Tracking Bodhidharma (39 page)

“Is there any proof about this? Has anyone written about what happened at Long Reed Temple?”

Shao shakes his head. “I don't know. Anyway, it's better to forget all this now. There's enough that's been said and done. There's the memorial museum.”

Shao's words roll over me like a ocean wave. For a few minutes I feel a little disoriented. I really don't know what to say.

Then Shao speaks again. “I should go back to work now. If you come to Nanjing again, I will have my head shaved and be wearing monks' robes.”

I get up and shake Shao's hand and ask him to pose for a photo. Then he steps back and bows slightly to me, his hands together. He turns and walks toward the back of the dining room.

I order a coffee and sit looking at the traffic outside while the day grows dark. I'm stunned about the strange meeting I've just had. I'm also struck by the fact that when Shao told me about the Japanese burning down Long Reed Temple and killing or driving away the monks there, he had no rancor or hatred in his voice. There was no malice or desire for revenge in his words. His face had a calm look, and his voice was steady as he described those awful times.

Maybe the problems that China has experienced before and since World War II also inform Shao's demeanor and maturity. Politics, greed, hunger, betrayals, and countless other heartaches have been part of China's society, not just in recent history, but for longer than history can remember.

With his calm words, Shao revealed his personal answer to these tragedies. His is the path of leaving the world and its troubles. He leaves not just its humiliating defeats and pain, but its intoxicating victories as well. He'll renounce and leave behind the famous “three poisons” of greed, hatred, and folly. His personal answer is to live without rancor or resentment. He has mentally already “left home.” He'll soon show his complete devotion to this ideal with the act of shaving off the rest of his hair, publically shedding the final vanity that identifies him with the samsaric world. He'll be someone who does not bow to a king.

THE TRAIN GLIDES silently out of the station and accelerates out of town, slipping quietly over the Yang-tse and speeding into the countryside with none of the boisterous noise I've learned to expect from a Chinese railway. The train from Nanjing to Wuhan looks and moves very much like Japan's old Shinkansen, the bullet train operating in that country since the 1960s. I take a last distant look at the Mufu Mountains and the forested hills where Bodhidharma's cave sits hidden in the woods. The passengers are as quiet as the train. For the next few hours I can consider some of the facts that my trip along Bodhidharma's trail has turned up and what they might mean.

When I resolved to come to Nanjing, I hadn't included the Nanjing Massacre among my reasons for doing so. Yet in some strange sense that event now looms over my journey. For the last several nights I've researched this and related events that make up the history of Japan's occupation of Nanjing on the Chinese Internet. I especially wanted to see if there were any accounts of the destruction of Long Reed Village and Changlu Temple.

What became clear to me as I searched through the many stories available is that the meta-narrative for Japan's invasion of China in World War II included, in no small part, the propaganda that it had a sacred mission to “liberate” China. This supposed liberation had both a physical and spiritual component. Japan would free China from the clutches of Western imperialism and the threat of Soviet Communism, plus it would “unite” with China and other Asian countries to purge the scourge of liberal democracy from East Asia.

The spiritual component was, put simply, that the emperor was divine.

For a period of about one hundred years prior to World War II, certain of Japan's intellectuals developed, and the country came to deeply
embrace, the ideology of
kokutai
(
).The term is translated as “national identity” or “national polity” but has in the Japanese context the further implication of meaning “national essence.” Japan's
kokutai
fused together components of Japan's ancient origin myths, including the myth of an unbroken and divine line of emperors, with modern nation-state chauvinism. A big dose of metaphysical claptrap was thrown into this heady
kokutai
brew for good measure. The result was something akin to a master race theory, complete with rituals, with the emperor acting as master of ceremonies.
Kokutai
became the political “theory,” loosely defined, that underpinned Japanese militarism and expansionism.

The mythical beginning of “divine emperors” supposedly started with a goddess named Amaterasu, though the earliest-dated emperor, according to Japanese mythology, was Emperor Jimmu, who purportedly lived around 600 BCE. However, it should be noted that the historical “record” of the earliest Japanese emperors was not actually recorded in writing until after Buddhism brought that skill to the country much later. Scholars generally cite the earliest written records about the ancient Japanese emperors to the early eighth century (around the years 710—715 CE). Buddhist scriptures and the means to write history appeared in Japan more than a thousand years after the ancient Emperor Jimmu reportedly lived. Thus it seems likely that the early imperial histories were a part of the process of inventing the Japanese nation, the uniting of contending clans under unified rule.

It turns out that Buddhism played a central role in this process. The Japanese ruler Prince Shotoku (573—621), a key figure in the building of a unified Japan, famously created a “constitution” based on Buddhist and Confucian principles for the governing of the country. He lived during the Yamato period, the time when Japan's identity as a unified country took shape. During World War II, the term
Yamato
was synonymous with Japan's self-described unique national spirit or essence. One symbol of “Yamato spirit” was the country's biggest battleship of that era. Japan's largest warship, the
Yamato,
was sunk by American planes in the closing days of World War II.

The first few lines of Prince Shotoku's constitution read as follows:

The ideas set forth in these passages came directly from China. Besides the references to Buddhism's “Three Treasures,” the idea of the sovereign being the intermediary between heaven and earth is quintessential Chinese Confucian philosophy.

Buddhism entered Japan meaningfully in the sixth century when a powerful clan called the Soga gained ascendency over other clans vying for dominance. The Soga had strong ties to one of the three kingdoms then ruling Korea called the Baekje Kingdom. The Baekje, in turn, had ties directly to the Liang dynasty court of Emperor Wu. These ties were a major route for introducing Chinese culture to Japan, and they contained a heavy element of the Buddhist-Confucian philosophy that Emperor Wu expounded. It was not long after Emperor Wu's model of the “Bodhisattva [and Confucian] Emperor” entered Japan that the Soga clan utilized it as their ruling ideology. They were the entity that placed Prince Shotoku in power and espoused the Buddhist/Confucian ideology revealed in his constitution.

The official Chinese history of Emperor Wu's dynasty, the
Book of Liang
, tells how the Korean Baekje Kingdom sent many delegations
to Emperor Wu's court to study Chinese culture. The record specifically says that these delegations from Korea, in an earnest desire to learn more about Buddhism, requested copies of the Lotus and Nirvana Sutras. Emperor Wu granted their request and thus those sutras officially entered Korea during the 530s. In Japan, according to historical records, after the Soga clan seized power in 531, the Soga chieftain named Soga no Iname imported these and other Buddhist scriptures through his close ties to the Korean Baekje Kingdom. Thus the Soga clan embraced the same heady mixture of Buddhism and Confucianism that Emperor Wu used to rule his Liang dynasty, and these ideas provided the ideology underlying Japan's clan unification, as well as the key role of Japan's emperor in the country's unified society. In light of this, Emperor Wu's court directly gave rise to the supposedly unique Japanese “polity,” the ideas underlying Japan's political cohesion and establishment as a country.

But there was an even earlier and even more direct path by which Emperor Wu's Buddhism was passed to the Soga clan and thus diffused in Japan's ruling circles. In the year 522, soon after Emperor Wu received the Bodhisattva Precepts at Flowered Woods Garden, one of his subjects, a Buddhist sculptor named Sima Dadeng (
), traveled to Japan as a Buddhist missionary and artist. He took up residence in what was then Japan's power center, located in the area of modern Sakurai (“Cherry Blossom”) City in what is now Nara Prefecture. There he created a Buddha Hall and sculpted Buddha statues to be placed in it. His Buddhist proselytizing caught the ear and patronage of Soga no Iname. Thus Japan's powerful Soga clan first learned of the great ruling wisdom of Emperor Wu and his empire through the person of the sculptor/missionary Sima Dadeng. To the Soga it appeared clear that the religio-political power of Emperor Wu's great empire must have resulted from his Buddhist and Confucian devotion. Soga no Iname took this lesson to heart, became the patron of Sima Dadeng, and spread the new Buddhist doctrines in Japan.

Sima Dadeng's sculpture was carried on by his descendants in Japan and became the basis of what is known as Asuka-period Buddhist sculpture. The earliest existent Buddha statue in Japan, said to be sculpted by one of the descendants and dated to 609, still stands at Asukadera, Japan's first Buddhist temple.

Sima Dadeng's Buddhist and Confucian gospel laid the basis for the Soga clan's ruling ideology. Perhaps just as important, Sima Dadeng brought written scriptures that introduced writing to the country. The Soga used the new ideology to unify the country and instituted writing using Chinese characters. This helped them defeat their rivals, the Mononobe clan, and thus gain ascendancy as the first unifying political clique in Japan.