Tracking Bodhidharma (48 page)

“‘The temple isn't open yet,” she says. “Later when it opens, you can come to visit and pay admission to view it.”

Our taxi driver, who knows that we've come from far away, starts arguing with the woman to let us come in. She is hesitant. I tell her I've come all the way from the United States and want to see this old temple and that my friends have wanted to come here for many years. She finally relents, and we walk on a stone path leading to the old temple's foundations. The entire “temple” is little more than a large square block of sod and brick, purportedly its old foundation. The whole edifice is about sixty feet square, with a smaller square of sod and brick sitting atop the first. It leaves a lot to the imagination. I'm extremely suspicious that such a sod and brick remnant was not eroded away long ago. I know that near here there is a good deal of rubble from what used to be the walls of ancient Luoyang City. Those ruins are barely discernable in the landscape. It seems hard to believe that the foundation of this old temple could have remained uniquely intact, even if the location where
it
sits is accurate (another dubious proposition). A scam? Maybe that's why the place hasn't been allowed to open yet. Maybe the authorities do not want to let such an obviously fake “ruin” defraud a gullible public.

Ancient information about the real Yongning Temple comes from a document called
Temples of Luoyang.
The text, written only about twenty years after Bodhidharma died, includes a passage that Zen scholars and practitioners have long assumed to be a firsthand account about the author's meeting with Bodhidharma. Furthermore, the text is the source of the legend that connects White Horse Temple to Buddhism's appearance in China. Composed around the year 540 by an official named Yang Xuanzhi (pronounced
Yang Swan-jer
), the document hints at Luoyang's ancient glory by providing glowing descriptions of the city's most famous temple landmarks during the period between the years 520 and 527 CE.

Yang Xuanzhi, the writer of the text, played a key role in Bodhidharma's legends for various reasons. His
Temples of Luoyang
is often
cited as the earliest impartial historical text that mentions Bodhidharma by name. But later texts, such as the
Compendium of Five Lamps
, connect Yang Xuanzhi to Bodhidharma in other ways. Such late texts claim that this same man named Yang visited Bodhidharma just before the latter died. So, on the face of it, anything we can glean about Yang's life may help prove or disprove parts of Bodhidharma's legend.

In
Temples of Luoyang,
Yang Xuanzhi first describes the layout of the imperial palace and its surrounding wall and gates. He then moves on to Yongning Temple, which was located close to the palace and was clearly the grandest of all of the hundreds of temples in Luoyang at that time. The description Yang provides of Yongning Temple is detailed. It includes, for example, a description of the temple's nine-storied pagoda that stretched ten
zhang
(about one hundred feet) into the air. The pagoda was ornately decorated with figures of the Buddha, and the roof tiles of the temple, decorated with gold leaf, glistened in the sun. After he describes the temple, Yang tells about meeting a monk named Bodhidharma who was at the place and was marveling at the splendor of the temple. This is the reference that many people, including many scholars, take as an authentic early reference to Bodhidharma. Yang's account of the monk reads as follows:

The story purports to show an encounter with the monk that occurred in the mid-520s, before the temple was severely damaged in a windstorm around the year 527. As such it places a monk named Bodhidharma in Luoyang prior to that year. Furthermore, the monk claims to be 150
years old. This text therefore seems to be the source of Daoxuan's claim about Bodhidharma's age that appears in the
Continued Biographies
,

Yet there are clearly aspects of this story that make it suspicious. The monk named Bodhidharma is described as being from Persia, not from South India, as related in the
Continued Biographies
. The Southern India origin for Bodhidharma is widely deemed more reliable, since the
Continued Biographies
says he came to China by sea. If he came directly from Persia, it seems more likely he might have come across the Silk Road. The monk also claims to have traveled throughout the “Buddha realms.” Despite the obvious hyperbole of the statement, it nonetheless seems reasonable to assume that if the monk came from Persia, he did so on a route that passed through the many Buddhist kingdoms of that area. Thus the term “Buddha realms” implies the places in question to be west of Luoyang, not the South Seas.

It's critical to note that Yang Xuanzhi authored the
Temples of Luoyang
more than twenty years after this purported meeting with Bodhidharma took place. This casts their alleged encounter in a suspicious light. Another very odd detail of the account is the manner of the monk's practice. He is said to have “clasped his hands and chanted
namu
for days on end.” Frankly, that doesn't sound like the Bodhidharma that is described in the
Continued Biographies
. Nowhere in that text are Bodhidharma and his disciples described as continuously chanting
namu,
a Pure Land Buddhist style of practice. Quite the contrary, he and his disciples are described as devoted to meditation practice.

All this makes the text rather suspicious. Yet, in the
Continued Biographies,
it is obvious that the author Daoxuan has used this account in the
Temples of Luoyang
to cite Bodhidharma's age as 150. What this means is that confusion about Bodhidharma apparently started quite early, and Daoxuan must have been at pains, at least initially, to nail down his real story. In light of all this, can
Temples of Luoyang
and its description of Bodhidharma be taken as describing a real event?

Yang Xuanzhi, the author of
Temples of Luoyang
, was not a Buddhist, and his meeting with a monk named Bodhidharma is described in the context of Yang's description of one of Luoyang's most famous, if very short-lived, temples. At the time that Yang wrote his account, Yongning Temple, indeed most of Luoyang's Buddhist Temples, had already been completely destroyed. Luoyang itself was largely in ruins,
the result of a war that ended the Northern Wei dynasty and divided it into the contending Eastern and Western Wei dynasties in the year 534. In the
Temples of Luoyang,
Yang Xuanzhi compares the situation in Luoyang before and after the war, saying, “In the city where more than a thousand temples stood, now a bell is hardly heard.”

After reviewing the historical evidence about this alleged meeting, I've concluded that the monk described in Yang Xuanzhi's description was not the person of Bodhidharma I've been looking for in China these past weeks. I'd go so far as to say that I think the encounter was instead a fabrication by Yang Xuanzhi to enhance his story about the beauty of Yongning Temple. It's plausible there were holy men who honored Yongning Temple in some manner as Yang describes. But the story he provides, written twenty years after the fact, seems to be an amalgam of events assembled by his memory and imagination. He may have invoked the name Bodhidharma, which likely had some currency in that age, simply to enhance his unlikely story. A chance encounter between Yang and Bodhidharma, on reflection, seems to strain credulity.

Besides the
Continued Biographies
, Daoxuan wrote another text called the
Guanghong Mingji
. Although largely a religious treatise, it includes biographies of some famous figures of the age, including a description of Yang Xuanzhi himself. Daoxuan makes it clear that Yang Xuanzhi was not sympathetic with Buddhism. Moreover, Yang's description of Luoyang's temples was clearly not nostalgic. It was meant, instead, as part of a political critique of Buddhism, an attack on the religion. Yang resented the extravagant expenditures that went to building temples and supporting the religion, money that he thought would have been put to better use to maintain order in the empire and uphold Confucian ideology. The
Temples of Luoyaug
had a political purpose, which was to attack Buddhism as a religion harmful to the state. Given the political purpose of the text, it seems likely that the depiction of Bodhidharma in
Temples of Luoyang
was meant as a caricature, and Bodhidharma's name was used in this instance because Yang wanted to faintly denigrate him and his followers with an unflattering portrait.

In sum, I doubt that the account of Bodhidharma in
Temples of Luoyang
is authentic. Chinese scholars have shown that at least one other monk named Bodhidharma lived in China at the time in question. If there was an encounter between Yang Xuanzhi and a monk named
Bodhidharma (which I doubt), then the account suggests that some other Bodhidharma was at Yongning Temple that day.

All these doubts notwithstanding, here we are taking multiple pictures of Bodhidharma's alleged home, Yongning Temple. Shanli convinces the woman guarding the old temple site to let us look around for ten minutes or so. I shoot a few photographs of Shanli and Ronan standing on the ruins (if the bricks were genuine, would such a thing be allowed?). After Shanli and Ronan are satisfied, we clamber back into the taxi.

Our driver pulls out of the Yongning Temple entrance road, and I ask him to stop atop the highway overpass that crosses some train tracks just nearby. On the overpass we get out of the car for a look around. The east-and-west-running track appears to pass approximately along the same line where the southern wall of the old Luoyang palace of Emperor Xiao Wen once sat. Remembering old maps of the place, I point out to Shanli and Ronan where the palace probably stood and where the old walls and gates were likely positioned.

From our high vantage point we can see many temporary buildings sitting among the farmers' fields to the north. The taxi driver tells us that archeologists are indeed now exploring the whole area due to some recent important finds here.

I then look east from our vantage point and ask the taxi driver if he knows where a place called Heyin (“South of the River”) is located. He says he's never heard of that spot.

An incident in the year 528 occurred somewhere near where we're standing, possibly to the east, near where the Luo River now flows. In that year there was a power struggle between the Wei emperor Xiao Ming and a faction led by his mother the Empress Dowager. A general named Er Zhurong took advantage of the political upheaval to convince the emperor to summon officials to Heyin, a place near the Luo River, for an imperial ceremony of sacrifice to heaven. Er Zhurong, seeking to eliminate obstacles to taking power, then unleashed his troops on the crowds of officials and others assembled there, slaughtering up to two thousand people. Because of this flagrant act of terrorism, the aristocracy of Luoyang fled the city in fear, and the emperor ceded power to Er Zhurong. Some scholars have speculated that Bodhidharma was among those killed in this massacre at Heyin. This idea comes from the fact that in the biography of Bodhidharma's main disciple, Huike, Daoxuan
writes that he “buried [Bodhidharma's] remains on the banks of the Luo River. Also, the year 528 fits well into the same account's approximate time of Bodhidharma's death. The text says Huike expounded Bodhidharma's teaching after the latter's death and then left the area in the year 534. This Huike biography contradicts what Daoxuan wrote about Bodhidharma himself, however, for in that passage he wrote that the place of Bodhidharma's death was unknown.

Without a clear explanation for the discrepancy between these two accounts written by the same author, we can only guess why they differ. At least one Chinese scholar says it is likely that Huike's biography was written many years after Bodhidharma's, when Daoxuan had met some of Huike's disciples and gained new information about Bodhidharma's life. Perhaps someone claimed that Bodhidharma died in the Heyin massacre, and Daoxuan decided that the idea was credible. So he thereupon added the report that Huike buried Bodhidharma on the banks of the Luo River to the
Continued Biographies.

My own view is that it is unlikely that Bodhidharma died in the Heyin incident. Other evidence about him indicates he avoided royal assemblies, and it is hard to imagine that he would have wanted to take part in the event, or even be found in the vicinity, of the imperial court city of Luoyang. Heyin, despite theories and timelines that support the idea, was probably not the place where Bodhidharma died.

IN THE YEAR 2002, the Buddhist author and authority Bill Porter (Red Pine) and I decided to try to find Bodhidharma's grave (which is not believed to be the same place where he died). We had only a vague idea of its location. At the time I had not yet studied the memorial to Bodhidharma that references Bear Ear Mountain as his burial place. But that location is mentioned in some later records I was aware of. I had no idea where Bear Ear Mountain was located. I had an old map that indicated the place to be an entire range of mountains, not simply one mountain, in an area southwest of Luoyang. But other places in China have the same name, and I was in dark about where to look for it. Bill Porter seemed confident that the place was indeed southwest of Luoyang and thought he had a good idea where it was. So I contacted some travel-business friends in Luoyang and explained that we wanted to find the place. Amazingly, my friends not only quickly found its location, but also arranged for a van and guide to take us there.