Tracking Bodhidharma (54 page)

I remember that the Second Ancestor's biography indicated he buried Bodhidharma on the banks of the Luo River. But that account seems uncertain because it contradicts Bodhidharma's biography written by the same author, Daoxuan.

Yanci slurps a mouthful of tea and continues. “There are some places on the Luo River that were called Yu Gate. But no one has ever found a Thousand Saints Temple.”

I sit quietly and sip some tea, trying to sort out the mystery.

Yanci puts down his cup and smiles. Then he says, “If you keep coming and going, you'll never find Bodhidharma.”

AN IMPORTANT interpretation of Bodhidharma's historical significance is that he symbolized resistance to the politicization of Buddhism in China. Buddhist emperors, of whom Emperor Wu was one of many, used the symbols and doctrines of the religion to enhance and legitimize their political rule. Of course, the emperors who used Buddhism in this way did not always do so cynically. Emperor Wu appears to have embraced the religion on a deep personal level. Nevertheless, the politicization and resultant degradation of Buddhism, especially the degradation of the home-leaving ideal, led Buddhism to be a component of East Asian political ideology and a foundation of state power. This mixture of religion and statecraft was no less disastrous in East Asia than it has proved to be in other places.

The tools of Imperial-Way Buddhism included the following:

Bodhidharma's life represents a counterpoint to Imperial-Way Buddhism:

What seems apparent is that early Bodhidharma Zen underwent important changes to take root in China and to avoid political interference. The establishment of farming monasteries, the changes in the nature of the precepts, and the direct efforts of the Zen school to remain politically independent were all aspects of the long historical process of integration.

Chinese Zen dealt with many problems unique to China. One of these was maintaining the home-leaving ideal in a society where family
was paramount and where the physical act of leaving home and entering a hostile natural environment required some external support and organization.

Bodhidharma and his Zen tradition were, from a political perspective, an adaptation to this situation. It appears that Zen valued independence and the home-leaving ideal above the strict application of the traditional precepts. It posed the “nature of the mind” as the intellectual and moral justification for farming and other nontraditional home-leaving lifestyles.

These points complement a number of questions already raised by many scholars and suggest some new interpretations for early Zen. It is beyond the scope of this book to review and examine all them all. Here are a few that come immediately to mind:

Zen Buddhism was not always at odds with Imperial-Way Buddhism, however. For example, the adoption of the Bodhisattva Precepts served the purposes of both Imperial Zen and Bodhidharma's Zen. Emperor Wu drew on different translations and adaptations of these precepts to create the Home-Leaving, Home-Abiding Bodhisattva Precepts and thus allowed Bodhisattva Emperors to have exalted spiritual status. But Zen also had an interest in emphasizing such precepts, as they could be used in lieu of traditional precepts that Zen farmer monks were violating. An interesting facet of this is that although Zen monks undertook farming, they adhered to the vegetarian diet espoused by Emperor Wu and adopted the vegetarian lifestyle as a permanent part of Chinese Buddhism. In these and certain other respects, the interests of Imperial Zen and Bodhidharma Zen coincided.

Whether or not Bodhidharma personally sought to create or maintain a non-Imperial-Way Buddhism in China or not, I believe that later Zen generations honored Bodhidharma's politics as much as his spiritual practice. Zen's emphasis on the legendary meeting between Emperor Wu and Bodhidharma supports this idea, and the dialogue of the traditional story supports this conclusion. Moreover, when we examine the huge number of Buddhist masters who were called “Zen masters” in China prior to Bodhidharma's arrival, we need to sort out why Bodhidharma was given the title “First Ancestor” of Zen. I think that Zen's emphasis on avoiding Imperial-Way Buddhism offers at least a partial explanation of this dilemma.

If, in China, the opposition between Bodhidharma's Zen and Imperial-Way Buddhism seems clear, in Japan any antagonism between that country's Zen tradition and the throne is less obvious. There, Zen has often served the throne and the national polity. There are notable exceptions and acts of resistance to this in Japan's Zen history, such as Dogen's apparent rejection of politics or the resistance that ensued to Meiji government decrees that weakened home-leaving. Such examples show that at times the Bodhidharma/Emperor Wu antagonism was in play. In general, however, Zen was far less successful at avoiding imperial
interference in Japan than in China. Indeed, Myoan Esai did not successfully transplant Zen to Japan until it had devolved in China to be the handmaiden of the imperial court. Bodhidharma's Zen was far from its original position of political independence in China when Esai, Benin, and others arrived there to carry it back to Japan around the beginning of the thirteenth century. This later, essentially neutered Zen was acceptable to Japan's political elites. It is notable that Japanese monks had various contact with Chinese Zen teachers prior to that time, but none resulted in Zen taking root in the island nation.

The connections (both direct and through Korea) between Emperor Wu's court and the establishment of Buddhism in Japan shows that from the very beginning its success in that country hinged on politics. Buddhism's role in politics waxed and waned there until the modern era, when it played a prominent role in World War II. A foreign-designed constitution separating church and state ultimately removed overt religious metaphysics from the Japanese national polity.

The metaphysical component of Japanese Buddhism, conjoined to politics, led to a path far removed from the religion's early ideals. This has led some modern Japanese scholars to claim that Japanese institutional Buddhism is not Buddhism at all. In my view this does not mean that there were not authentic Japanese Buddhists who grasped the religion for the right reasons and practiced it faithfully in every age. Many Japanese Buddhists undoubtedly understood the significance of the failed meeting between Bodhidharma and Emperor Wu for reasons as I've outlined in this book.

Yet in Japan, the fusion of imperial authority with Buddhist metaphysics and institutions was extreme. The practical result of this mixing was that the Buddhist home-leaving ideal was eventually diluted to a degree far beyond what occurred in China, and the bodhisattva ideal more or less replaced the home-leaving ideal completely. During the Meiji period of the late nineteenth century, the Japanese government chained Japan's Buddhism to the rise of the modern nation-state. New policies reinforced trends toward laicization that permitted monks to marry and made privately owned temples commonplace. The very existence of “priests,” a word foreign to the lexicon of Buddhism in India and China, indicates the creation of an exalted spiritual class that, aside from their titles, were often not markedly different in their concerns
and lifestyles from those of lay Buddhists. Of course, “priests” had an additional role as the adjudicators of orthodoxy, an orthodoxy that in Japan was part of the ruling ideology. This phenomenon is especially ironic in the context of Zen Buddhism, a religion that emphasizes that differences between “sacred” and “mundane,” “enlightened” and “ordinary” are in an important sense without meaning.

AFTER WORLD WAR II, commentators criticized the Kyoto school of philosophy that existed in Japan during the war. That Buddhist-oriented philosophical group, headed by the scholar Nishida Kitaro, stood accused of providing the philosophical underpinnings of Japan's imperial misadventure. Throughout his life, Nishida tried to reconcile his perceived “essence” of Japanese and Chinese philosophy with Western science and culture. Critics said his work helped provide the philosophy behind the Japanese militarists' belief that Japan was “special” and should spread its cultural superiority to Asia and the world. Perhaps the criticism of Nishida is unfair, as he seems to have been torn between nationalist sentiments and a belief in cosmopolitanism. His writings do reflect a desire for Western and Eastern philosophy to complement each other in a global community.