The words Number 4 Waiting Hall are themselves dehumanizing and a cause for melancholy. I listen to the same songs on my iPod that I’ve heard a thousand times, and time drags on to the appointed hour. Finally a surge in the crowd signals that the lights indicating “Shanghai, Ticket Inspection” are now flashing. My suitcase is four times larger than any other traveler’s, and I strain to get it down the long flight of steps leading to the train platform without letting it slip and roll free, crushing some child innocently clutching her mother’s hand on the steps below me. The sound of the suitcase wheels on the cement platform—rrr, rrr—and the sound of the train whistle in the distant night convey the loneliness of a Johnny Cash ballad. I climb aboard and find I must rearrange things in the top pocket of my suitcase so it will fit under the sleeper. My compartment mates arrive: a young couple with a little boy, maybe two years old, who looks at me with wide eyes, probably seeing his first foreigner up close. I make my usual jokes: “Wa, a laowai!” (“Look how big his nose is! Terrifying!”)

  The mother is friendly and smiles. They all wave to someone standing outside on the platform. She says, “Say good-bye to Uncle.”

  Soon I rearrange my blanket and pillow and search for sleep. But I can’t sleep. Instead I mull over the things I read on the Chinese Internet last night, the things that helped make a Chinese train station assume its bête noir atmosphere.

  At 4:00 AM the train stops. I notice we’re in the city of Xuzhou. We’ve come pretty far. Maybe they were exaggerating when they said we’d arrive in Shanghai at three thirty the next afternoon. If we’re already in Xuzhou, it shouldn’t take that long to get to Shanghai, should it? I get up and open the door into the empty train corridor. You can’t use the restroom while the train is stopped at the station. I wait. I watch. The train finally pulls away from the station. I use the restroom and go back to the compartment. I feel anxious and can’t go back to sleep.

  After another sleepless hour or two, dawn breaks. The dining car is the next car down. For twenty yuan, you can have a “buffet breakfast.” I find there’s only one dish out of ten or so that looks vegetarian-palatable. But I pay the twenty yuan and fill a small plate. I start to sit down at an empty table before I notice that a sign on it that indicates it is reserved for Islamic passengers eating their halal food.

  At around eight in the morning, the train rolls across the long trestle above the Yang-tse River, indicating we’ve reached Nanjing. The couple with the little boy pick up their bags, give me a nod and a smile, and get off the train, leaving me alone in the compartment. Will it really take another seven and a half hours to reach Shanghai? It’s less than two hours away if you take a high-speed train. As the sun rises, the landscape can’t shake off a low fog. The train begins a slow crawl south, pausing frequently. The Chinese authorities are building superfast trains, some even have maglev technology, but you still can’t buy a ticket that lets you transfer to a faster train when you reach a given station.

  I settle in to pass the seven-hour trip to Shanghai. I try to read, but thoughts about Nanjing, Emperor Wu, and Bodhidharma weigh on me.

  NANJING IN CONTEXT

  Is it fair to say that Buddhist metaphysics actually caused the aggressive imperial adventures Japan undertook in World War II? On balance, I do not think it is fair to do so. The causes of the war are naturally deeper than the propaganda used to justify it. Such causes are certainly atavistic, which is to say they are connected with deeper historical antagonisms with social, geographical, and biological origins. One cause historians point to is the scourge of extreme nationalism, in which Japan and other nations got caught up, that has accompanied the rise of the modern nation-state. Modernization, along with the rise of resource-hungry capitalist economies, ethnic rivalries, and other causes, all create a tinderbox easily ignited by the odd case of megalomania or just plain old jingoism. Buddhist metaphysics was largely just window dressing for more fundamental forces. Ideological fanaticism of every stripe, perceived national insult, and simple arrogance and its accompanying delusions have long spurred elites to propagate hatred and violence toward other groups. The experience in Japan is not unique, nor is it even the most recent extreme example of this problem. Fanatical belief has walked hand in hand with the history of conflict of every age, and Darwinian impulses abound. Historians have noted that in the case of Japan, the very acceptance and embrace of the philosophy of social Darwinism by Japan’s intellectuals helped promote kokutai thinking.

  While Buddhist metaphysics only decorated deeper forces, it also provided excuses for some of the extreme manifestations of the tragedy. Social elites politicized the religion in a long historical process. Then, at a critical juncture, it failed its mission of offering a counterpoint or remedy for the impulse toward war and empire. Instead, it contributed to war mania. This failure must be acknowledged and understood.

  ON THE TRACK TO SHANGHAI

  The snow is gone. The train rumbles slowly along, with many long stops.

  Once, when I get up to stand in the corridor, an Asian man with gray hair passes in the corridor. He’s well-dressed. Later I look through the train passage into the dining car and see him sitting at a table and smoking. I close the door between the train cars to help keep his cigarette smoke from drifting my way. Twice I’ve caught bronchitis after breathing cigarette smoke in China.

  When Shanli and Mike and Hashlik and I climbed the mountain to the Second Ancestor’s hermitage, Mike said he wanted to make a movie about cigarette culture in China. He said he was talking to a man about an orphanage connected
with his organization in the United Kingdom. The project hadn’t gotten funded, and the Chinese man was depressed about this. Mike said the man couldn’t admit what the problem was until Mike realized that something was wrong and offered him a cigarette. Then the man opened up and talked freely. This is one part of Chinese culture in which I won’t ever be able to participate.

  While I’m sitting in the train compartment, the gray-haired man comes by and sticks in his head. He says something to start a conversation. He sits down. He’s Japanese, and his home is in Nara, Japan’s ancient capital. Even stranger, his name is Sakurai, the same name as the place near Nara where Sima Dadeng lived. He tells me his wife has a very big heart. She likes foreigners. Come and stay at our house, he says. One month. Two months. However long you like. I tell him I’ve been to Nara a few times. It’s a beautiful place. I remember some Japanese. “Nara wa, aki ni naru to, utsekushi desu nee!” (“Nara! When fall comes, it’s beautiful!”) He says he’s in the bamboo-flooring business. He buys the bamboo material in Thailand and imports it to China for manufacture and sale. He says he can’t sell it in Japan. Business is bad. We make more small talk. After a while he excuses himself and leaves.