Tracking Bodhidharma (2 page)

Besides Bodhidharma, two other figures who lived at or about his time play prominent roles in this narrative. One is China's great Tang dynasty Buddhist historian and scholar Daoxuan (pronounced
Dow Swan
) (596—667 CE). This remarkable man not only personally unified much of Chinese Buddhism but also chronicled in detail its people, thought, and movements. We can thank him for keeping Bodhidharma's life planted on the earth instead of floating in mythical clouds. Daoxuan's historical records play heavily in this story.

The other figure is an emperor. At the core of Bodhidharma's legend is his fabled encounter with Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty, called the Bodhisattva Emperor (in East Asian Buddhism, a bodhisattva is an exalted spiritual being). Wu's reign (502—549 CE) represents the fusion of the Buddhist religion with Chinese state power and authority. Emperor Wu wedded his brilliant understanding of Buddhist tradition
and theory with Confucian statecraft. The result served as the ideological basis of Wu's empire and reverberated through East Asian history. No thorough understanding of China and East Asia can overlook the critical developments that came from Emperor Wu. For this reason, this book looks at Emperor Wu's life in some detail. His intriguing story is the essential counterpoint to Bodhidharma, and the significance of each of these historic figures cannot be calculated without an understanding of the other.

As I said, I explore these questions while tracking Bodhidharma's ancient trail through China. Along the way are places that Bodhidharma lived and taught, places that reveal the cultural aftermath of his passing.

People with little prior knowledge of Zen may here have a first look at part of this deep wellspring of Chinese and East Asian culture. For readers with more prior knowledge of Zen history, the book should throw new light on the tradition's early years. But I hope that thoughtful readers with no knowledge whatsoever about Zen, about Bodhidharma, or even about Chinese history can here find an illuminating account of a critical story of East Asia history, a story that informs a better understanding of that region.

Zen, often called the “essence” of Chinese culture, had an important political component. This is not surprising. Politics has always engaged or lurked near the heart of religious movements. This is not to say that the Zen spiritual tradition is not important or that its insight is without gravitas. The tradition is engaging on both the spiritual and aesthetic plain, and its observations reach the limits of our understanding of the human condition. Arguments advanced by some modern physicists and even cosmologists fall in line with what the old Zen masters and the Buddha himself said about the world—that it is created by the mind. Scientists and philosophers still debate whether this is true only metaphorically or in some far stranger sense.

The Zen cultural tradition has bequeathed to the world a treasury of fine art, prose, and poetry. A solitary moon suspended in the void, a sweet-watered spring, a lonely mountain peak—the old Zen masters used such metaphors to suggest the nature of “signless” mind. The tradition's intimate love of nature and natural metaphor conjures a scenic
trail in both fact and imagination. Bodhidharma's China road affords the traveler a chance to see how ancient landscapes of the Earth and the mind are withstanding China's exploding population and modernization. That critical question alone makes tracking Bodhidharma compelling. It is only one of the important questions an examination of his life and ancient path evokes.

Andy Ferguson
The Tao Po Hermitage
Port Townsend, WA
August 16, 2011

From high above,
Sublime the vision,
Islands beneath the rising sun.

—
Poem composed by Emperor Hirohito of Japan in 1939, submitted as his contribution to an imperial poetry contest

 

ON DECEMBER 7, 1941, Japanese Zeros flew out of the rising sun of a Hawaiian morning to rain destruction on the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor. Personally planned and approved by Emperor Hirohito, the attack plunged the United States into the most catastrophic war in human history. But the date that flashed across the screens of Japan's war propaganda films celebrating the attack was not December 7, but December 8, the date that had already arrived in Japan when the first bombs fell in Hawaii.

The date was not serendipitous. Emperor Hirohito selected December 8 as particularly auspicious and meaningful, for according to Japan's Buddhist tradition, that date corresponds with Buddha's enlightenment day, the day when the historical Buddha Shakyamuni sat in meditation as dawn approached, then suddenly experienced enlightenment as he observed the morning star that accompanied the sunrise.

The symbolic date of the attack punctuates the role that Buddhism and its doctrines played in Japan's militarist and imperial ideology. Recently the historian Brian Victoria has detailed how Buddhism, including Zen Buddhism, played a critical role in the ideology of emperor worship in Japan before and during the war. The religion meshed deeply with native Shintoism to underpin the country's war propaganda. How, one might ask, did a pacifist religion, known as dedicated to peace and brotherhood, travel so far from its fundamental teachings to become a weapon in Japan's arsenal of imperial war?

These strange developments belie the notion that Buddhism has unerringly sided with pacifism and opposed armed conflict. As a Zen practitioner and researcher for the past three decades, I confess that Brian Victoria's narrative of the events of WWII presents me with a troubling set of questions that beg for an explanation.

Fully understanding Zen and its perplexing history has led me here to Hong Kong where I sit today on the shore in Kowloon watching the Star Ferry shuttle back and forth to Hong Kong Island under a bright autumn sun. I plan to follow the long overgrown trail of the figure credited with establishing Buddhist Zen in China, a legendary and enigmatic Indian holy man named Bodhidharma. What, after all, did he stand for?

Much about Bodhidharma's life remains obscure, and scholars debate almost everything about him. What we know comes from old Chinese records of varied reliability, complemented with legends and folklore blown up to mythic proportions.

Bodhidharma (?—528?), a Buddhist missionary from South India, arrived in China about fifteen centuries ago near where I write these words. His ship sailed into China on the Pearl River, the waterway that flows past the Chinese city of Guangzhou (previously called Canton) and empties into the South China Sea. He would ultimately be remembered as the First Ancestor of Zen, China's dominant religious tradition. Many in China say that Bodhidharma and the Zen masters that followed him, his “spiritual descendants,” comprise the essence of Chinese culture.

Guangzhou, where he landed, has long been a gate of intercourse between China and the world. It is where British gunboats compelled China to import British opium, a drug that helped anaesthetize Chinese resistance to Western and Japanese imperialism, in the infamous Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century. Guangzhou is also where Sun Yat-sen and other luminaries of the 1911 Republican Revolution organized a failed attempt to introduce Western-style democracy to China.

Bodhidharma's influence on China was far greater than the Opium Wars or even the Republican Revolution.

Who was he? We know little of certainty about his origins beyond that he was a Buddhist monk who was born a Brahman, India's highest caste. He reached China after years at sea had thinned his cheeks, but
his eyes, says his legend, matched the ocean's blue waves. They may have betrayed a Greco-Aryan bloodline. Perhaps his ancestors came from where Alexander's army rolled across India and his soldiers settled to intermarry with the local population. The earliest statues of the Buddha, which appeared where Alexander's colonies prevailed, look more like Greek gods than Hindu deities. The Chinese nicknamed Bodhidharma the “Blue-Eyed Barbarian.”

Other South Asian monks besides Bodhidharma braved the tortuous currents and typhoons of the South China Sea to spread Buddha's teachings. Modern historians call those ancient sea lanes the Ocean Silk Road, the trading route that passes between South and East Asia through the Strait of Malacca.

Bodhidharma stepped ashore in a China fractured with ethnic rivalry, feudal fiefdoms, and a prolonged civil war between the country's north and south. In the centuries before his arrival, China experienced conflict, disintegration, and chaos. The people who embraced Bodhidharma's teaching had endured much and suffered more. They had already known Buddhism for several centuries before Bodhidharma arrived. Yet his Zen caught the imagination of the world-weary populace, and so rulers, aristocrats, and commoners eventually embraced religious practices connected with his name. The teachings of one lonely sramana (holy man) who walked up a gangplank in Guangzhou into a chaotic country eventually conquered it, then spread far beyond its borders. I'll start my search for Bodhidharma's traces by going to where he stepped ashore.

The white incandescent bulbs of the immigration hall cast pallor on the faces of people in slow moving lines waiting to cross the border into China.

There is a short, pock-faced Chinese man with a leggy girlfriend standing ahead of me. She displays Italian fashion from hair to high heels, the shoes making her a head taller than her boyfriend. She is intently focused on everything he says. The man's pocked face and eyes convey menace, and his tailored suit sticks out among a ragged line of people
wearing street market clothes. His eyes skip back and forth, parodying some shifty-eyed stereotype. I remember news stories of Hong Kong triad godfathers and gangs and so avoid staring at the odd couple. My mind drifts to thoughts about the trip that lies before me.

But my thoughts are scattered by a shrieking sound. It takes a few startled seconds to realize that I'm hearing the sound effects from the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's
Psycho
. It's the
ree
,
ree
,
ree
part where a shadowy figure is steadily swinging a broad-bladed knife under a gray light, plunging it into the naked body of Marion Crane (played by Janet Leigh) in the Bates Motel shower. I turn and look for the source of the sound. Then it grows louder, and I turn back to see that the pock-faced man has pulled his mobile phone from his jacket. He presses the button to talk. The shrieking sound stops. “
Wei!
” (Hello) he says. He begins talking in Cantonese. None of the other people in line pays any attention. Welcome to new China.

When I first traveled this route into China in 1978, there were no stampeding crowds. On that morning a humid fog lifted on the Hong Kong side to reveal a landscape of ragged shacks and fish ponds where limp Kuomintang flags hung defiantly within sight of the border. After a few hours' ride from Kowloon Station, our creaky train rolled across a splintered trestle to stop at the bare-brick Lowu checkpoint. Our group, a “U.S.-China People's Friendship Tour,” looked excitedly at the rice paddies. Then, with entry chops pressed in passports, we rolled into the direct aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. The rice fields and shacks that met us just across the border in 1978 are now the supercity of Shenzhen, the export manufacturing zone that China's leader Deng Xiaoping dreamed of when he said “to get rich is glorious.”

Many Westerners, if they've thought about Zen at all, associate it with Japan. But the tradition flourished in China for about seven hundred years before it finally took root in the Land of the Rising Sun. By then its original incandescence was dimmed by devotional religious practice and literary artifice. Politicians, poets, and dilettantes laid claim to the religion. Even in that age, the word
Zen
was thought to be cool and hip, something hard to define, imparting an attractive and enigmatic air to anyone believed to understand it.

Although after many centuries Zen suffered decline in China, it found
a strange, fresh new life by leaping across the East China Sea to Japan. There its impact was widespread, stretching deeply into the country's cultural life. It spawned enduring arts well-known today, such as ornate tea ceremonies, austere rock gardens, and poignant flower arrangements.

In China, Zen interacted with China's native Confucian and Taoist culture, and this meeting had a deep and lasting influence. The religion spread not just because of its engaging insight, but also because its literature coincided with the development of woodblock printing. In its late literary heyday, Zen rode this technological wave, then caught another with the Chinese invention of movable type by an alchemist named Bi Sheng.

Zen is a Sinicized form of Indian Buddhism. The hybrid came about partly because translators introduced Buddhist ideas from India to China using Chinese words already pregnant with meaning. The meanings came mainly from China's nature-loving, magic-imbued Taoist philosophy. For example, when Buddhism arrived in China, the country already used the phrase “The Way” to describe an exalted path of philosophical or aesthetic insight and practice. “Attaining the Way” was a phrase imbued with both Taoist and Confucian ideals, China's native modes of thought. Buddhism exploited this phraseology, and “attaining the Buddha Way” nimbly introduced Buddha's enlightenment to a Chinese audience. Chinese language and thought molded and culturally reinterpreted Buddhism in China. This pattern was widespread and long-lived.

Buddhism was long established in China before “Zen” became its dominant current. The religion arrived about five hundred years before Bodhidharma sailed up the Pearl River. In fact, even Zen and Zen practice were common in China before Bodhidharma reached its shores and was crowned Zen's “First Ancestor.” So a major question about Bodhidharma concerns why it was he, and not any of his many Zen predecessors, who got that sobriquet.