Tracking Bodhidharma: A Journey to the Heart of Chinese Culture

Tracking Bodhidharma: A Journey to the Heart of Chinese Culture

by Andy Ferguson
Tracking Bodhidharma: A Journey to the Heart of Chinese Culture

Tracking Bodhidharma: A Journey to the Heart of Chinese Culture

by Andy Ferguson

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Overview

The life of Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen Buddhism, has, with the passing of time, been magnified to the scale of myth, turning history into the stuff of legend. Known as the First Patriarch, Bodhidharma brought Zen from South India into China in 500 CE, changing the country forever. In Tracking Bodhidharma, Andrew Ferguson recreates the path of Bodhidharma, traveling through China to the places where the First Patriarch lived and taught. This sacred trail takes Ferguson deep into ancient China, and allows him to explore the origins of Chan [Zen] Buddhism, the cultural aftermath that Bodhidharma left in his wake, and the stories of a man who shaped a civilization.

Tracking Bodhidharma offers a previously unheard perspective on the life of Zen's most important religious leader, while simultaneously showing how that history is relevant to the rapidly developing super–power that is present–day China. By placing Zen Buddhism within the country's political landscape, Ferguson presents the religion as a counterpoint to other Buddhist sects, a catalyst for some of the most revolutionary moments in China's history, and as the ancient spiritual core of a country that is every day becoming more an emblem of the modern era.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781619020795
Publisher: Catapult
Publication date: 04/12/2012
Sold by: Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format: eBook
Pages: 288
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Andy Ferguson is a graduate of the Chinese Language and Literature program at the University of Oregon. He has lived in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan, and has traveled extensively in East and Southeast Asia since 1978. He has organized and led numerous tours to visit Chinese Zen history sites. He lives in Petaluma, California.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

An Auspicious Date

From high above, Sublime the vision, Islands beneath the rising sun.

Poem composed by Emperor Hirohito of Japan in 1939, submitted as his contribution to an imperial poetry contest

ON DECEMBER 7, 1941, Japanese Zeros flew out of the rising sun of a Hawaiian morning to rain destruction on the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor. Personally planned and approved by Emperor Hirohito, the attack plunged the United States into the most catastrophic war in human history. But the date that flashed across the screens of Japan's war propaganda films celebrating the attack was not December 7, but December 8, the date that had already arrived in Japan when the first bombs fell in Hawaii.

The date was not serendipitous. Emperor Hirohito selected December 8 as particularly auspicious and meaningful, for according to Japan's Buddhist tradition, that date corresponds with Buddha's enlightenment day, the day when the historical Buddha Shakyamuni sat in meditation as dawn approached, then suddenly experienced enlightenment as he observed the morning star that accompanied the sunrise.

The symbolic date of the attack punctuates the role that Buddhism and its doctrines played in Japan's militarist and imperial ideology. Recently the historian Brian Victoria has detailed how Buddhism, including Zen Buddhism, played a critical role in the ideology of emperor worship in Japan before and during the war. The religion meshed deeply with native Shintoism to underpin the country's war propaganda. How, one might ask, did a pacifist religion, known as dedicated to peace and brotherhood, travel so far from its fundamental teachings to become a weapon in Japan's arsenal of imperial war?

These strange developments belie the notion that Buddhism has unerringly sided with pacifism and opposed armed conflict. As a Zen practitioner and researcher for the past three decades, I confess that Brian Victoria's narrative of the events of WWII presents me with a troubling set of questions that beg for an explanation.

Fully understanding Zen and its perplexing history has led me here to Hong Kong where I sit today on the shore in Kowloon watching the Star Ferry shuttle back and forth to Hong Kong Island under a bright autumn sun. I plan to follow the long overgrown trail of the figure credited with establishing Buddhist Zen in China, a legendary and enigmatic Indian holy man named Bodhidharma. What, after all, did he stand for?

Much about Bodhidharma's life remains obscure, and scholars debate almost everything about him. What we know comes from old Chinese records of varied reliability, complemented with legends and folklore blown up to mythic proportions.

Bodhidharma (? — 528?), a Buddhist missionary from South India, arrived in China about fifteen centuries ago near where I write these words. His ship sailed into China on the Pearl River, the waterway that flows past the Chinese city of Guangzhou (previously called Canton) and empties into the South China Sea. He would ultimately be remembered as the First Ancestor of Zen, China's dominant religious tradition. Many in China say that Bodhidharma and the Zen masters that followed him, his "spiritual descendants," comprise the essence of Chinese culture.

Guangzhou, where he landed, has long been a gate of intercourse between China and the world. It is where British gunboats compelled China to import British opium, a drug that helped anaesthetize Chinese resistance to Western and Japanese imperialism, in the infamous Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century. Guangzhou is also where Sun Yat-sen and other luminaries of the 1911 Republican Revolution organized a failed attempt to introduce Western-style democracy to China.

Bodhidharma's influence on China was far greater than the Opium Wars or even the Republican Revolution.

Who was he? We know little of certainty about his origins beyond that he was a Buddhist monk who was born a Brahman, India's highest caste. He reached China after years at sea had thinned his cheeks, but his eyes, says his legend, matched the ocean's blue waves. They may have betrayed a Greco-Aryan bloodline. Perhaps his ancestors came from where Alexander's army rolled across India and his soldiers settled to intermarry with the local population. The earliest statues of the Buddha, which appeared where Alexander's colonies prevailed, look more like Greek gods than Hindu deities. The Chinese nicknamed Bodhidharma the "Blue-Eyed Barbarian."

Other South Asian monks besides Bodhidharma braved the tortuous currents and typhoons of the South China Sea to spread Buddha's teachings. Modern historians call those ancient sea lanes the Ocean Silk Road, the trading route that passes between South and East Asia through the Strait of Malacca.

Bodhidharma stepped ashore in a China fractured with ethnic rivalry, feudal fiefdoms, and a prolonged civil war between the country's north and south. In the centuries before his arrival, China experienced conflict, disintegration, and chaos. The people who embraced Bodhidharma's teaching had endured much and suffered more. They had already known Buddhism for several centuries before Bodhidharma arrived. Yet his Zen caught the imagination of the world-weary populace, and so rulers, aristocrats, and commoners eventually embraced religious practices connected with his name. The teachings of one lonely sramana (holy man) who walked up a gangplank in Guangzhou into a chaotic country eventually conquered it, then spread far beyond its borders. I'll start my search for Bodhidharma's traces by going to where he stepped ashore.

LOWU STATION, ON THE BORDER BETWEEN HONG KONG AND CHINA'S GUANGDONG PROVINCE

The white incandescent bulbs of the immigration hall cast pallor on the faces of people in slow moving lines waiting to cross the border into China.

There is a short, pock-faced Chinese man with a leggy girlfriend standing ahead of me. She displays Italian fashion from hair to high heels, the shoes making her a head taller than her boyfriend. She is intently focused on everything he says. The man's pocked face and eyes convey menace, and his tailored suit sticks out among a ragged line of people wearing street market clothes. His eyes skip back and forth, parodying some shifty-eyed stereotype. I remember news stories of Hong Kong triad godfathers and gangs and so avoid staring at the odd couple. My mind drifts to thoughts about the trip that lies before me.

But my thoughts are scattered by a shrieking sound. It takes a few startled seconds to realize that I'm hearing the sound effects from the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. It's the ree, ree, ree part where a shadowy figure is steadily swinging a broad-bladed knife under a gray light, plunging it into the naked body of Marion Crane (played by Janet Leigh) in the Bates Motel shower. I turn and look for the source of the sound. Then it grows louder, and I turn back to see that the pock-faced man has pulled his mobile phone from his jacket. He presses the button to talk. The shrieking sound stops. "Wei!" (Hello) he says. He begins talking in Cantonese. None of the other people in line pays any attention. Welcome to new China.

When I first traveled this route into China in 1978, there were no stampeding crowds. On that morning a humid fog lifted on the Hong Kong side to reveal a landscape of ragged shacks and fish ponds where limp Kuomintang flags hung defiantly within sight of the border. After a few hours' ride from Kowloon Station, our creaky train rolled across a splintered trestle to stop at the bare-brick Lowu checkpoint. Our group, a "U.S.-China People's Friendship Tour," looked excitedly at the rice paddies. Then, with entry chops pressed in passports, we rolled into the direct aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. The rice fields and shacks that met us just across the border in 1978 are now the supercity of Shenzhen, the export manufacturing zone that China's leader Deng Xiaoping dreamed of when he said "to get rich is glorious."

Many Westerners, if they've thought about Zen at all, associate it with Japan. But the tradition flourished in China for about seven hundred years before it finally took root in the Land of the Rising Sun. By then its original incandescence was dimmed by devotional religious practice and literary artifice. Politicians, poets, and dilettantes laid claim to the religion. Even in that age, the word Zen was thought to be cool and hip, something hard to define, imparting an attractive and enigmatic air to anyone believed to understand it.

Although after many centuries Zen suffered decline in China, it found a strange, fresh new life by leaping across the East China Sea to Japan. There its impact was widespread, stretching deeply into the country's cultural life. It spawned enduring arts well-known today, such as ornate tea ceremonies, austere rock gardens, and poignant flower arrangements.

In China, Zen interacted with China's native Confucian and Taoist culture, and this meeting had a deep and lasting influence. The religion spread not just because of its engaging insight, but also because its literature coincided with the development of woodblock printing. In its late literary heyday, Zen rode this technological wave, then caught another with the Chinese invention of movable type by an alchemist named Bi Sheng.

Zen is a Sinicized form of Indian Buddhism. The hybrid came about partly because translators introduced Buddhist ideas from India to China using Chinese words already pregnant with meaning. The meanings came mainly from China's nature-loving, magic-imbued Taoist philosophy. For example, when Buddhism arrived in China, the country already used the phrase "The Way" to describe an exalted path of philosophical or aesthetic insight and practice. "Attaining the Way" was a phrase imbued with both Taoist and Confucian ideals, China's native modes of thought. Buddhism exploited this phraseology, and "attaining the Buddha Way" nimbly introduced Buddha's enlightenment to a Chinese audience. Chinese language and thought molded and culturally reinterpreted Buddhism in China. This pattern was widespread and long-lived.

Buddhism was long established in China before "Zen" became its dominant current. The religion arrived about five hundred years before Bodhidharma sailed up the Pearl River. In fact, even Zen and Zen practice were common in China before Bodhidharma reached its shores and was crowned Zen's "First Ancestor." So a major question about Bodhidharma concerns why it was he, and not any of his many Zen predecessors, who got that sobriquet.

Some commentators suggest that Bodhidharma was called the First Ancestor of the Zen school because he was the first to emphasize directly observing the nature of the mind. But I haven't found evidence that this is so, for "observing mind" and equating the mind with Buddha's teachings was taught in China before Bodhidharma arrived there. Evidence suggests that as novel as Bodhidharma's approach to teaching Zen may have been, it was his politics that secured his importance to the tradition.

Bodhidharma's spiritual descendents flourished in China and spread his message to Korea and Vietnam within a century or so of its arrival in China. Now there are Zen teachers and students in China, other East Asian countries, and many other places. In the West, Zen has a small but growing group of followers.

THE TRAIN TO GUANGZHOU

On the fast new train to Guangzhou, a train attendant passes out complimentary bottles of water. She hands two bottles to a middle-aged Chinese man sitting next to me and he offers me one of them. I thank him in Chinese, and he says, "You must live in China." I tell him I'm just a tourist, and he says, "No, you speak well. You must live here." I ask him where he's from. He says he's from Guangzhou and is returning from visiting his son in Hong Kong. We chat a little about what we're doing. His name is Li. He's over sixty and is a businessman with a factory in Guangzhou that makes metal products. He sells die-cast parts and castings to some big-name tool companies in North America.

He says he recently visited the United States as a tourist.

"What did you think?" I ask him.

"You have a nice environment in America, with lots of land and not many people." Then he says, "Here in China, we have too many people. That's the biggest problem. Many other problems come from that."

While we chat, a young boy a few seats away sits entranced with a video game. He erupts with an exclamation. Mr. Li looks at the boy for a long moment then turns to speak to me again.

"Ah! When I was a boy, I lived in a poor village. We had to make up our own games. We didn't have toys or even a radio. We would make straw figures or mud balls. Even if we only had mud balls, we would play all day and half the night. I remember that the best thing was when some grown-up would dress up in a costume and walk around on high stilts. We kids would run down the street after him, all excited, jumping up and down, pointing and yelling. That was our entertainment."

After we talk a while more, I ask Mr. Li a question. "Do you know who Bodhidharma is?"

"I do," he says. "When I was a child, my grandmother kept a little shrine in the house where she prayed. The statue in the shrine was of the bodhisattva Kwan Yin, but a little figure that sat next to it was Bodhidharma. She called him "Saint Bodhi." That's what I remember. The figure was carved out of wood."

CHAPTER 2

Guangzhou

IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON, the train arrives at Guangzhou Station, and I find my way to a nearby subway station and make my way to my hotel. Unlike the barren and broken city that met me in 1978, in the truly new China of free enterprise there are many small hotel chains. My lodging tonight is typical, an inexpensive but comfortable chain named Like Home.

When first I arrived here in 1978, Guangzhou and the entire mainland lay crushed under the debris of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Then there were no evident traces of Bodhidharma in the city where he arrived in China. The night streets of Guangzhou in 1978 were quite literally dark, for even streetlights were rare. We walked long boulevards illuminated only by the headlights of an occasional public bus or belching truck. The Chinese pedestrians still sported the blue or gray Mao jackets of the day. But even then, just before economic reforms were unleashed, things were changing. One night I walked with two young women from the tour past a dark intersection. Emerging from the drab landscape, we discovered an advertisement for a local business hotel's coffee shop (Guangzhou was already the site of China's annual foreign trade fair). The ad was a near-life-size, cutout figure of a Western woman with long, wavy blond hair, the word welcome printed awkwardly on her torso. It was a portent of the future. "Look," said one of my feminist companions dejectedly, "she's windswept!"

We found little else of interest in Guangzhou then. The tour visited the Wampoa Military Academy where, in the early twentieth century, cadets of Sun Yat-sen's nationalist army trained to help build a new Chinese nation. We walked the barracks and looked at old photos above the spartan beds, sad shots of young men born in an unfortunate time, most fated to die in China's early but aborted attempt at modernity.

I remember a banquet we attended. It was in a well-known restaurant used by foreign traders and local officials. A high-level Communist cadre came to join us for dinner. He didn't say much but seemed to relish the good meal being paid for by our Beijing-based guides. I ventured to try out my Chinese language skills on him by asking him the following bit of nonsense.

"Wasn't the smashing of the Gang of Four important because the failures of their radical policies only dampened the peasants' enthusiasm for socialism?"

He didn't look up as he slurped his soup, a few drops glistening on his chin. "Yes, yes, of course," he mumbled. "That is fundamental …" He slurped another spoonful and stuffed a dumpling in his mouth, then repeated himself. "That is fundamental."

Whether in 1978 or today, knowing how to read and speak Chinese is almost necessary for traveling alone in China, since there are few English or other European language signs to help guide you through the country. Yet some language facility is no panacea. I've spent considerable time searching for places shown on maps that are maddeningly hard or impossible to locate. Locals don't always know the places I'm looking for and, anyway, seldom provide good directions to find something. Asking directions often goes like this:

Me: "Excuse me, can you tell me where Western Happiness Temple is located?"

Direction-giver: "Go straight."

Me: "Is it on the right or left?"

Direction-giver: "Just go straight."

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "Tracking Bodhidharma"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Andy Ferguson.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Title Page,
Introduction,
1. An Auspicious Date,
2. Guangzhou,
3. Hualin Temple,
4. The Layout of a Traditional Chinese Temple,
5. Grand Buddha Temple,
6. Guangxiao Temple,
7 Another Visit to Hualin Temple,
8. Traveling North,
9. Zen at War,
10. The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Ancestor,
11. Nashua Temple: The Sixth Ancestor Huineng's Dharma Seat,
12. Yunmen Temple,
13. Danxia Mountain,
14. Separate Transmission Temple,
15. Nanchang City,
16. Youmin Temple,
17. The Trip to Baizhang Temple,
18. Baizhang Temple,
19. Jiujiang City,
20. Up or Down the Yang-tse River?,
21. Meeting Gunabhadra?,
22. Laozu Si, the Old Ancestor's Temple,
23. Nanjing City,
24. Emperor Wu and Imperial-Way Buddhism,
25. Tianchang City and Bodhidharma's True Victory Temple,
26. Linggu Temple on Bell Mountain,
27. Emperor Wu, the Chakravartin King and Bodhisattva Emperor,
28. Emperor Wu and His Family,
29. Emperor Wu and the Temples of Bell Mountain,
30. Mufu Mountains and Bodhidharma's Nanjing Cave,
31. The Fusin of Confucianism and Buddhism under Emperor Wu,
32. The Tai Cheng Palace and Hualin Garden,
33. The Poem by Crown Prince Zhao Ming (Xiao Tong),
34. Stone Fortress and Refreshing Mountain,
35. Dingshan Temple,
36. Changlu Temple,
37. Train to Wuhan,
38. Xiangfan City,
39. Mount Song and Shaolin Temple,
40. Shaolin Temple,
41. Bodhidharma's Cave,
42. Huishan Temple,
43. Ordination Platforms: The Battle Ground between Imperial and Bodhidharma Zen?,
44. The Temples of Luoyang,
45. Empty Appearance Temple,
46. Bodhidharma's Memorial Stele: Written by Emperor Wu?,
47. Bodhidharma Memorial Ceremony,
48. Train to Shanghai,
49. Bodhidharma's Fate,
50. Epilogue,
51. Was Japan to Blame?,
Appendix:,
Copyright Page,

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