Bodhidharma

By the middle of the tenth century, Chan monks credited their founder with a teaching that does not rely on words and letters. The Anthology of the Patriarchal Hall, a Chan history of 952, attributes the formula to Bodhidharma, and it became the school's signature. The one text that may preserve what he actually taught begins differently. It tells the reader to awaken to the essence by means of the scriptures, and only then to leave the written teaching behind.

That text is the "Two Entrances", a few hundred characters long, which Tanlin, a sixth-century monk and scholar of the scriptures, prefaced with the earliest life of Bodhidharma. Tanlin calls him a South Indian, the third son of a great king, who came to China to teach, and names Huike among his disciples. The first entrance is by principle: a deep trust that all living beings share one true nature, hidden only by the passing dust of false thinking. A person who returns from the false to the true rests in biguan, wall-contemplation, in which self and other, ordinary person and sage, are the same. The second entrance is by practice, in four kinds: to bear suffering as the ripening of one's own past wrongs, to accept good fortune and bad as the play of conditions, to seek nothing, and to act in accord with the teaching. The text's claim is that awakening means seeing a nature already shared by everyone, and then living without grievance or craving in whatever comes.

Yang Xuanzhi's Record of the Buddhist Monasteries of Luoyang, written in 547, mentions a monk from the West called Bodhidharma who admired the city's great Yongning monastery and gave his age as 150. Daoxuan, a monk-historian whose Further Biographies of Eminent Monks dates from 645, describes a Brahman from south India who came by sea, taught in the north under the Wei dynasty, handed Huike the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, and died on the banks of the Luo River. Historians have found no firmer dates: Bernard Faure, writing in the Encyclopedia of Religion, places his activity around 480 to 520; others place him earlier in the fifth century.

The famous Bodhidharma came later. A meeting with Emperor Wu of Liang, in which the emperor asks what merit his temple-building has earned and is told none, is first recorded around 758. The Anthology of 952 makes him the twenty-eighth patriarch of a line reaching back to the Buddha, has him sit facing a wall for nine years near the Shaolin monastery, and tells that after his death an envoy met him in the Pamir mountains, carrying a single sandal. Later tradition adds that Huike cut off his own arm to show his sincerity.

Tradition also ascribes to Bodhidharma the Shaoshi liumen, six short treatises named after the mountain of the Shaolin monastery, and the Treatise on No-Mind. Modern scholars doubt that he wrote the Treatise or five of the six; only the "Two Entrances", one of the six, is widely accepted as an early record of his teaching. Faure notes that many early Chan works under his name were written by later masters. His link to Shaolin kung fu is a twentieth-century popularisation, drawn from a seventeenth-century exercise manual credited to him.