Tracking Bodhidharma (20 page)

Before my bed a moon so bright,
I thought the ground with frost was sown,
I gazed up to that lustrous light,
Then dropped my head and thought of home.

—“
Night Thoughts
”
by Li Bai

Li Bai is probably China's most famous ancient poet, and the poem I've translated here is his most famous verse. In China it's so widely known and loved that (if you read Chinese) you will notice it everywhere enameled on vases and embroidered onto pillow cases. Li Bai's persona was of a wandering poet, drunkard, and nostalgic merry-maker. So the poem quoted above should not conjure an image of someone actually in a bed, but rather of Li Bai waking in a drunken hangover at midnight upon the grass of a high mountain meadow. He probably wandered away from his drinking mates to pee, tripped over a log, and passed out. When he came to, he wrote this verse. That's my narrative, anyway.

Hiding in high mountains away from the polluted world is an idea that united Zen Buddhism with Taoism, China's native religion. To refer to Taoism as a “religion” is not quite right, as it is hard to separate Taoism from Chinese culture in general, so widespread is its multimillennial influence on the country. Taoist culture has even spread in little ways to the West. My dentist, with no other connection to China's culture, likes to talk to me about his Tai Chi exercise class, something intimately Taoist in its origins.

Taoism is the formal name of a religion with deep roots in China. On a rather high philosophical level, the religion has a certain similarity to Buddhism. Taoist philosophy idealizes the radical “nonaction” of leaving the polluted world behind to live a simple and natural life. This idea, on its face, is somewhat like the Buddhist ideal of home-leaving. But
through the centuries, Taoism adopted various metaphysical ideas and philosophies that are at odds with Buddhism's outlook. Some of these ideas came from a Taoist belief that one can prolong one's life by living in harmony with the natural environment. This idea spawned all types of theories about “energies,” usually translated as Qi (normally written in English as
Chi
), that underlie theories of natural health. Qi influenced exercises like Tai Chi and Qi Gong (which in the West were once called “Chinese shadow boxing”) and Chinese medicine. Without debating the merit or truth of theories of Qi, which is a different question, it must be admitted that Taoist metaphysics also spawned a lot of quackery. Early Taoist alchemists, trying to make life longer through chemistry, mistakenly identified lead and mercury as important elements in any good long-life potion. Needless to say, the actual effect of their exotic products had exactly the opposite of their intended effect. After providing such untested elixirs to some gullible emperors, the Taoist alchemists abandoned chemistry in favor of a new theory called “internal alchemy.” That philosophy simply counseled that one should practice to align one's “internal” Qi energies with the cosmic Qi meridians that pervade the universe, a more mysterious but also safer form of Taoist practice.

Taoist metaphysics left a lot to be desired, but China's mythical folklore is full of stories of people who allegedly discovered long-life elixirs or other edible means of gaining immortality. Typically, these figures left the world—due to some danger or tragic event—to take refuge in high-mountain vistas like those depicted in traditional Chinese landscape paintings. In these high mountains, they encountered old Taoist hermits or similar demigods who ultimately revealed their secrets, and so more and more lucky world-leavers joined the realm of the immortals. Partly for this reason, Taoism has an immense pantheon of gods and immortals, most of them legendarily connected to events of every tragic age of China's long history. For example, one of the great female immortals, named Magu, is said to have been a concubine of the first emperor and unifier of China, Qin Shi Huang. When he died, custom demanded that his concubines should be buried alive along with him. Magu decided against this fate and escaped to the mountains, there learning the secrets of the Tao. Other immortals of Taoist folklore escaped similar misfortunes in the red dust of the world. Gift stores in Chinatown offer visitors a museum of figurines depicting these ancient immortals. Many of
them clutch peaches or mushrooms, two foods they often prescribed to nurture an endless lifespan.

Mount Lu, a peak in Southern China that sits not far south of the Yang-tse, is the ideal mountain setting for Li Bai's verse. Folklore from the dawn of Chinese history tells of Taoist adepts who lived (live?) happily among its caves and peaks, concealed in the mists, and dine on its magic mushrooms. Perhaps they still come out in the early dawn to look down and laugh derisively at the benighted mortal fools who cling to the world.

The Buddhist home-leaving ideal was more easily accepted in a China that already had the idea of these Taoist hermits. Leaving home and “attaining the Way” was not a difficult concept for the Chinese to grasp. Zen, in some respects, was the fusion of Buddhist home-leaving with the Taoist mountain living ideal. In Chinese landscape paintings this ideal is everywhere seen where hermits or scholars are depicted taking refuge among high cliffs. Poetry also fused Zen with Taoism. Take for example this untitled verse by Zen Master Yanshou (904—975):

From my rock perch atop Mount Lu, East Woods Temple appears as a smallish dot on the plains below. It's the place I mentioned before, the Buddhist temple and hub where the famous translator Huiyuan lived and taught sixteen centuries ago. I arrived atop Mount Lu last night from Nanchang by bus and stayed in the high village that caters to the throng of tourists now overrunning the mountain. They've all come to see the places where Li Bai and other famous poets wrote verses amid these peaks far above the dusty world. The view from Mount Lu is
beautiful indeed, but nowadays, if you want to find a place with the solitary remoteness of the poetry, you'd better find a different mountain. Here on Mount Lu the tourists stream through the trails like ants, everyone seeking the immortal solitude that Li Bai and Yanshou idealized.

I shift my position on the rock on which I'm sitting and strain to see if anything's moving at East Woods temple.

As I've said, Bodhidharma likely traveled north from South China through the mountains to Jiangxi Province, the area around modern Nanchang City. From there he would have continued north through lake country toward the Yang-tse, going directly past here, and likely stopping at East Woods Temple. That place was already famous when he passed this way and would have been his obvious stopping place. He certainly looked up at the place where I'm sitting now. Maybe he climbed up here.

An old record that claims that Bodhidharma came to East Woods Temple is in a book called
Record of the Dharma Treasury [through the] Generations,
written about the year 760 CE, more than two hundred years after Bodhidharma died. It relates a strange story that says that two of the old master's disciples traveled to China before Bodhidharma himself arrived in the country. According to the story, these two monks brought the teaching of Sudden Enlightenment to a skeptical Chinese society. For their efforts they were thrown out of all the temples in which they tried to stay and finally ended up at East Woods Temple by Mount Lu where they encountered the abbot, the famous Buddhist translator named Huiyuan. When Huiyuan asked them why they had been driven out of other temples, they explained their revolutionary doctrine to him along with the insight that “nirvana is the same as samsara.” It was truly a radical idea that nirvana and samsara were the same thing, with the critical difference only existing in the mind of a deluded observer. They reportedly used an odd example to describe this idea, saying that “a hand is also a fist; a fist is also a hand.” This supposedly profound insight was said to have awakened Huiyuan to the truth of the “Sudden” doctrine of enlightenment. The story goes on to say that Huiyuan helped the two monks translate a Buddhist scripture called the Zen Gate Sutra, a text that emphasizes a teaching on the Sudden way. Then the story says the two monks passed away. Word of their death eventually
reached their teacher Bodhidharma, who was still in India. In order to complete their mission, Bodhidharma himself then came to China and traveled to East Woods Temple to live.

This story is fanciful, at best. Nevertheless, like many old tales, it may be based on a grain of truth. As I've explained, Bodhidharma probably did come here.

Huiyuan, the temple abbot who met the two monks in the story, is famous as one of the most important scholars of Chinese history. His translation of scriptures laid the basis for the Buddhist Pure Land sect. East Woods Temple is thus the mother temple of that widely followed branch of the Buddhist religion.

Among his many important contributions to Chinese Buddhism is Huiyuan's treatise entitled “A Monk Does Not Bow to a King.” This essay strongly proclaimed that a Buddhist monk is not subject to the normal relations of loyalty and fealty required of other subjects toward their monarch. As an early statement on the need to separate church and state, Huiyuan's essay is notable and fascinating. Even more surprising is that it was widely acclaimed and accepted in many Buddhist and even official circles in the south of China during his age. The writing weighs in on the meaning of Bodhidharma legend that says he met with Emperor Wu. I'll refer to “A Monk Does Not Bow to a King” again later.

From my perch high on the mountain, I can barely make out the front gate in front of East Woods Temple on the plain far below. There's an interesting legend about that spot that concerns Huiyuan. It seems he befriended the great poets and philosophers of his time, the early fifth century. A legend tells how he had two special friends, a famous Confucian poet named Tao Yuanming and the Taoist Master Lu Xiujing, who once came to visit him at East Woods Temple. The three spent a long afternoon engaged in lively conversation. Their famous friendship symbolizes how the three Chinese teachings of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism should live in harmony. As a monk that had “left the world,” Huiyuan had vowed to not leave the monastery, never crossing the bridge that spanned a creek in front of the temple. As his friends were leaving, Huiyuan accompanied them to the front gate, seeing them off in the Chinese fashion. The legend relates that the trio began to cross the bridge that passes over the creek when suddenly a tiger roared from the nearby woods, as if warning Huiyuan not to venture any further
and thus violate his world-leaving vow. The three friends all laughed in surprised delight, and the saying “Tiger Creek three laughs” was thereafter remembered and depicted in Chinese folklore and art.

The teachings of East Wood Temple's Pure Land sect, the same teachings cited by the young monk I talked to at Baizhang Temple, remain popular in China and elsewhere and provide a way for people in distress to find solace in religious practice. Many years ago I visited a Chinese nunnery whose inhabitants followed Pure Land teachings. The abbess, a young Chinese woman of about thirty years old, greeted me and my friend and travel business associate Eric Lu warmly, inviting us to have tea. “So, the women here practice Pure Land Buddhism?” I said to her to start the conversation. Her reply surprised me. “Yes,” she said, “but of course there is really no such thing as a ‘Pure Land.' We're all going to the same place. That place is enlightenment. There are just different ways to get there. It's like taking a trip to Shanghai. Some people will take a train, and other people can take an airplane.” Most of the women who lived in the temple, she explained, came from situations of abuse or abandonment and had established a new and happier life in the monastic setting. I was struck by the dignity and poise of the young woman's manner, apparently the result of dedicated practice and dedication to her charges. Later, when I viewed a group photo that we had taken, I was shocked to realize she was extremely short, maybe four foot nine. Her upright poise had left me with the impression she was quite tall.