Tracking Bodhidharma (35 page)

And the words hold other clues helpful to the search for Bodhidharma. More on this later.

THE WEATHER HAS WARMED, and I'm wearing only a light sweater against the morning chill at the bus stop for the number 6 line near my hotel. The morning traffic is heavy. It takes me nearly an hour to make the two-mile bus trip across downtown Nanjing to the Stone Fortress Park, a string of low hills that rise above the north side of the Qin Huai River before it empties into the Yang-tse. The Qin Huai River, part of Nanjing's old defensive perimeter that looped under the city, witnessed some of the city's most cataclysmic battles. Accounts relate that during some battles the bodies of the city's attackers and defenders filled the waterway such that one could walk across them like a bridge. The river bank and modern park where I'm headed is due west from where the ancient Tai Cheng Palace once stood. Rebels of ancient times set up their command posts there to lay siege to the palace.

In
feng shui
parlance, Stone Fortress Park was the “tiger” of ancient Nanjing's defenses. In old China the four cardinal directions were each associated with a mythical animal. The west was associated with the militarily symbolic white tiger. The place has the
feng shui
and astrological position of military might.

I get off the bus and walk across the street into the park. Almost at first glance it's easy to see why the Stone Fortress was really the “tiger” of the city's strategic positions. A ridge runs along the river, providing high ground to any defenders. Old bricks and columns sometimes jut from the ground. The exposed roots of large trees clutch old bricks. China's history is everywhere like this—things buried, exposed, reburied, forgotten, remembered.

I go back to the street and walk a hundred meters or so toward the old city center. There, on the last of the hills along the river, is Qing Liang (“Refreshing”) Mountain. Nanjing's connection to Bodhidharma
connotes the birthplace of the Zen tradition. But this forested hill in the same city is connected not with the beginning, but with the end of Zen's classical period. Until modern times a place called Refreshing Temple was located here. And now, after that temple's all but complete destruction in the twentieth century, it is again being rebuilt. A famous Zen master named Fayan (885—958) once lived here.

Fayan was the archetypical Zen teacher of ancient times. He was brilliant and deeply knowledgeable about the tradition. He taught with famous flair and creativity. His cryptic observations are still widely remembered. “A monk asked [Zen Master Fayan], ‘What is the thing toward which an advanced student should pay special attention?' Fayan said, ‘If the student has anything whatsoever that is regarded as “special,” then he shouldn't be called ”advanced.“”' Fayan's temple has been destroyed and rebuilt repeatedly since he lived here. The Cultural Revolution was only the latest of the catastrophic events to occur on these premises. The only hall standing today with a connection to earlier times was built in the late Qing dynasty (1644—1911). Records say the monastery was once among the country's largest, and old drawings depict it as beautifully designed. But if its ancient halls are gone, one landmark of those times remains. That landmark is the Baoda Spring, a source of pure water that Fayan and his disciples personally dug at the site. A story about the spring appears in classical Zen records. It is an example of how Zen often used the metaphor of an “eye” to refer to the nature of consciousness and the mind:

The same “eye” metaphor was used by the Buddha in his talk on Vulture Peak, as told in Zen's founding myth, when he said, “I possess the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, the signless mind of nirvana ...” The emperor actually granted the old Zen master the name
Fayan
after Fayan died. It means “Dharma Eye.”

The location of the spring in the landscape indicates that it may have been located in front of where the temple's original Dharma Hall sat, symbolizing the source of the signless Dharma. Like Bodhidharma's famous wells at Hualin and True Victory Temples, such places are often connected to Zen teachers. Water is characteristically a sort of “signless” (i.e., lacking special flavor) ingredient of life. I've noticed that Dharma Halls are positioned behind old springs at several old temple sites in the country.

Now, Refreshing Mountain Park surrounds the old temple site. It is a botanical garden containing many recently replanted native species. However, the religious significance of the place is not yet lost. A third-generation disciple of old Zen Master Fayan, a monk named Yongming Yanshou (904—975), transmitted Fayan's Zen line to Korea. Now South Korean monks return to Refreshing Mountain Temple here in Nanjing to honor the origin of their Zen sect. They are working with local authorities to restore the temple, the mother temple of the Fayan Zen school.

Zen Master Yongming must be credited with spreading Fayan's teachings not just to Korea but throughout China as well. But at the same time, that disciple of Fayan did much to mingle Zen teachings with other Buddhist schools and dilute its unique character. After Yongming, Zen was never quite the same. The emphasis on “pointing directly at mind” that served as the theme of early Zen was diluted by burying it more deeply in the practices of other Buddhist sects like the Pure Land and Tiantai traditions. Yongming's ecumenical work led to the watering down of Zen's original emphasis, and in my view, wittingly or not, he obscured the power of Bodhidharma's simple instructions. Other Zen masters of later times followed suit. This led to a famous Zen master named Foguo (1063—1135), author of a well-known Zen book called the
Blue Cliff Record,
to say, “In ancient times Bodhidharma just taught ‘directly pointing at mind.' Where was the forest of words we have to deal with now?”

Above the area where the old halls of Refreshing Mountain Temple once stood, a flat and carefully landscaped plot sits beneath broad ginkgo trees. Their gold leaves glitter in the autumn sun. It's obvious that the landscaped gardens and paths beneath the trees once held ancient monuments of the Zen teachers who lived and taught here. No doubt
Fayan's own stupa once stood here. Maybe it still rests a few meters beneath the surface where old folks now gather to chat and enjoy the fall day in the shade of a gazebo.

The orthodox story of Bodhidharma's meeting with Emperor Wu, as it appears in texts written many centuries after the alleged event, goes like this:

This version of events has problems immediately apparent to scholars. The most obvious is that Bodhidharma is said to have arrived in China in 527, but thereafter he is said to have arrived in Luoyang in the third year of the Northern Wei emperor Xiao Mingdi, which was actually the year 518. Such problems with the mentioned dates are only some of the reasons scholars reject this account as an invention created centuries later. For this reason many say that a meeting between Bodhidharma and Emperor Wu simply didn't happen. Western and Japanese scholars take it as a given that this was a legend that simply advanced the cause of a faction of Chan Buddhism with the emperor of the Tang dynasty about two hundred years after the Bodhidharma lived (more on this later). Thus this story of the famous meeting, which is regarded by Chan practitioners and much of China as a foundational event in Chan and Chinese cultural history, is largely dismissed as a fiction by scholars in East and West.

This is strange. The meeting between Emperor Wu and Bodhidharma is regarded as a critical, if rather obscure, event of the Zen tradition. Is it possible that the scholars are wrong, and that the event really did occur, even though early records do not show clearly that it happened?

As I've already taken pains to point out, the relatively reliable
Continued Biographies
offers an account much at odds with the account shown above. It says that Sengfu was Bodhidharma's oldest disciple and that he enjoyed great fame at the very center of Emperor Wu's empire and capital city during a time starting about thirty years before 527, when the traditional account claims Bodhidharma arrived. Moreover, our trip to Tianchang City, at least, suggests there is tangible evidence,
including historical records that are not easily discountable, that Bodhidharma lived in the vicinity of Nanjing during the period in question. But even if Bodhidharma did live in Tianchang during that time, what could have brought the Indian sage and the Chinese emperor together? This is especially hard to understand given that Bodhidharma and his disciples all seemed to take pains to avoid meeting emperors.

In my view it seems likely that if Sengfu died in the year 524, as the
Continued Biographies
indicates, and Bodhidharma was anywhere in the vicinity of Nanjing, that he would have come to his disciple's funeral. It seems unlikely he could have ignored that event. When he came at last to the court of Emperor Wu, the emperor likely seized the chance to meet the famous teacher from India who had long avoided him. Perhaps after a grand funeral ceremony at Tongtai Temple, the emperor invited Bodhidharma to visit him in the Flowered Woods Garden, a quiet place where they could speak in private.

Perhaps their meeting went somewhat like traditional accounts of that event. Bodhidharma may have said a few words that revealed an awkward distance between the two men's views of Buddhism. Bodhidharma may have regarded the Imperial-Way Buddhism of Emperor Wu as little different from the court religion he left behind in North China. And then, after the meeting, Bodhidharma may have decided he must retreat from the public spotlight and avoid the annoying acclaim directed toward him by Imperial-Way Buddhism. Perhaps he decided to return again to someplace removed from “imperial sway” and so made his way back up the Yang-tse River to faraway regions.

Bodhidharma and his followers appear to have clung to the idea of being a home-leaver in a very literal sense, not accepting Emperor Wu's dilution of the ideal by expanding the Bodhisattva Vow and extending it equally to lay people. Bodhidharma's possible resentment toward the laicization of organized Buddhism would not have been unique. We've already seen that Zhizang, foremost among the most honored of the emperor's house monks, deeply held and publically displayed this same attitude.

Sengfu's biography also reinforces this view. While Sengfu's moral example was honored by Emperor Wu's court, as his biography shows, Sengfu himself appeared unconcerned, if not contemptuous, of Imperial-Way Buddhism. That the emperor and his family honored him so greatly
shows that the home-leaving ideal still held powerful sway as a model. The fact that Emperor Wu at least nominally “left home” on several occasions confirms that the ideal endured despite attempts to dilute it. The idea behind Huiyuan's treatise “A Monk Does Not Bow to a King” continued to hold sway despite Emperor Wu's grab at supreme religious authority, and Bodhidharma and his disciples seem to represent, to later generations, the greatest example of resisting the dilution of Buddhism's most honored practice, that of leaving society behind.

As Mentioned before, in the
Continued Biographies
the author Daoxuan wrote a long passage of text that described monks of the Zen tradition. Among his comments about the most famous monks of Emperor Wu's age, he refers to Bodhidharma, saying that he “did not stay in places of imperial sway, and those who loved to see him could not draw him to them.” This description fits not only with what we know about Bodhidharma, but about his disciple Sengfu as well. The attitude appears to extend down through several generations of Bodhidharma's disciples, with the Fourth Ancestor's refusal to respond to the emperor's summons being a shining later example of this refusal to submit to imperial authority.