Tracking Bodhidharma

by Andy Ferguson

  I sit looking out at the slow-moving landscape and thinking about Nara.

  I daydream. Maybe if Buddhism is to survive in the West, it should get rid of its metaphysical baggage and go back to what Bodhidharma originally stood for. Western philosophy has managed to rid itself of much metaphysics, and Bodhidharma’s Zen, as it appears in the West today, might benefit from the same attitude. The West is about rationalism. In a certain sense, so was Bodhidharma. Where should the Bodhisattva Vow, a big part of Zen in the West, fit into the whole picture?

  The morning drags on. Then Mr. Sakurai again appears in the door and says he wants to show me something in his train compartment. I follow him there. He has a big wooden box. Inside is a piece of Chinese pottery, heavily glazed and oddly shaped, a tall cylindrical vessel that looks like a bumpy pipe with stubby wings. Its glaze displays a twisted and bumpy amalgam of green, blue, and pink hues.

  “A business partner gave me this as a present.”

  I’m struck with a sudden realization that he’s hoping he can give it to me.

  “It’s big,” I say. “You can’t carry it.”

  Sakurai shows me that there’s a little sticky price tag on the thing that says it costs eighty thousand yuan, more than ten thousand dollars. Now I’m really afraid he wants to give it to me.

  I tell him, “If you take it back to Japan, your wife won’t like the color.”

  He laughs. He knows I don’t want it.

  “Everywhere I go in China people give me big books,” I say. “It’s impossible to carry them.”

  I examine the thing more closely. It’s awful.

  “Too bad that in Japan you have sliding doors and not hinged doors,” I tell him. “You could put umbrellas in it and keep it out of sight behind the door.”

  Sakurai breaks out laughing. He closes the box.

  We walk back out into the train corridor together, and he suggests we have a beer in the dining car. We take the few steps to that car and sit at a table. Sakurai orders a beer, and I order a coffee. I haven’t had any beer or wine, any alcohol of any kind, for a long time. He lights a cigarette. I decide I should accept the world a little more, and so I sit there uncomplaining while he smokes, hoping I won’t catch bronchitis. After my coffee is gone, I order the first beer I’ve had since I can’t remember when. We talk about the world and how hard the recession is for everyone and what it’s like to try and survive in business. Finally we arrive in Shanghai. He’s made me promise, and I agree, to meet him for a drink that evening. Cigarettes or not, Sakurai is really an engaging, friendly man. Nara is a beautiful place. I’d like to go there again, maybe for a month or two.

  That evening I find my way to Jenny’s Blues Bar near Huaihai Road to meet Sakurai. When I arrive he is already there, sitting at the bar. I pull myself up on a bar stool and order a beer, wondering if there will be a live band. I like blues and have even seen some great Chinese blues musicians perform in Hong Kong and China over the years. Two girls behind the bar take my money and give me the beer. There’s no live music, they say, just recordings. They are interested that Sakurai and I can speak Chinese, and we all chat for a while. Then a young woman appears walking among the customers. She’s dressed in a Tiger Beer outfit, including a bright yellow sash with the Tiger Beer logo on it. She sees that I’ve ordered an American beer and pitches to me that my next one should be a Tiger. I promise her I’ll order Tiger next time.

  Sakurai is a little drunk. We continue chatting with the bartenders, and I notice that an older woman, who appears to be managing the place, is interested in our conversation.

  Sakurai frequents this place and has his own private bottle of whiskey that he drinks whenever he comes here. He talks about Thailand. He says he likes the Thai people a lot and starts talking about how polite they are. The older woman stands nearby, listening to Sakurai. She has a deeply pained expression on her face. She obviously is the boss, as she directs the girls working behind the bar about various small tasks. I wonder why she looks so aggrieved and exhausted.

  Sakurai notices that one of the girls working behind the bar is new and asks her where she comes from. She says she’s from Anhui Province. Then she asks me if I know where Anhui is located. I say that of course I do, for that’s the place where the sacred mountain of Dizang Bodhisattva, one of the four great Bodhisattvas of Chinese Buddhism, is located.

  Then the older woman chimes into the conversation. “Have you been to that place?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “Quite a few times.”

  She’s surprised I know about the mountain. “Do you know what is special about Dizang?” she asks.

  I say, “He goes into hell and liberates beings that are there.”

  Oddly, it seems that both the older woman and the girls tending the bar know all about this bit of Buddhist lore.

  The woman’s face is almost contorted in pain. Obviously she wants to talk about something. Finally she tells her story. Recently she began following a Buddhist path. She tells me this directly, as I gather that Sakurai already knows her story, as do the girls behind the bar. She has a teacher, she says. Her teacher is in the Mizong (“Tantric”) Buddhist tradition like the one Shanli follows. Then she seems to break down, and the story floods out. She’s owned the bar since 1994 when she divorced her philandering husband. Her twenty-nine-year-old son, named Bao Jun, died a few months ago of a heart attack. They were eating ice cream on Huaihai Street near Shanghai’s famous Cathay Theatre. She thought the pain he was experiencing was from the cold ice cream. Then he was dead. He was her only child. The woman’s face takes on an incredible expression of tragedy as she speaks about her son. She describes how his personality was outgoing and kind, and he worked on projects to help people, like a new school that she was helping him establish for poor children. She shows me his photos on a computer screen that sits at the end of the bar. He appears smiling and happy in each photo. His sudden death has caused his mother to doubt everything. Now she seeks answers in Buddhism and bodhisattvas. She tells me she asked her Buddhist teacher if she could continue selling alcohol. He said she could, but she must be very careful. Now she avoids letting any customers get intoxicated. She tells me more about her son. He managed his own coffeehouse where he made a point of paying people high wages and treating them well. He was a little overweight. She jokes that he was a pangzi (an endearing term meaning “fatty”), but he wasn’t that much overweight, really just average on the American scale. Look, she says to me, at his open, deep eyes, that showed an acceptance of everything, nothing held back.

  “When he died, I stayed in my house for five days and didn’t come out. They all came to get me.”

  I notice that as we are talking the girls working behind the bar have drawn near and are listening to our conversation intently, and the girl in the Tiger Beer getup is doing the same. Perhaps they hope I can offer some solace to this woman, who is their boss, whose world has collapsed and who has turned to Buddha.

  “I have money. I have everything I need,” she says. Then she pauses. “I just feel that . . .” She pauses and then continues, “Everything in the world is dirty.”

  We talk for a while about Buddhism. She says she will go to Jiuhua Mountain in Anhui Province and pray to Dizang, the bodhisattva that travels into hell to liberate the unfortunate beings there. She will take the precepts with her Buddhist teacher. She’s not sure how much longer she will do business. She asks me, a foreigner who she thinks knows a little about Buddhism, why her son died.

  THE DEATH OF EMPEROR WU

  During the Heyin Massacre of 528, when the general Er Zhurong slaughtered hundreds of government officials and others of the Northern Wei Court, a young military commander named Hou Jing escaped the carnage by fleeing to a Buddhist temple and hiding out there. Said by Chinese historians to have been a crude opportunist, and sporting the nickname Little Dog, he inveigled a command in Er Zhurong’s forces and then, possessing the unprincipled ruthlessness necessary to such a position, was appointe
d to a high rank in his army. Subsequently, along with Er Zhurong, he led marauding troops in victories over rival forces in North China. Within a short time Er Zhurong himself was killed through betrayal, but Hou Jing, ever the opportunist, parlayed his battlefield successes and reputation to become a commander of new political factions. He made a point of sharing the spoils of his conquests among his troops, especially by rounding up all the women in a defeated countryside and giving them to his soldiers for their amusement. After the establishment of the Eastern Wei dynasty in 534, the emperor ordered his general Hou Jing to occupy and govern the area of Henan, which bordered Emperor Wu’s Liang dynasty to the south. During this time, Little Dog learned of the weakness and corruption that had spread in Emperor Wu’s empire. He proclaimed, “I’ll call on my troops to roam everyplace beneath heaven. I’ll cross the [Yang-tse] river, capture that old-timer Xiao Yan, and make him the abbot of Great Peace Temple!”

  The emperor of the Eastern Wei well knew Hou Jing’s wide-ranging ambitions and feared that when he died his dangerous general might try to deny the emperor’s son the throne and take it himself. So, prior to his death, the Wei emperor took steps to make sure his son could stop any power grab by Hou Jing. His preparations were successful, for when the emperor passed away, his son did stop Hou Jing’s attempt to seize the throne. Now isolated and seen as an enemy of the Wei, Hou Jing appealed to his southern enemy, Emperor Wu, offering to turn his back on the Wei and place his territories under Emperor Wu’s Liang dynasty. Although most officials in Emperor Wu’s court were horrified by the idea, the eighty-three-year-old Emperor Wu decided to accept Hou Jing’s offer. Suffering mental decline, the emperor claimed that he had a dream in which he took control of China’s Northern Plain. Sycophants in his court proclaimed the dream was a harbinger of Emperor Wu unifying the country, and the emperor chose to follow this fateful path.

  Emperor Wu received Hou Jing and his territories with a ceremony worthy of China’s mythical kings Yao and Shun, declaring him the king of Henan and commander of his northern forces. Before long, Hou Jing quietly put into effect his plan to take over the Liang dynasty. With his own troops now nominally a part of Emperor Wu’s forces, he was soon able to advance on the capital virtually unopposed and before long took control of the city with little meaningful resistance.

  Emperor Wu finally realized his mistake but was unable to marshal enough forces to stop Hou Jing from taking control of the country. The only thing left guarding the emperor was his reputation as a bodhisattva, and, surprisingly, this seems to have been worth something.

  Hou Jing, instead of deposing Emperor Wu and claiming the throne, kept him as a figurehead. While the rebel general outwardly paid honor to the emperor, he kept the monarch under house arrest in the palace, gradually starving him to death. Emperor Wu’s popularity, and his symbolic importance, saved him from being summarily executed. The situation was similar to what prevailed in Japan, where shoguns opted to keep the emperor as the symbolic head of the country, all the while retaining real power for themselves. This method of rule proved especially useful in Confucian societies where the emperor is supposed to lead by example. A virtuous emperor like Wu could be kept as a figurehead while those with real power could rule outside the public eye. Appearances were maintained with propaganda like the “mandate of heaven,” “Bodhisattva Emperor,” or, in the case of Japan, the “Divine Emperor.” In truth these high-sounding ideals were a perfect cover for debauchery, graft, and, in the case of 1930s Japan, imperialism.

  Ultimately the grand rule of Emperor Wu literally ended with a whimper. The Book of Liang portrays the old man dying in bed, his power and prestige evaporated. He asked for some honey. But there was no honey or anything else left to succor the dying emperor. No one responded to his request, and so he died.

  Hou Jing made a show of honoring the emperor in death, even allowing his son to nominally take the throne as emperor. But Hou Jing also moved into the palace and directly grasped the levers of power. There, like the Qi emperor Baojuan Emperor Wu had once deposed, Hou Jing feted his friends and established his own imperial harem. The people of the capital city deeply hated the usurper and suffered much at the hands of Hou Jing and his court clique.

  But Hou Jing’s shogunlike rule of the country did not last long. The Book of Liang relates that a strange monk became part of Hou Jing’s palace coterie. One night, after a bout of drinking, the monk stabbed the drunken general. The cleric then ran from the palace crying, “I’ve killed the slave! I’ve killed the slave!” According to the historical record, some people of the city dragged Hou Jing’s body into the street where they cut it up, boiled it, and devoured it to show their hatred for him.

  49. Bodhidharma’s Fate

  THERE IS AN ACCOUNT of Bodhidharma’s death that appears as a fully embellished story in the thirteenth-century Compendium (added as an appendix to this book). The odd story in that text purports to detail the sage’s death, but the account is highly suspicious and can’t be confirmed by any early sources. The story says his death occurred at a place called Thousand Saints Temple. But there is no record of any such temple in Chinese historical records, and no one knows where it might have been. Even more strange, the account says that before he died Bodhidharma was visited by the official Yang Xuanzhi, the same official who wrote the Temples of Luoyang and whom Daoxuan described as hostile to Buddhism. It says Yang came seeking Bodhidharma’s teaching, and the sage obliged him with a lecture on the nature of mind and the nature of Zen. Then Bodhidharma died. The story also says that Yang was then the prefectural governor of Biyang City, a place a few hundred kilometers south of Luoyang. But no records I have found indicate that Yang served in that position there. The story retells a legend saying that Bodhidharma was poisoned by his jealous detractors. This unsupported idea may have arisen because of Daoxuan’s account of bitter criticism to which Bodhidharma was subjected during his life.

  The Compendium account confirms that Bodhidharma was buried at Empty Appearance Temple near Bear Ear Mountain. That place, since at least as early as the seventh century, has laid claim to be his burial spot. Because it has made the claim from such an early time, and is where the memorial purportedly composed by Emperor Wu is located, at least that part of the story seems plausible.

  Taken as a whole, the Compendium account of Bodhidharma’s death is heavy on legend and light on verifiable fact. As I’ve already mentioned, Yang Xuanzhi, mentioned in this account, composed Temples of Luoyang, and Daoxuan described him as hostile to Buddhism. Thus this account of Bodhidharma’s death, though of great interest as folklore and as a representation of how Bodhidharma was honored by later generations, cannot be taken as accurate. See a complete translation of the Compendium account of Bodhidharma’s death in the appendix of this book.

  DRAGON GATE: DID BODHIDHARMA DIE NEAR CHINA’S ABANDONED HEART?

  “Who among you is an adept of the Dragon Gate? Right now, is there anyone that can enter? Hurry up and go in so that you can avoid a wasted life.”

  —Zen Master Fengyang (947—1024), addressing assembled monks

  The Yellow River is named for the yellow silt it ferries from central Asian Deserts and the North China Plain to the sea. It creates rich soil all along the river’s course, and ancient farmers prospered there. The surpluses of good farming allowed for trading, markets, and the accumulation of wealth needed for civilization. But the river’s constant silting also caused disastrous floods. Four thousand years ago, the legendary Chinese ruler Yu the Great led the ancestors of the Han people in the fight to survive along the Yellow River’s banks. He built dikes and dredged the river, taming its unbridled floods.

  Forever honored for his labors, Yu is remembered as China’s first hereditary king, whose progeny maintained continuous rule for sixteen generations. Yu was the primogenitor of the legendary Xia (Hsia) dynasty.

  Perhaps Yu’s greatest river-control project took place where the Yellow River emerges from the Dragon Mountains into the dusty
soil of the Yellow River basin. That place, called Dragon Gate, concentrated the waters of the river to run through white rapids before they reached the plain. Today the waters there still course through massive boulders and outcroppings, but now a constructed lake just downstream has slowed the flow and controlled the shifting silt deposits that caused floods. Yu also controlled the waters at this critical point where the river exited the mountains, a place also called Yu Gate. Dragon Gate and Yu Gate are names applied to this same place.

  A legend intimately tied to China’s origins says that Yellow River carp traveled upstream through this spot, struggling and leaping through the rapids to reach their spawning grounds. Their heroic efforts were likened to Yu’s efforts to tame the river. Yu’s labors secured him the dragon throne. Thus, metaphorically, fish that conquered these rapids were likewise thought to become dragons. The painting I purchased years ago in Hong Kong depicts their struggle. In the painting, among three leaping fish, the one that leaps the highest clears the rapids and changes color, turning orange. Like Yu, when the fish conquered Dragon Gate, it changed into a dragon. In China and Chinatowns throughout the world, the scene of li yu tiao long men (“fish leaping through Dragon Gate”) is still displayed on all types of Chinese folk art, an echo of the mythical beginnings of China. The bright orange color of goldfish was bred into carp by ancient Chinese fish breeders to reflect the transformation of carp into dragons at Dragon Gate. When Zen Master Fengyang, quoted earlier, challenged his disciples to show they were adepts at Dragon Gate, he evoked the metaphor of the carp who could successfully transform themselves to become dragons.

  Was this also the Yu Gate where Emperor Wu’s memorial says that Bodhidharma died? One clear and dry autumn morning, Eric and I decide to find the place and see for ourselves, We hire a car in Xian and set off.