Tracking Bodhidharma (26 page)

The families of several high-ranking Communist officials visit and even study with high-ranking Zen monks. And while it is not widely publicized, high-ranking Communist officials sometimes formally study Zen teachings. Zen is regarded even by the party as an important part of China's cultural and spiritual landscape. It's regarded as the “orthodox” Buddhist religion of China. The government calls on some Zen monks to refute the heresies of various groups that might threaten political security. Cults that are influenced by Taoist ideas are especially anathema to the government and are targeted for elimination. The reasons for this
go deep into history. Taoists have long tended to believe in occult powers, especially embracing things like magic amulets or spiritual mantras that they believe confer protection from harm on their practitioners. I already mentioned the Taoist love of long-life elixirs. Taoist-influenced cults often were involved in political rebellions, thinking they had special powers to protect them from the arrows or bullets of government troops. Such groups appear more dangerous to the government than Buddhists, who are usually content to practice their religion quietly and who tend to emphasize meditation over confrontation. Taoists are bigger political threats than Buddhists.

This is not to say that Buddhists haven't led any rebellions. At various times Buddhist monks have been rabble-rousers. This was particularly true around the time that Bodhidharma visited China, the period covering about 470 to 530 CE. Then, under the Wei dynasty that ruled Northern China, several revolts broke out where Buddhist monks rallied peasants against the government. More on this later.

Jinghui, the Old Master, is the most honored guest and main speaker at the event. Finally, he rises to speak to the crowd. I seize the opportunity to grab my camera from my backpack and retreat completely from the rostrum under the pretext of taking his photograph. Freed at last from the spotlight, I relax again. Jinghui delivers his remarks and his congratulations for the reopening of the temple, and thereupon a cascade of fireworks is set off above the temple's front gate, signaling an end to the day's formal activities. As the crowd disperses, a monk motions me to a door leading upstairs to a dining room. Ascending the stairs, I see Bright Sea and members of the Cypress Grove Monastery delegation and join them to enjoy a buffet lunch.

After we're done eating, Bright Sea pulls me toward the exterior walkway that runs along the side of the building. “Let's go see him,” he says. I realize that there's a crowd clustered there, all waiting for the chance to see the Old Master, Jinghui. I feel like an imposter as the crowd opens to let Bright Sea and me pass. But anyway I go along, and soon we find ourselves in a guest reception room where Jinghui sits in front of an enthusiastic crowd of admirers. I go forward to pay my respects. He's seated and looks up at me as I approach him.

“Do you remember me?” I ask.

“Feng Keqiang?” he asks, saying my Chinese name.

I'd like to ask Jinghui a few questions, but the crowd is pressing into the meeting room. Jinghui's celebrity now draws throngs of well-wishers. After a few moments Bright Sea and I retreat to a nearby reception room for some photo taking. Soon it's time to leave, and I fall in with Bright Sea's entourage to push through the crowd to the front of the temple. We board a waiting bus that fills up quickly behind us. Minutes later we are winding down the mountain en route to the city of Huangmei. After we arrive at Bright Sea's hotel, he kindly arranges for his private car to return me to the Fourth Ancestor's Temple.

While I was dealing with festivities at Laozu Temple, my longtime friend Eric Lu has arrived back at the Fourth Ancestor's Temple and is waiting for me there upon my return. Eric and I have traveled widely in China together for more than a decade. A college graduate who majored in English, Eric speaks that language with complete fluency. He's joined me to visit the next few stops on Bodhidharma's trail.

Among the early Zen places in this region, there is the temple that claims to be the residence and teaching seat of the Third Ancestor of the tradition, and there is also a mountain where Zen's Second Ancestor, Huike, Bodhidharma's main Dharma heir, is said to have lived.

Scholars mostly ignore these places because there are no early texts like the
Continued Biographies
that confirm that the Second and Third Zen ancestors lived here. The references to these places are all found in later texts that many Western and Japanese scholars dismiss as fictions. Many scholars regard the idea that the Second and Third Ancestors lived in these places as highly dubious, probably just later attempts to create a Zen mythology. I think the facts we know support the idea that the old ancestors really lived in these places, but that is an argument for a different book.

As I mentioned previously, while much of Buddhism, including certain currents of Zen, submitted to and was tainted by the wealth and power of the court, Bodhidharma's band of followers appears to have stayed away from the intoxicants of fame and royal praise. This is indicated in the
Continued Biographies
where it says he would not remain in “places
of imperial sway” and “those who loved to see he could not draw him near them.” That this was part of Bodhidharma's Zen tradition is also indicated by the refusal of the Fourth Ancestor to answer multiple summons from the emperor.

The Chinese scholar Yang Xiaotian has written a paper about Bodhidharma's life that emphasizes this point. He points out that the fact that Bodhidharma's disciple Sengfu left the Luoyang area in the year 494 is significant. Yang shows that this time coincides with the decision by Emperor Xiao Wen, of the Northern Wei dynasty, to move his court from the northern city of Pingcheng to Luoyang, the place where we know Bodhidharma and his disciple were living at that time. Sengfu's biography says he left the area at that time and went to Nanjing. Evidence indicates Bodhidharma also would have had good reason to leave.

Emperor Xiao Wen, who was of the Tuoba ethnic group, was everywhere adopting and incorporating Chinese culture into his “barbarian” northern empire. Moving from the northern city of Pingcheng, near the Tuoba people's traditional northern home, to Luoyang, a place with a long history as China's capital, was a political move designed to cement the Wei's legitimacy with the Han Chinese population.

Emperor Xiao Wen, like other Chinese emperors, was a believer and promoter of Buddhism. He spent lavishly to build monasteries and support the religion in various ways. A famous landmark of his support for Buddhism is the Yungang Grottos, the site of stunningly beautiful and artistic Buddhas carved into the stone cliffs and caves near modern Datong City in North China. That site, better preserved but less famous than the Longmen Grottos near Luoyang, remains as evidence of the astonishing artistic skills of carvers who believed that carving beautiful Buddhas secured you a better future life. Emperor Xiao Wen, who fashioned himself to be an incarnation of the Tathagata (the Buddha), commissioned the Buddhist statues that were carved into the cliffs in both Yungang and Longmen.

When Emperor Xiao Wen moved his capital from Pingcheng to Luoyang around the year 492, work on the Yungang Grottos near Datong was stopped. The work then started again at Longmen (“Dragon Gate”) along the Yi River near Luoyang. For the next two and a half centuries, the Longmen site saw the creation of literally thousands of Buddhist carvings in caves that overlook the river. That place is now a famous
UNESCO World Heritage site visited by thousands of tourists every day.

The
Continued Biographies
reveals that Sengfu left Luoyang just when Emperor Xiao Wen moved his court there. A coincidence? Bodhidharma's biography in the
Continued Biographies
indicates he was roundly criticized for the type of practice he advocated. He did not fit in the Buddhist establishment of Emperor Xiao Wen's court. In fact, Emperor Xiao Wen issued a directive demanding that Buddhist scriptures be publically taught by Buddhist monks. Bodhidharma, an independent teacher outside the religious establishment, could well have suffered criticism if not persecution for not joining the emperor's efforts to spread scriptural study.

During the time of Emperor Xiao Wen's rule (471—499), monks were definitely not supposed to operate outside the religious establishment and direction of the court. The reason for this is clear from historical records. During the first two decades of Emperor Xiao Wen's rule, at least three uprisings against him and his court were led by Buddhist monks. The last such rebellion in the year 490, shortly before the Wei capital moved to Luoyang, occurred when a monk declared himself the new messiah and marshaled the Han Chinese peasants against the Tuoba “foreign” oppressor. Emperor Xiao Wen brutally crushed this rebellion and executed the “messiah” and his commanders.

For these reasons it seems logical that Professor Yang's ideas are right, and that Bodhidharma and his band of independent misfits decided they should get out of Luoyang, while a new gang, the emperor and his establishment monks, was taking over their turf in the Luoyang area. They likely left the Luoyang area around 494, as Sengfu's biography indicates. They departed the area where the Northern Wei dynasty was setting up a new capital and headed south, down the Han and Yang-tse Rivers into the area where Xiao Yan (Emperor Wu) would soon overthrow the boy emperor Baojuan and set up the Liang dynasty.

If Professor Yang's idea is indeed correct, and Bodhidharma and his disciples left the Luoyang area at that time and traveled south, then many pieces of the Bodhidharma puzzle fall into place. This possibility provides a possible explanation for tantalizing references to Bodhidharma and his disciples living in the southern part of the country, especially around Nanjing. It also explains where Bodhidharma and
Huike lived and taught during the long thirty-plus-year gap in their history that the
Continued Biographies
leaves open, a gap that stretches from the year 494, when they were in Luoyang, until the approximate date of Bodhidharma's death sometime around the year 530. In this long period of time, there would have been ample opportunity and means for Bodhidharma's group to migrate to the southern Yang-tse River region and take up residence there.

As I mentioned earlier, the people who established the Wei dynasty that ruled Northern China at that time were originally of the Tuoba ethnic group. They were foreigners, not Han Chinese. Since the third century, their invasion of Northern China drove many ethnic Han Chinese to migrate from the north to the south of the country. One of the main routes for these migrations started from the area where Bodhidharma and his disciples lived around Luoyang and proceeded south through the Fu Niu Mountains. After a relatively short distance, this migration route reached the Han River, which flowed downstream to meet the Yang-tse. Commerce and travel was well-established on these rivers, and so the great majority of the distance between Luoyang and Nanjing could be traveled by boat. The idea that Bodhidharma and his disciples could have followed this well-established migration route to the south is entirely plausible. Their route, going downstream on the Han River, would have carried them through the vital trading and political city of Xiangyang (pronounced
Hsiong-yong
), the same city where Military Governor Xiao Yan (the future Emperor Wu, who we'll examine in detail soon) lived around that same time biding his time, planning his rebellion against the last Qi dynasty emperor in south China.

 

FIGURE 13. Bodhidharma and his disciples leave Luoyang and travel down the Han and Yang-tse Rivers to the Nanjing region in the year 494.

The precise reasons why Bodhidharma avoided imperial contacts can only be surmised. Naturally, as a Buddhist home-leaver, he might be expected to leave society behind and avoid its temptations. Yet the fact is that Bodhidharma traveled at great personal danger for an enormous distance to proselytize in China. Clearly he was not simply of a home-leaving mindset that ignored the world. He wanted to convert people to his vision of Zen and willingly traveled in the world to do that.

In light of the idea that Bodhidharma seems to have avoided the Wei emperor Xiao Wen (and later, as I will show, Emperor Wu), the likelihood that Bodhidharma met Gunabhadra and learned from the latter's harrowing experience with royalty seems even more plausible. Buddhism teaches that life can be both mesmerizing and transient, and where more so than among the competing ruling elites and their bitter struggles for power? At the top of the list of those to be avoided would be an emperor and his immediate kin. Gunabhadra's bitter experience as a political hostage showed that no matter how such people profess affection for the Dharma, they are still tactically minded, always jockeying for advantage in the fearful maelstrom of politics. Emperors and kings maintain their positions through lethal force.