Tricycle | Awake in the World

Zen lineages all begin with Bodhidharma, the mythic first ancestor of Zen, who came to China from India, and who, by inaugurating Zen, also transmitted the true teaching beyond words that begins with Shakyamuni Buddha. For years I felt irritated by Bodhidharma; he glares out of innumerable portraits with a thick odor of machismo clinging to his robes. Image after image offers up a pair of round, bulging eyes popping out between beetling eyebrows and a bulbous nose, the face framed by immense pendulous ears and an untrimmed beard. He is a solid, bull-necked figure, muscular running to fat—a dharma linebacker. His robe is usually loosely draped, baring his substantial chest enough to give us a glimpse of his hairy torso, and when his legs are revealed by a breeze blowing his skirts, they complete the hirsute look. Although he usually sports at least one earring, he always seemed to me the personification of Mr. Tough Zen. Here was the first ancestor, and to me he was wholly Other.

While no longer written off by scholars as completely fictional, Bodhidharma remains elusive. Very little is known about him, including who his teachers were. He journeyed to China around 470 C.E., one of a few meditation masters at that time who came to a country that had already known a first small flowering of Buddhism; he encountered some resistance to his teaching, had few disciples, and died around 532 C.E. A few teachings in editions from a thousand years later bear his name, but a lot of historicity can leak out over a millennium. Eventually, versions from the seventh and eighth centuries were found among the great scriptural treasures that have emerged from the caves of the Silk Route town of Dunhuang, on China's western frontiers. And with that, the record begins to be fleshed out, bringing the mythic Bodhidharma to life as well.

It was only after I read these few essays that I looked again at the paintings and realized these weren't portraits of supreme masculinity, they were just caricatures of The Westerner, The Foreigner. A South Indian monk wandering in China, he's an East Asian fantasy of the forever gaijin. Round-eyed, hairy, stocky, perhaps looming over his audience, he is of my tribe.

Bodhidharma eventually became a well-known figure not only in Zen circles but in popular and literary culture as well. In his earliest images, from about the eleventh century, he is a fairly normal looking monk, Chinese in features and dress, with perhaps a little stubble on his chin. A few stock portraits came to dominate his image. In Japanese zenga, the Zen painting that has roots in Chinese styles, his appearance grew more forbidding and distinctive as his popularity grew—mythic figures make better copy that way—exaggerated, alien.

One of my favorite paintings of Bodhidharma depicts him wafting across water on the slimmest of reeds—a detail for which there aren't any good explanations. He is often glancing back over his shoulder as he glides along with his robes flapping in the wind. He is totally present, at home in the flow of impermanent existence, entrusting himself to the world and its vagaries. Along with such allusions to water as symbolic of our dynamic, flowing universe, and to Shakyamuni's often-used metaphor of crossing from this shore of suffering life to the farther shore of truth and liberation, these river crossings are also identified with his crossing the Yangtze Rivef after encountering the Chinese emperor Wu.

This exchange is probably the most famous in all Zen lore. Bodhidharma met the emperor of the Liang Dynasty, a devout Buddhist renowned for his piety and charity, who was much given to endowing monasteries and orphanages. Wu said: "I have endowed temples and authorized ordinations—what is my merit?" Bodhidharma's answer was radical: "No merit at all."
Wu had been doing good for the sake of accumulating merit. Bodhidharma cut through Wu's ideas about merit to the core of his teaching, that your practice isn't apart from you: when your mind is pure, you live in a pure universe; when you're caught up in ideas of gaining and losing, you live in a world of delusion.

The emperor tried again: "What is the first principle of the holy teaching?" And Bodhidharma's answer once again cut to the quick: "Vast emptiness, nothing holy." There is nothing to cling to, holy is just a word. The great dynamic universe of absolute reality flourishes, and it is completely ordinary. The emperor did not understand what he was saying, and Bodhidharma left his kingdom, crossed the Yangtze, and went north to Mount Song, where he settled at a minor temple called Shaolin.

At Shaolin Temple, Bodhidharma sat facing a cave wall for nine years, and taught a small band of disciples—probably just two, Huike and Daoyu. According to a very early biographical text, the disciples served their master sincerely and studiously for some years, cutting away only delusions in the process—with no mention of the legend of Huike’s chopping off his hand to demonstrate his sincerity. The historical record of Bodhidharma almost disappears after this, noting only that he traveled and taught, and was appreciated by some but not by many.

Bodhidharma's teaching begins and ends with the mind as the gateway to liberation—there is no Buddha beyond the mind that is our marvelously aware true nature—and with beholding the mind as the key to the gate. The central practice he taught was seated meditation, translated as "wall gazing"—sitting like a wall, stable and immovable. He said this is the way to clarify the mind and thus your life and your world. Concentrate, relinquish all false ideas, return to true reality, and with that abandon all dualisms of self and other, settling into the still true nature of things. His language is often symbolic and lyrical as he points over and over to what he calls the fundamental pure inherent mind on which we should ground ourselves. This mind is not just your or my thinking and perception; it is what is also called Buddha, Buddhanature, suchness—no word can contain it, no self can grasp it.