Tracking Bodhidharma (34 page)

“Do you ever consider that this was the place where the emperor lived during the South-North dynasties?”

The girls look at me a little shocked, partly because I asked the question in Chinese and partly because of its strange content.

One girl seems to have little idea at all about the history of the place. “When was that?” she asks.

“It was about fifteen hundred years ago,” I say. “Emperor Wu lived here. From my calculations I think this spot was where his private living area was located. Over there”—I point to the south—“was his Great Ultimate Hall where he sat on his throne. That was his court. That way was his Flowered Woods Garden, where he liked to relax.”

Two of the girls quickly catch on to what I'm saying and agree with me. “It's true,” says one. “This is probably where the emperor lived. I can't say I've ever thought about it, but there are many people who study this and know a lot.”

I get my espresso, and one of the girls gives me some advertising literature about the British chain that owns the coffee shop. On the back of the brochure it proclaims the company's slogan: “With every drop a bit of history!”

After I drink the coffee, I wave good-bye to the girls behind the counter and continue my walk north along Taiping Road. The great palace is buried ignominiously beneath pizza parlors and convenience stores. At the intersection of a little street called Yang-tse River Back Street, I see an odd clustering of pillars grouped together on the corner. It seems like either an artistic work or a memorial or both. The sixteen round pillars are grouped in receding rows and heights. Each is topped with some retro sort of traditional decor. I remember an old news story from Nanjing that described a location where some archeologists claimed to have discovered parts of the old palace, perhaps even part of Flowered Woods Garden. I ask a newspaper seller what the pillars are for. He shrugs and says he doesn't know. Maybe they don't mean anything.

Emperor Wu took the Bodhisattva Precepts in Flowered Woods Garden, perhaps just at this spot, in the year 519. Maybe the pillars mark where he lectured to the public about points of doctrine, about original enlightenment or Buddha nature. Perhaps this is where the grand
ceremony was held to honor Bodhidharma's senior disciple Sengfu when he died. And maybe someone in a local university or historical bureau is figuring all this out and will make it public someday.

Some accounts say the Tongtai Temple was located about where the Beijing Road Peace Park now sits in the north part of modern Nanjing, a couple of blocks north of where I am now and just south of Dark Warrior Lake. Other scholars dispute whether Flowered Woods Garden was even inside the palace wall, although to me that view seems indefensible. My own view is that the garden had to be inside the palace, as this was the design of an earlier Han dynasty palace in Luoyang after which Emperor Wu's palace was reportedly modeled. The same general design can be seen in the Forbidden City in Beijing today, where the Ming and Qing emperors' leisure garden remains just inside the palace's rear gate.

As to the place where Emperor Wu allegedly met Bodhidharma himself, there is no solid evidence to say exactly where the event happened, if it occurred at all. So if we can't know exactly what lies buried beneath the monument at the corner of Taiping Road and Yang-tse River Back Street, it seems like the appropriate place to commemorate Bodhidharma and Emperor Wu's meeting. As far as I'm concerned, this spot and its odd artistic columns work fine as a remembrance of where their great misunderstanding might have occurred.

Emperor Wu knew that to solidify his rule and enhance his Bodhisattva Emperor status he needed to bend Huiyuan's idea that “a monk does not bow to a king” to the proper imperial perspective, namely that a monk should indeed bow to a king. As I've explained, this is where the status of being a bodhisattva had particular value, for that exalted religious role did not, by definition, require that the emperor need to become a home-leaving monk in order to have high spiritual status.

But some clerics in Emperor Wu's inner circle of house monks were apparently not happy with the special spiritual position the emperor had conferred on himself. While they were no doubt pleased that their religion now dominated spiritual life in the country, there's evidence
that the monks resented the emperor's high-handed religious authority, a power that eclipsed their own status as home-leavers.

In Daoxuan's
Continued Biographies
there is a biography about the monk Zhizang, a foremost Buddhist teacher and preceptor to the Crown Prince that I mentioned previously. Though he was among the most honored and famous of the emperor's favorite monks, his biography reveals serious friction between him and Emperor Wu over the latter's spiritual self-aggrandizement. Zhizang, due to the high status and honor Emperor Wu afforded him, was allowed to come and go in the palace as he pleased. In the course of elevating his own spiritual status, Emperor Wu issued an order saying that only the emperor himself would be allowed to lecture from the throne chair that served as a teaching seat in the palace. The implication of the emperor's exclusive claim to this teaching chair was clear. The emperor wished to compel the religious community to recognize that he had ultimate spiritual status, and that the idea that kings were not of the Dharma realm, as reflected in Huiyuan's dictum about not bowing to them, was not valid. The story relates that the monk Zhizang, whose former lay family had imperial connections, strode into the palace in a pique and went directly to the throne chair in question, ascended, and sat down on it. He then somewhat sarcastically declared, “I am [also] of the royal house and am not ashamed to sit in the royal seat. If the emperor wants to brandish his royal sword, he is, after all, a
chakravartin
monarch, and if he wants to kill me, he can kill me! I can go to a different realm, and even if it is hell itself, there's nothing there that can stop me from carrying on with my practice!” The story relates that Emperor Wu, thus confronted, rescinded his order about being the sole user of this Dharma-expounding throne.

This was not the only indication of Zhizang's rebellion against imperial prerogative. Another story from the biography reveals more of Zhizang's resentment toward the emperor and also throws light on the problems that arise when Buddhism is the state ideology. According to this story, a problem arose in the country because many people availed themselves of the special rights enjoyed by clergy by simply taking the Bodhisattva Vows and claiming to be monks. The rights thus obtained were indeed attractive and included, besides permanent room and board, freedom from manual labor, the avoidance of military service, and no need to pay taxes. Not surprisingly, many young men
without an inheritance opted for this path. With little genuine religious conviction, these “monks” further blurred the home-leaving and home-abiding boundary by sneaking out to carouse (visiting prostitutes, drinking wine, and partaking in other forbidden behaviors) with some of their “religious brethren.” Naturally, this behavior scandalized the religious community and called for some sort of action. Emperor Wu saw in this situation a way to extend his temporal authority over the religious community by punishing its miscreants, But Zhizang would have none of it, telling Emperor Wu to keep his non-home-leaving hands out of the church's internal religious problems.

In Zhizang's biography we find the recorded exchange between the two, in which the emperor declared, “What is it about such problems that they can't be rectified by the imperial control?”

Zhizang's somewhat insolent answer was that “The emperor's role is to rectify relations amongst family relatives [a Confucian idea]. As for the affairs of the Tathagata [the Buddhist community], you have no authority to manage them!”

This was apparently an ongoing argument, for, on another occasion when Emperor Wu tried to seize administrative authority over Buddhist monks, Zhizang declared, “The Buddha Dharma is a great sea. Non-home-leavers cannot know of it.” According to the record, Emperor Wu did not take offense at this rebuff and ceded authority to Zhizang without complaint. Yet it shows that a real contradiction existed between the Buddhist community and the prerogatives sought by the growth of Imperial-Way Buddhism.

IN THE HISTORICAL records of Emperor Wu's Liang dynasty, there is no mention of Bodhidharma. However, I think that a poem written by Crown Prince Zhao Ming holds a clue about whether a meeting between the emperor and the sage took place. Before I look at this question in detail, let's take a look at the prince's poem, “On a Dharma Meeting at Kaishan Temple”:

Who was the lecturer whom the Crown Prince got out of bed early to hear at Kaishan Temple that day? Historical evidence points to it being the monk Zhizang, the most famous of the house monks who taught the emperor and his court and who defied the emperor's edict by sitting on his Dharma seat. He is also recorded to be the monk who officiated at a ceremony where the author of the poem took his Bodhisattva Precepts. The probable date of this Dharma talk, however, also suggests that Bodhidharma's oldest disciple, Sengfu, lived at Kaishan Temple when it was given. It's quite plausible, if not likely, that Sengfu was in attendance on the cold morning the prince traveled up the mountain to hear the Buddhist sermon offered by the unnamed speaker. The proximity of Sengfu to this event is tantalizing.

Emperor Wu doted on his son and crown prince. As a boy Zhao Ming devoted himself to Confucian and Buddhist study under his imperial tutors. When he came of age, Emperor Wu gave him charge of the Eastern Palace, a hall on the east side of the Tai Cheng Palace complex where famous religious and literary men of the day lectured to the emperor and his court. Zhao Ming was also familiar with, if not involved in, the multiple sutra translation projects and organization of scriptures that Emperor Wu ordered to be carried out. He was probably intimately involved in assembling the library in the Flowered Woods imperial garden. All this activity, under the direction of the famous prince, was at one of the great intellectual centers of ancient times. Foreign and domestic Buddhist masters and other scholars flocked to the Tai Cheng Palace at imperial invitation.

zhao Ming not only compiled the first anthology of Chinese literature, but also personally wrote commentaries on important Buddhist
texts such as the Diamond Sutra. He extolled the poetry of Tao Yuanming, one of Huiyuan's famous friends in the “Three Laughs” incident at East Woods Temple.

Zhao Ming's fame in his own lifetime as a literary figure was widespread. Moreover, from the sophistication of the poem shown above, Zhao Ming must have been at least in his late teens or early twenties when he wrote it. During the last years of his life, Zhao Ming moved to a place east of the capital city to live. From this we can surmise that this poem was very likely written between the years 518 and 525, a time that overlaps the time when Emperor Wu took his refashioned Bodhisattva Precepts in 519, when Bodhidharma reportedly set up his temple in not-too-distant Tianchang (522), and Bodhidharma's senior disciple Sengfu died (524).

Given the Crown Prince's exalted position, why didn't the monk he went to hear that morning instead hold audience in the Tai Cheng Palace, the usual venue for giving sermons to the court? We know that both Sengfu and his teacher Bodhidharma were noted for their refusal to visit the court. Zhizang, whom Chinese historians credit with having given this talk, was not a stranger to the palace. So I wonder whether Chinese historians may have it wrong, and someone other than Zhizang gave the talk at Kaishan Temple that day. Could it have been a monk that refused to go to the palace to speak? This may be a stretch. But what is not speculation is that Bodhidharma's oldest disciple, Sengfu, lived in the same temple where this talk was given, likely at the time it happened. Later, when Sengfu died, he was honored with an epithet for his monument by Zhao Ming, author of the poem. Remember that Zhao Ming was called on by his sister Yong Xing to laud Sengfu when he died.

Zhao Ming claims that that the event he attended that day surpassed a thousand religious ceremonies in importance. He also lavishes praise on his father, Emperor Wu. Whether this was genuine praise or just a formulaic insertion required by the Crown Prince's political position, it implies that Emperor Wu arranged the meeting that day but was not the speaker.

The speaker himself is described to be giving his talk in a dark room, and Zhao Ming makes a metaphoric connection between the speaker's shining Dharma words and the sunrise that is gradually
illuminating the world outside the door. The entire poem both literally and metaphorically moves from the darkness to the light; it describes an “enlightenment” experience. The speaker's words illuminate the room while the sun rises outside to drench the red earth of the mountain.