Tracking Bodhidharma (51 page)

There is yet another piece of evidence to consider. Zhao Ming also composed a separate poem about an unidentified monk who gave a talk to an audience at Tongtai Temple. That was the special temple built behind Tai Cheng Palace where Emperor Wu lived during times when he had renounced the imperial throne. In that poem about a monk talking at Tongtai Temple, Zhao Ming first refers to Vulture Peak, the place in India where Buddha taught and that was the legendary origin place of the Zen sect, the place where Buddha held up a flower. The reference to Vulture Peak may suggest not only a link to Zen, but also that the lecturing monk was a foreigner. Here's a translation of the first few lines of the “The Virtuous Talk of a Monk at Tongtai Temple” by Xiao Tong (Zhao Ming):

Overall, the tone of this poem and of his poem of the meeting at Kaishan Temple is similar. Moreover, the phrase “scriptures hide the Buddha realm” can be taken to mean that the speaker that day, whoever he was, counseled against relying on scriptures to understand the Dharma. This suggests a link to Zen's mind teachings, the practice that relied on “just observing” and that avoided the metaphysics of the sutras.

Connections between Bodhidharma's memorials and the poetry of Zhao Ming and his younger brother do not prove that Zhao Ming composed even a portion of the memorials. But taken altogether, the first part of the memorials text and Zhao Ming's poetry are suspiciously of the same flavor.

Yet there is a major reason why the Zen tradition and many scholars will not accept that Zhao Ming could have composed any part of the memorial to Bodhidharma. That problem lies in the fact that the date given for Bodhidharma's death that appears on the monuments, the fifth day of the twelfth (lunar) month of year 2 in the Datong era, or 536, occurred five years after Prince Zhao Ming himself is known to have died (531). This contradiction is found in some other old records.

There is a text called the
Baolin Biography,
generally thought to have been composed around the year 801. The
Baolin Biography
agrees with the date offered on the Bodhidharma memorials for his death, yet the text also specifically claims that Bodhidharma's memorials were composed by Crown Prince Zhao Ming. One or the other, or both, of these facts must be wrong.

How can these confusing and contradictory accounts be reconciled? Remember that the
Continued Biographies,
the earliest datable account of Bodhidharma and his disciples' lives, places his death sometime prior to 534, the time when Huike left Luoyang and traveled to the territory of the Eastern Wei dynasty. If that account is roughly accurate, and it is the best account we have regarding the times involved, then Bodhidharma's death could have occurred as much as three years or so prior to Prince Zhao Ming's death due to illness in 531. In that case, Zhao Ming could indeed have composed, or helped compose, a
document memorializing Bodhidharma before his own untimely death in the year 531.

The appearance of the phrase “Mind illuminates a dark room” in Prince Xiao Wang's poem raises another possibility. That is that the memorial was composed not by Zhao Ming but by Xiao Wang, Emperor Wu's second son. In that case, it may have been composed long after the death of both Bodhidharma and Zhao Ming. Xiao Wang lived until the year 551, even ascending the dynastic throne for a brief period under difficult circumstances two years before his own death.

Could Jingjue or some other author of the steles have added the 536 date to an earlier text? And why would he do so? I believe there was a great deal of confusion about the precise date that Bodhidharma died. The
Continued Biographies
offers contradictory information on the year, and this confusion is revealed in later records.

For whatever reason, the “official” story of Bodhidharma, the story that the steles provide as a cautionary tale, places his death in the year 536. Later accounts that say Bodhidharma arrived in China in 527 appear to be calculated by subtracting the nine years he reportedly spent meditating in a cave from the listed date of his death on the memorial steles, namely 536.

What seems plausible, but not provable, is that Emperor Wu and the rest of his court met Bodhidharma on one or more occasions on or before the year 524. Bodhidharma and Huike both may have come to visit Bodhidharma's ailing oldest disciple, Sengfu. Or they may have come to visit during the grand funeral described in Sengfu's biography. Then, perhaps Bodhidharma at long last consented to give a talk at Kaishan Temple or even to the court at Tongtai Temple or Flowered Woods Garden. Upon Sengfu's death, Emperor Wu's oldest daughter, Princess Yong Xing, declared her allegiance to his teachings and petitioned the Crown Prince Zhao Ming to write his memorial. Could Xiao Wang, younger brother to the same crown prince, have already received the precepts from Sengfu or Bodhidharma at Tongtai Temple, thus honoring their ideal of not entering the actual palace that stood across the street from the temple's front gate?

And what if there was a meeting? What if Bodhidharma did in fact come to visit Sengfu from his little temple in Tianchang, sixty miles away? Perhaps Bodhidharma told the court that it was Huike, not
Sengfu, who really understood his teaching. Then, to avoid their new celebrity, Bodhidharma and Huike left the area and returned to the north either on foot or by sailing up the Yang-tse and Han Rivers, returning to the area where Bodhidharma first took Sengfu as a disciple thirty years earlier. Bodhidharma may have thereafter had even more stature because of an encounter with Emperor Wu. Then, around the time 528 to 530, Bodhidharma died. Although Emperor Wu had not grasped what Bodhidharma had said during their encounter, he may have still tried to share the spiritual limelight with the famous Indian sage by declaring him to be his teacher. Prince Zhao Ming, assigned to issue a proclamation of praise for Bodhidharma, wrote something along the lines of the first half of the memorial text, and this was, or served as the basis for, the text used when the steles were carved and erected in the early 700s.

This version of possible events conforms and takes into account the narrative of the
Continued Biographies
, the best available source about Bodhidharma's life. It also suggests an origin for Bodhidharma's memorial steles that was not fabricated out of thin air. Yet the date given for Bodhidharma's death on the steles, 536, cannot be reconciled with the version of events provided in the
Continued Biographies.
The mystery continues.

There are other unanswered questions here. If the phrases about illuminating a “dark room” and references to a “sea of wisdom” were only added to the memorial steles because the author, two centuries after Bodhidharma lived, was aware of the poems by the Liang princes and tried to give authenticity to the steles, why are there no other allusions to those princes or their writings on the steles? This implies that the writer of some of the steles was one of the princes. And could it mean that the year 536 given for Bodhidharma's death is, after all, reliable, and that Xiao Wang, not his older brother Zhao Ming, was the author?

But Daoxuan, author of the
Continued Biographies,
did not make any reference to the 536 date of Bodhidharma's death, although he worked on the
Continued Biographies
over a twenty-year period and had access to disciples intimate with Bodhidharma's Zen tradition.

In my view, the memorial steles attributed to Emperor Wu have a connection to the Liang Court, though the exact nature of the connection is obscure. The text indicates that Emperor Wu's sons influenced, directly or indirectly, the first part of the memorial's contents. It appears
that certain legendary aspects of Bodhidharma's life, such as his “nine years” of sitting meditation, his mythical return to “western regions,” and his meeting with Emperor Wu, were known and widely circulated at the time the stelae were made. The contents also suggest these old memorials were not composed in a single sitting by a single writer.

Scholars contend that different religious factions, whether Buddhist, Taoist, or Christian, advance mythologies that will enhance their political positions with the state. This is clearly true. Bodhidharma's story, based on impartial historical accounts and relatively reliable records, also suggests a political element was central to the plot, but not a political element of ingratiating his life to emperors and their families. Indeed, his story seems to indicate just the opposite. Bodhidharma's life, related in the
Continued Biographies
and the memorial steles, and even possibly by the poetry of the Crown Prince Zhao Ming, was of a life devoted to solitary practice that avoided emperors and perhaps even the religious metaphysics that darkened his age.

AS THE SUN slowly brightens the morning fog, I sit in a late-model black sedan waiting to be driven to the Bodhidharma memorial ceremony at Empty Appearance Temple. This Dharma meeting takes place every year on the fifth day of the tenth lunar month, usually falling sometime in early November by the Western calendar. At the first such convocation, which occurred in the autumn of the year Bill Porter and I sought out the place, more than fifty thousand people attended. Every year since then on that date, monks from around China and even other countries have joined with lay people to commemorate Bodhidharma in big public observance at the same site.

The celebration features groups of lay people who have traveled from afar, bands of peasant musicians and dancers, demonstrations by young martial arts practitioners from Shaolin Temple, and other colorful sights. There's an art exhibition in one of the temple halls that is devoted to Bodhidharma, a few speeches by government officials and high-ranking monks praising “Bodhidharma Culture,” and general China country fair festivities.

Every year at this Dharma convocation, there is a contingent of lay Buddhist women from Luoyang City who attend. Wearing beautiful lay Buddhist robes, they carry a banner announcing their group, and they take an active part in the celebrations. I saw them during my first visit to the ceremony. They were coming up the road to the temple in a long procession. Every three steps they'd make a full prostration on the road, followed by three more steps and another prostration. They always seem, to me, the most dedicated and enthusiastic supporters of this blood vein of Zen culture, this link to China's “cultural essence.”

A half mile or so from the temple is a big
paifang
, a wide gate that
arches above the entrance road. This morning I ask the driver of the sedan giving me a ride to the celebrations to stop there. I get out and stand watching while the lay ladies of Luoyang pass in their slow, noble procession of bowing and devotion. When they have finally all passed the
paifang,
I fall in behind them and follow suit.

THE TRAIN FROM Luoyang to Shanghai is a communications trap. It leaves at 9:00 PM, so I need to book an extra half day, at least, on my hotel room in Luoyang. Crowds stretch across the plaza in front of the train station. I arrive more than an hour before I need to because my time in my hotel has run out. I stand in the cold wondering if the scene inside the station is more depressing than the square in front of it. Should I go in or not? Then, even though I have a first-class ticket, I find there's no first-class waiting room, so I place my backpack and suitcase in some strange unknown liquid beneath the only seat I've found open in the Number 4 Waiting Hall. The words
Number
4
Waiting Hall
are themselves dehumanizing and a cause for melancholy. I listen to the same songs on my iPod that I've heard a thousand times, and time drags on to the appointed hour. Finally a surge in the crowd signals that the lights indicating “Shanghai, Ticket Inspection” are now flashing. My suitcase is four times larger than any other traveler's, and I strain to get it down the long flight of steps leading to the train platform without letting it slip and roll free, crushing some child innocently clutching her mother's hand on the steps below me. The sound of the suitcase wheels on the cement platform—
rrr
,
rrr
—and the sound of the train whistle in the distant night convey the loneliness of a Johnny Cash ballad. I climb aboard and find I must rearrange things in the top pocket of my suitcase so it will fit under the sleeper. My compartment mates arrive: a young couple with a little boy, maybe two years old, who looks at me with wide eyes, probably seeing his first foreigner up close. I make my usual jokes:
“Wa, a laowai!”
(“Look how big his nose is! Terrifying!”)

The mother is friendly and smiles. They all wave to someone standing outside on the platform. She says, “Say good-bye to Uncle.”

Soon I rearrange my blanket and pillow and search for sleep. But I can't sleep. Instead I mull over the things I read on the Chinese Internet
last night, the things that helped make a Chinese train station assume its bête noir atmosphere.

At 4:00 AM the train stops. I notice we're in the city of Xuzhou. We've come pretty far. Maybe they were exaggerating when they said we'd arrive in Shanghai at three thirty the next afternoon. If we're already in Xuzhou, it shouldn't take that long to get to Shanghai, should it? I get up and open the door into the empty train corridor. You can't use the restroom while the train is stopped at the station. I wait. I watch. The train finally pulls away from the station. I use the restroom and go back to the compartment. I feel anxious and can't go back to sleep.

After another sleepless hour or two, dawn breaks. The dining car is the next car down. For twenty yuan, you can have a “buffet breakfast.” I find there's only one dish out of ten or so that looks vegetarian-palatable. But I pay the twenty yuan and fill a small plate. I start to sit down at an empty table before I notice that a sign on it that indicates it is reserved for Islamic passengers eating their halal food.