Tracking Bodhidharma (5 page)

As we gaze at Marco Polo, a bystander overhears me talking and says something like “Oh, this foreigner can speak Chinese!” I turn to
say hello and see a look of surprise on the man's odd-looking face. I say hello again, but he's now speechless and seems shocked. The abbot and other monks appear embarrassed and start moving me away from this odd denizen of the temple.

“I recognize you,” I say. “Yes, you're Ji Gong! You're very famous.”

“What? No, no,” says the man. “That's not me!”

Everyone politely laughs at my feeble joke. Ji Gong was a legendary monk in Hangzhou that lived during the Song dynasty. He reportedly often violated the Buddhist precepts by getting drunk, eating meat, and showing up late for morning temple services. At Nanhua Temple, the Dharma seat of the famous Sixth Ancestor of Zen, there's a statue of Ji Gong by a window in the Buddha Hall where services are held every day. He's sneaking in after the door was locked for latecomers. Despite his famous shortcomings, Ji Gong supposedly performed miraculous feats and became known as a “living Buddha.” He's often depicted with a face that looks like the man who now tags along with our group, a face sculpted by a hard world.

We emerge back into the temple's courtyard. There stands a “ŚarÄ«ra tower,” a type of pagoda structure about fifteen feet tall. In the 1960s, construction crews were moving the structure from a location in a local park when an underground vault was discovered beneath it. In the vault was a box that reportedly contained sacred relics of the Buddha, the jewels that remained after his body was cremated. The relics were retained by the local historical society, and the ŚarÄ«ra tower was moved inside the Hualin Temple grounds.

We talk about the origin of the name of Hualin Temple.
Hualin
means “Flowered Woods.” The place is named after the garden where Emperor Wu is believed to have met Bodhidharma. This occurred in Jiankang, capital of the Liang dynasty, the city now called Nanjing. Flowered Woods was mainly a private park at the rear of the palace grounds for the emperor and his family. It was also the venue for several of Emperor Wu's great religious events.

In passing, I mention to my hosts that I'm interested to know more about the many monks who came to China on the “Ocean Silk Road.” While the Silk Road that passes through the desert is more famous, the sea route that passes through the Strait of Malacca were a well-traveled and important part of China's Western contacts in ancient times.

Yaozhi says, “There's a scholar who's just written a book about that!” In a few seconds he's pulled out his cell phone and started dialing, apparently following up on my interest.

On the other side of the courtyard is the back door of a large hall facing south toward the Pearl River, which is about a thousand meters away but obscured by city buildings. In ancient times that river is said to have flowed even closer to where we now stand, and thus this is the approximate place where Bodhidharma is said to have come ashore. What is unexplained, of course, is why Bodhidharma would build his teaching spot at virtually the very spot where he first stepped on land. I'd think the stevedores loading and emptying boats with their goods-laden shoulder poles might overrun him. Anyway, that's the story.

The big hall at the center of Hualin Temple is the Bodhidharma Hall, and it is a model of traditional Chinese Buddhist architecture, sporting ornate wooden roof beams and fishtail gables, all supported by columns wrapped with carved dragons. We walk around to the front door on the south side of the building and look in to see a twenty-foot-tall statue of Bodhidharma at its center. The guide says it was cast using three layers of bronze that were stacked one on top of the other and then sealed and polished to form the complete figure. The whole statue weighs nearly ten tons. It's an impressive work of modern statue making. Of course casting technology these days is nothing compared to what the Chinese of ancient times were capable of doing. In Beijing there is something called the Yong Le Bell, a Buddhist bell ordered cast around the year 1426 by Emperor Judi of the Ming dynasty, the same emperor who built the Forbidden City. The single casting from which the bell is made weighs an astonishing fifty-four tons (forty-eight metric tons), and on its internal and outer surfaces are two hundred and fifty thousand Chinese characters integrally cast in the bell body, all displaying text from Buddhist scriptures. Anyone who knows about bronze-casting technology and the difficulties involved in making such a one-piece masterpiece is at a loss to comprehend how this giant Buddhist bell was made in ancient times. It still hangs on public display at the Big Bell Temple museum in Beijing and is rung during the Chinese New Year celebrations.

The situation with Hualin Temple is like many other temples in China that are in an urban setting. After 1949, when religions came under pressure, much of their original land was appropriated by the government
and used to create housing and other purposes, their area squeezing into smaller and smaller compounds. Finally, during the Cultural Revolution, they were closed completely, their contents generally ransacked or destroyed. After 1980 the temples began reopening, and with help from sympathetic local governments, many are getting back some of the land that was taken from them. Hualin Temple is expanding again, albeit slowly. When I ask how long this will take, my hosts laugh a little nervously. I say, “Well, Chinese are patient. Even if it takes a hundred years, that's okay.” Ruxin smiles in agreement. He says that maybe it could even take several hundred years to complete. As the story of the stone tablets of Yunju Temple shows, Chinese have patience and a different sense of time. The old joke is that when two Chinese people meet, one will ask, “Where is your hometown?” The other then answers, “In Hebei Province.” “When did you leave Hebei?” says the first person. “Six generations ago.”

We then walk back to the temple gate and into the pedestrian street out front. Along Jade Street, shops sell every manner of jade ornaments and jewelry. We walk south along the street for a short distance and make a turn to pass under a
paifang
, one of those big ornamental Chinese gates made from stone. It commemorates and marks the spot of Bodhidharma's arrival in China. The characters written on the stone cross beam at the top of the
paifang
literally read WEST COMING FIRST PLACE. A small paved plaza sits on the other side of the gate, nestled between some buildings. At one end of the plaza is a cement railing enclosing a small area. Within the enclosed area, five round cement blocks lie on the ground. Each is a wellhead of an ancient water source. The well with its five round wellheads is called the Five Eyes Well. Four of the holes covered by the cement blocks form a square with the fifth hole placed in the center of the others. The guide explains that the hole in the center was the well discovered by Bodhidharma, while the four around the outside were enlargements dug by Bodhidharma's disciples. A legend says that after arriving in Guangzhou, Bodhidharma was walking along near the shore of the river, then struck the ground with his staff and said, “There's treasure there!” Some men standing nearby heard these exciting words from a foreign holy man and started digging on the spot. Instead of gold, sweet water came up from the ground in the middle of the brackish tidal area. The well, I'm told, continued to be used as a unique source of fresh water in the brackish soil around the city until 1953, when the government installed water pipes to area homes.

 

FIGURE 5. “West Coming First Place” Gate. The legendary place where Bodhidharma is said to have come ashore in China by the Pearl River, Guangzhou. Now a pedestrian shopping street.

After a group picture, our car pulls up on the side street nearby and we climb inside, ready to proceed to visit my host abbot Yaozhi's Grand Buddha Temple.

Whether or not Hualin Temple has any real connection to Bodhidharma is tenuous. While tradition says that Bodhidharma set up a hermitage and started teaching after his arrival in Guangzhou, nearly everyone would admit that simple logic defies this story. First, there are no contemporary records that say exactly when or where Bodhidharma arrived in China. Even the most reliable record, the
Continued Biographies
, was written roughly 160-odd years after it claims Bodhidharma arrived. It says he came during the Liu-Song dynasty. That dynasty fell in the year 479, nearly fifty years before the sign on Hualin Temple says Bodhidharma first arrived at this place. One very strange thing is that the temple claims to have been established in the year 526, a year before an often-cited version of Bodhidharma's legend says he even arrived in the country. Hualin Temple definitely raises more questions than it answers about Bodhidharma and his real story.

Bodhidharma's life has been hotly debated by scholars. Most of his traditional story comes from accounts and legends created after he lived, most of it long after. This tardiness led to some Japanese and Western scholars downplaying his importance during the time he lived or even denying that he existed. In the post—World War II period, scholars in Japan and the West “deconstructed ” East Asia's prevailing myths, especially the divinity of the Japanese emperor, lately the cause of so much misery and pain. Bodhidharma's was among the stories reexamined in the glare of new intellectual fashions such as “postmodernism” and “deconstructionism.” In my view, the result was that Bodhidharma was cut loose from his cultural and religious moorings to become, not just in the eyes of scholars but even the Western Zen tradition, a sort of placeholder—just a symbol in history's parade. Though he was the founder of arguably the main religious current in the world's longest surviving civilization, his life has been strangely marginalized, demoted to the status of a footnote appended to an obscure place and time. Bodhidharma's “deconstruction” by scholars is reflected in pronouncements like the following by the Buddhist scholar Bernard Faure: “Bodhidharma does not ... deserve attention as a historical person ... [and] should be interpreted as a textual and religious paradigm and not be reconstructed as a historical figure or a psychological essence.”

Influenced by such writings, even people who practice Zen and consider themselves familiar with the tradition express surprise when I tell them there should be no doubt that Bodhidharma actually existed. He wasn't a mythical figure made up later or a composite of other religious figures cobbled together by later writers. That he may represent a certain “paradigm” is true enough, but that is just a fancy way to say he lived in and was a product of an age, of causes and conditions that can be examined. He most definitely was a flesh-and-blood person who walked on China's yellow soil. To divorce his “paradigm” from his “historical person,” whatever that is supposed to mean, is simply a postmodernist attempt to eviscerate him as a flesh-and-blood person whose life's story meant something and is worth considering.

Admittedly, what we can say about the facts of his life is limited, but even those limited facts, meager as they are, are not without value.

During the ride to Great Buddha Temple, Yaozhi and I get better acquainted. He is one of many young abbots now running Chinese
temples. With a good education and dedication to the Dharma, he and young abbots like him are working hard to get the Chinese Buddhist tradition back on track after the problems of the twentieth century and despite continuing obstacles in the twenty-first.

Chinese Buddhism, called
Hanchuan
Buddhism or “Han transmitted” Buddhism, is generally different from Tibetan Buddhism or much of the Buddhism practiced in Japan. Having developed much earlier than in either of those places, Chinese Buddhism retains some religious practices that have disappeared or been overlooked elsewhere. The most obvious difference between Han Buddhism and the Buddhist tradition of Tibet and Japan is the former's strict observance of vegetarianism. Chinese Buddhist monks avoid eating
hwun
, meaning meat or foods derived from animals.
Hwun
also includes some vegetables like onions and garlic, believed to give rise to sexual energies and thus also proscribed. Han Chinese Buddhist monks and nuns are vegans. Emperor Wu, the same emperor who had the legendary encounter with Bodhidharma, was instrumental in the spread of vegetarianism in Chinese Buddhism. Contemporary records of his day claim that monks of the old Hinayana school of Buddhism ate meat under certain conditions. Supposedly they believed that if the meat in question did not come from an animal specifically slaughtered for the monk who was going to eat it, then it could be consumed without violating the Buddhist precept against killing, one of the “commandments” for proper behavior. But Emperor Wu and Chinese Buddhism rejected this idea and decided instead to interpret literally the precept of “don't kill or cause to kill.” Thus they avoided all meat consumption. Emperor Wu was the first Chinese emperor to widely promote this view, and his influence was lasting. This was just the beginning of his long-lasting influence on Chinese Buddhism and society.