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A Life of Bodhidharma by John M Evans. In the Zen Masters Series.

Despite his wordless doctrine, Bodhidharma is credited with the writing of some important texts. This may not be precisely the case, as it often happens in Eastern religions that some may have been put down “in his style” by disciples after his death.

Among the works said to have been composed by the master, one of the most important was discovered at the turn of the 20th Century in the Tun Huang caves in China. This important text is known variously as A Dialogue on the Contemplation Extinguished, A Treatise on the Transcendence of Cognition, or, more happily in a newer translation from the Zen Centre in London, The Ceasing of Notions.

This is a remarkable work which, though set down more than a thousand years ago, remains fascinatingly modern. It tells of a dialogue between Master Nyuri and his (almost) intractable pupil, Emmon. The encounter opens with the main theme of Bodhidharma’s Zen, that of pacifying the mind, here called heart (the Chinese character has both meanings).

Emmon: What is called heart? And how is the heart
pacified?
Master: You should not assume a heart, then there
is no need to pacify it. That is called pacifying the heart.
Emmon: But if there is no heart, then how can we learn
the Way?
Master: The heart cannot conceive of the Way, so why
should the Way depend on the heart?

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A Life of Bodhidharma by John M Evans. In the Zen Masters Series.

A number of legends surround this period of Bodhidharma’s life. He is reported, for example, to have founded the Chinese boxing style known as Kung Fu, partly as a response to the flabby condition of the scribe-monks, and partly as a spiritual exercise in the Taoist tradition, where bodily practices play as important a role as mental ones. Simple self-defence may also have been a motive as monks travelling in wild country were particularly vulnerable to attack. The story goes that the Patriarch observed a variety of animals in combat, especially a crane and a snake, and devised the motions of his system from the elegant, unpremeditated actions of the crane, which rose directly from the unborn Buddha-mind.

At the time of Bodhidharma, Buddhism had been established in China for more than five hundred years. The Emperors were said to approve of it because the monks were basically peace-loving and did not involve themselves in local politics as some Taoists did. The ordinary people of the empire were attracted to the character of the Bodhisattva figures, who represented a goal and an ideal to which even those at the lowest end of the social scale could aspire. To the Chinese of all classes, Buddhism meant peace and a kind of spiritual egalitarianism not to be found elsewhere.

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A Life of Bodhidharma by John M Evans. In the Zen Masters Series.

Bodhidharma’s fierce-looking exterior effectively masks his underlying wisdom, as well as the compassion which took him to China to spread the Dharma. His life spanned the years 448 to 527 AD, although there is some confusion over dates, with a few scholars placing him decades earlier. The year of his arrival in China varies from 486 to 527. The one more generally accepted is 520. Either way, the journey from tropical India via bandit-infested passes and the terrifying cold of the high Himalayas, or alternatively by a hazardous sea voyage, marks him out as a man forgetful of his own bodily needs and comforts, a mentality he was to prove many times in the succeeding years.

He arrived in Nanking where he attended on the Emperor Liang Wu Ti and conducted the famous interview already quoted.

“What is the nature of the holy Dharma?” asks the Emperor.
“Vast emptiness, nothing holy.” cries Bodhidharma.

It is a classic case of non-communication. The Emperor speaks from a relative understanding of Buddhism, while the sage talks from the absolute plane of Buddha-mind. Seeing the error in the ruler’s understanding, should Bodhidharma perhaps have given him further instruction? Here was the man whose prescript was “A wordless doctrine outside the scriptures, direct perception of the nature of being, seeing into one’s own nature as Buddhahood.” The Chinese ruler had failed to understand the direct pointing the master had transmitted. Perhaps Bodhidharma felt he was not yet ripe for further instruction.

Whatever the situation, Bodhidharma left the capital and crossed the Yangtze River, heading North to Loyang in Honan Province, where he came upon the now famous Shao Lin monastery. At this time, far from being a centre of the deadly martial arts, it was a translation point for more than five thousand volumes of Buddhist texts being collected from all over India.

The monks, not surprisingly, were rather nervous of the great man’s brand of wordless Buddhism, which, if allowed to prosper, would undoubtedly throw them out of work. Bodhidharma faced the same reactions as did the Luddites in a 19th Century Manchester cotton mill.

Accordingly, he was banished to a cave outside the monastery, where he placed himself before a cliff face and spent the next nine years contemplating the wall in complete silence (the reader will note that there is a symbolic element in this story). Visitors were attracted to this strange figure. How many of them, one wonders, understood his silent transmission that their minds should be like the wall, utterly imperturbable in the face of the world’s clamour, serenely ungrasping towards the ghosts of form?

Recently discovered manuscripts, ostensibly written by Bodhidharma himself, throw more light on the great meditator’s wall-like attitude of mind:

Those Buddhists who discipline themselves in the
doctrine of absolute Buddhahood should make their
minds like a piece of rock … The Dharma has no
magnitude, no form, no altitude. To illustrate: here
is a big stone in the court attached to your house.
You sit on it, sleep on it, and have no feeling of
fear. One day you suddenly conceive the idea of
painting a picture on it. You hire an artist and
have a Buddha’s figure painted on it and you take
it for a Buddha. No longer dare you sleep on it, you
are fearful of desecrating the image, which was
originally nothing but a huge rock. It is due to the
change in your mind that you no more sleep on it. And
what is this so-called mind too? It is your own brush
pieced out of your imagination, which has
turned the stone into the Buddha-figure … All is
mind made.

Eventually, the Abbot of the monastery relented and Bodhidharma was allowed into the club to become the first Patriarch of Ch’an Buddhism in China.

Go to Part Five.