Tucked away off a side street in Kyoto, about a mile from Nijo Castle -- where the last shogun announced to his followers the restoration of the Emperor and the end of the shogunate -- is a small Zen temple known as Daruma-dera, the "Temple of Daruma". (It's official name is actually Hourin-ji, which as near as I can figure means "Temple of the Dharma Wheel". It shouldn't be confused with another Hourin-ji, over in the Arashiyama area.)
Daruma is the Japanese name for Bodhidharma, the legendary founder of Zen. He's also regarded as the founder of many of the healing and martial arts that trace their origin to China, including both karate and shiatsu. That's how I became familiar with him.
He may be the most-portrayed gaijin in Japanese history. His image is everywhere -- not just in portraits, but in a peculiar sort of figurine. These are weighted so that if tipped over, they right themselves, illustrating the proverb "nana karobi, ya oki" -- "if you fall down seven times, get up eight times."
The figurines come with both eyes blank, white, and there is a wonderful little ritual involved in coloring them in. When you set out to achieve some goal, you get to color in one eye. The figurine then stares at you with that one eye, encouraging you to get to work and make your goal happen so that you get to fill in the other eye. It's strong magic. (I've used one to help remind me to keep working on this book.)
It is for its collection of these figurines that Daruma-dera is known. Supposedly, the temple houses ten thousand of them, but in Chinese and Japanese culture 10,000 often just means "more than you'd care to count".
The temple itself dates to 1718, but it was in 1933 that the tenth abbot, who used the Daruma figurines as a teaching tool, started the famous collection.
The temple was not in my guidebook, but when I stumbled across a mention of it on the web I knew I had to check it out. (Fortunately it's marked on the Periplus map of Kyoto I bought this morning.) This is a small temple, not much of a international tourist destination, there's no English brochure or signs other that the one in front. But it's definitely worth a visit if you're familiar with Bodhidharma's legend.
Bodhidharma is often shown wearing an enveloping cloak and cowl, presumably keeping him warm as he sat in his cave facing the wall. As I walked to Daruma-dera through the wind and rain, I composed a haiku:
wind bends umbrella
so my jacket's hood becomes
like Daruma's cowl
Not a very good haiku, perhaps, but there it is. (It was the moment I saw the temple that the wind and rain stopped. Make of that what you will.)
When I found the temple I had the place to myself a bit. I sat in meditation for a few minutes in the main hall with its tremendous collection of Daruma figurines, burned incense and lit a candle in prayer, then paid a few yen to go in to the inner courtyard and look at the garden. There's also a memorial hall for film stars -- I'm not quite sure how that ended up here, but in Japan it's in Buddhist temples that cemeteries and other memorials are usually found. The native religion, Shinto, considered death to be the ultimate impurity and has very little in the way of funerary ritual. It was through dealing with death that Buddhism first found its foothold in Japanese culture.
While it lacks the gravitas of the larger, more famous temples like Nanzen-ji, a visit to Daruma-dera seems a fine way to pay one's respects to the "red bearded barbarian", Bodhidharma.
According to orthodox Zen, Bodhidharma lived around 500 C.E. and came to China from either India or Persia. He was the direct successor of the Buddha, through the line of direct "dharma transmission" from Buddha to Mahakasyapa (the guy who smiled at the Buddha's "flower sermon") and down through a few dozen teachers to Bodhidharma himself, 28th in the line.
Classically he is depicted with a wild fringe of hair and a red beard -- many koans make reference to "the barbarian's red beard." He also is often shown with bulging eyes, the legend being that, frustrated with falling asleep while meditating, he cut off his own eyelids; where he threw them to the ground, the first tea plant sprouted.
(Zen is replete with stories about hacking off body parts -- thankfully, most of them should be taken figuratively, otherwise early Zen followers would have been dying from blood loss or subsequent infection at such a rate at to preclude the school's survival.)
When Bodhidharma arrived in China, Buddhism was already well-established. But this was Mahayana Buddhism, with a thousand years of additional beliefs and teaching encrusted on to it. While it had absorbed many useful teachings, it had also soaked up a bunch of superstition and metaphysical speculation. Much of what was taught was a degraded sort of Buddhism that was less concerned with the Buddha's teachings about ending suffering in the here and now than with racking up merit (what we often call in the West "good karma") to get a good position the next time around the cycle of reincarnation.
The story goes that the Chinese Emperor Wu was just such a Buddhist, and Bodhidharma ended up having an audience with him. The Emperor had sponsored a lot of temple-building, sutra-copying, and suchlike, and thought this had earned him a lot of good karma. He asked, "So, how much merit have I accumulated doing all this?"
The emperor no doubt expected to told that he had earned copious merit points, redeemable for a future re-birth into the Pure Land or something. But Bodhidharma was having none of it.
"None at all," he replied.
That's a gutsy thing to tell a man who could have you executed on a whim. But rather than running this impudent monk through, the emperor must have figured to tap his brain on better ways to rack up the merit.
"Then, what is holy?" he asked.
And that lovable barbarian replied, "Vast emptiness. Nothing is holy."
This befuddled the emperor more than a little bit. Perhaps suspecting that he was being toyed with, he asked, "Who are you, to give me such answers?"
Bodhidharma's answer has echoed down the ages, forming what many believe is the core of Zen: "I don't know."
"Knowing", after all, is an intellectual attachment. Perhaps you have tried to help someone learn a new skill, only to be rebuffed with protestations of "I know, I know!" And if you're honest, you can probably remember doing this yourself. (I certainly can, to my chagrin. Apologies to all the teachers I did this to -- and to the ones I'll probably do it to in the future.) Knowing can be excellent insulation against learning. But when we can say we "don't know", we're teachable, open to alternatives.
And if we can do this with our concept of who we are, if we can give in to "I don't know" rather than limit ourselves with attachment to socially-determined roles and labels -- "I'm my father's son, so I behave thus-and-such way; I'm a poet, so I act like so; I'm an American and so I am free and brave and trustworthy and loyal and whatever" -- then the freedom is boundless.
Zen calls this attitude shoshin, "beginner's mind". As the twentieth century Zen master Shunryu Suzuki put it, "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."
It's that lack of possibilities, that "sure" knowledge, that so often makes religion dangerous. You've got to be pretty damn sure of what you're doing to burn heretics at the stake in order to save their souls, or to declare that your tribal god has promised some piece of land to your people and anyone else occupying it is to be put to the sword, or to carry a bomb into a crowd of heretics and blow yourself and a bunch of strangers into a fine red mist.
More liberal doses of "I don't know" for all religions sounds like a very, very good idea. If Zen has nothing else to offer, the treasure of "I don't know" more than justifies it as one of the world's wonders. In this sense, confusion is good for the soul.
(I have tried to make a Discordian koan out of Bodhidharma's answer: "Upon hearing this great teaching of Bodhidharma, Chairman Tao exclaimed, 'I don't know?! I don't know?! Third base!'". People either look at me blankly or groan when I tell it; I "don't know" if that means its working or not.)
After his unsatisfactory interview with the Emperor, Bodhidharma went to the famed Shaolin Temple where he spent several years in seated meditation, staring at the wall of a cave -- so long, according to one legend, that his arms and legs atrophied, and that's why he's represented as an armless, legless Weeble-like like figurine, symbolizing perseverance.
He supposedly found the monks at Shaolin too weak to endure the rigors of his style of meditation, so introduced a set of exercises (presumably with some origin from yoga) that became the basis of kung fu/wushu and, later, karate, and also of qi gong and Asian bodywork therapies.
Resolving the armless and legless lump with the kung fu master is left as an exercise for the reader.
Bodhidharma's method was a negation of abstract theory, and focused on meditation practice and cultivating the right state of mind: stoic, not seeking any goal, practicing virtuous actions without attachment. His teaching started to chip away a lot of the junk that had adhered to Mahayana Buddhism over the centuries, and is considered the start of Zen (Ch'an, under its Chinese name). Bodhidharma is revered as Zen's founder and "First Patriarch".
But it was another legendary master who gave Zen its distinctive flavor. This was the Sixth Patriarch, Hui Neng.
His official story goes something like this: Hui Neng was an illiterate peasant from the sticks of southern China. As a boy, he heard a man reciting the Diamond Sutra and was struck by its advice to "Let your mind flow free without dwelling on anything". Simply hearing this verse was enough to push his mind over into enlightenment. Hui Neng asked the chanting man about it, and found that he had come from the East Mountain monastery of the Fifth Patriarch, Hung Jen.
Hui Neng headed off to Hung Jen's temple. The Fifth Patriarch recognized Hui Neng's potential and he was accepted as a disciple -- but only in secret, as Hung Jen knew that the other monks would not accept this country bumpkin as an equal. He was set to menial tasks, and not ordained as monk.
Some months later, Hung Jen started to look for a successor. He decided to do this with, of all things, a poetry contest, and told the monks to express their wisdom in a verse.
The senior monk, Shen Hsiu, was considered the odds-on favorite. But he was unsure of his own ability, so he wrote his poem on a wall, anonymously, and waited to see the reaction:
The body is the Bodhi tree[*]
The heart is like the bright mirror in a stand
Take care to wipe it constantly
And allow no dust to cling
[* The "wisdom" tree, the tree under which the Buddha sat during the meditation leading up to his enlightenment]
This poem represents a fairly standard, methodical approach to cultivating wisdom. All the monks praised it, but Hung Jen told Shen Hsiu that it wasn't quite there.
Hui Neng heard the hubbub about the poem. Since he couldn't read the verse himself, one of the monks read it to him, and Hui Neng asked someone to write down a responding verse for him:
Fundamentally the Bodhi tree does not exist
Nor is there a stand with a bright mirror
Since everything is empty from the beginning
What is there for dust to cling to?
This probably seemed like nonsense to the other monks. Publicly the Patriarch had no praise for it, but in the middle of the night, he summoned Hui Neng.
Hung Jen gave Hui Neng the dharma transmission, and gave him the robe and the begging bowl that had been passed down from Bodhidharma, the symbols of the Patriarchship. Hui Neng, not even ordained but now the Sixth Patriarch, fled back south into the night to avoid the wrath of the monks. For about fifteen years he lived with hunters in the back country -- though he would free animals from their snares, and would instead gather vegetables.
When he thought the time was right, Hui Neng went to Fa-hsing temple. Since he was still a layman, he didn't bust right out teaching, but hid his understanding until one day he overheard two monks arguing about a flag in the breeze. Was it the wind that was moving, or the flag? Hui Neng cut right through the Gordian knot, suggesting to the monks, "It is your mind that moves." With that, he was brought to the attention of the temple's master, and recognized as Hung Jen's successor. He was finally ordained as a monk and began his teaching career.
Hui Neng's teaching is marked by the idea that our true nature is already pure and enlightened. According to Liu Tsung-yuan, writing about a century after Hui Neng's death, "his teaching began with the goodness of human nature and ended with the goodness of human nature. There is no need of plowing or weeding; is was originally pure." He taught students to disregarded any outside authority and put an emphasis on "sudden enlightenment": the idea that it is not enough to just follow the precepts of virtuous behavior and to study the sutras, or even to quiet the mind with meditation. A direct mystical experience is necessary, a moment of insight into this true nature. This experience is the "satori" for which Zen is famous.
But on the other hand, satori is not sufficient by itself. We read Zen stories that end with somebody's satori and we tend to think that's the end of the process, but it's just the start. As Hui Neng's student Shen Hui [not be be confused with Hui Neng's rival Shen Hsiu] explained: "All those who want to learn the Tao (Way) must achieve Sudden Enlightenment to be followed by Gradual Cultivation. It is like child-birth, which is a sudden affair, but the child will require a long process of nurture and education before he attains his full bodily and intellectual growth."
The story of the Zen lineage passing through Bodhidharma and Hui Neng is a great tale -- it's got a wise man who tells off one of the most powerful men in the world, an underdog who triumphs, a rag-tag bunch of spiritual rebels who prevail over hypocrisy and orthodoxy. If we buy the story about Bodhidharma being the original kung-fu master, we can almost picture him as a Jedi Master from the Star Wars movies. Maybe George Lucas could turn the story of the early Zen patriarchs into a series of films.
Unfortunately, the historical evidence points to these tales being largely fabrications. The tales of Bodhidharma were not recorded until five centuries after the fact. The only contemporary account that mentions him does so only in passing, if indeed it's even the same man. Some scholars doubt he existed at all.
And Hui Neng seems to have been heavily re-invented by succeeding generations -- especially by Shen Hui, for the sake of arguments about the "sudden enlightenment" versus "gradual cultivation" doctrines, and possibly also due to court intrigues surrounding the Empress Wu.
But their legend is so deeply rooted in Zen that it almost doesn't matter what the historical truth is. As Neil Gaiman observed, "Things need not have happened to be true."
Regardless of who was responsible, Ch'an developed into a form of Buddhism that took much from Chinese Taoism. Even though there were instances of Buddhist persecution under Taoist emperors,
Taoism is the native mysticism of China, traditionally dated to yet another mythical figure, Lao Tzu, who supposedly lived around 600 B.C.E. He doesn't even have a proper name, "Lao Tzu" meaning something like "Old Fellow" or "Great Old Master". Putting aside the more incredible bits -- that he was conceived by a shooting star, carried in his mother's womb for over 80 years, and was born a wise old man -- we still have quite a story. Supposedly Lao Tzu was a archivist who led a life of quiet virtue. In his later years, seeking to get away from the hustle and bustle he rode west on a water buffalo. At one mountain pass, a gatekeeper recognized his wisdom, and tried to get him to return to civilization. Failing in that, the gatekeeper persuaded Lao Tzu to stop for a while and write down some of his insights. The work he supposedly authored was the Tao Te Ching (loosely translated, The Way and Its Power), the basic text of the Taoist philosophy.
The Tao of Lao Tzu is "the Way" -- literally, the character "tao" means path or road or way -- the way things are, in the deepest sense and the biggest picture. It is not a being to be worshipped, but something more like a current or a pattern, a way of thinking and acting, that a wise person can make use of.
Lao Tzu was one of the earliest philosophers to recognize the limitations
of language in discussing states of mind. Right at the start, the _Tao Te Ching_ tells us that the Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao -- the truth of our experience comes before language.
To deal with this limitation, paradox and humor are valuable tools in the Taoist's kit. They show especially strongly in the work of Chuang Tzu, a storyteller and poet who lived around 300 BCE and the only fellow who approaches the role of Lao Tzu in Taoism. You may have heard about a famous dream Chuang Tzu had: he dreamed that he was a butterfly, fluttering around and doing butterfly things. He suddenly awakened to find that he was not a butterfly, but in fact Chuang Tzu. But then he wondered -- was he Chuang Tzu who had dreamed that he was a butterfly? Or was he a butterfly dreaming that he was Chuang Tzu?
That's pretty radical skepticism. The Taoism of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu was full of "don't know" long before Bodhidharma.
Chuang Tzu's stories -- the forerunners of Zen's koans -- are fables of a sort, but like nothing that Aesop ever came up with. For example, one tells of a giant old chestnut tree with wood that is absolutely useless to craftsmen: too dense to make a boat, too subject to rot and worms to build with, too brittle to make utensils out of. But it is exactly because of its uselessness that it survives, while other trees are cut down for their wood or stripped for their fruit.
The Taoist Sage lives a life of simplicity and balance, puts himself or herself in accordance with Nature, and spontaneously and un-self-consciously "goes with the flow". The notion that the world consists of the interplay of yin and yang, of pairs of opposing but complementary principles that are always in motion and transformation -- day and night, sun and shade, life and death, movement and substance -- is at the heart of Taoist cosmology.
This cosmology is found not just in the Lao-Chuang philosophy, but also in the theory of "qi" (central to Chinese medicine and "Taoist yoga" such as tai chi chuan and qi gong) and in the folk religions of China. In the broadest sense, Taoism includes all of these -- we could almost call Taoism a catch-all term for any native Chinese philosophy or religious practice that existed before the introduction of Buddhism, and that was not Confucian or part of another easily identified historical school.
Ch'an Buddhism absorbed much from the Lao-Chuang philosophy. Huston Smith claims that "Buddhism processed through Taoism becomes Zen", and in the view of Livia Knaul Kohn, after centuries of interaction with Buddhism, Lao-Chuang ceased to exist as an independent tradition and Ch'an may be seen as its legitimate heir. The Tao Te Ching was well known enough in Buddhism that Dwight Goddard included it in his Buddhist Bible alongside the various sutras.
Ch'an also took from the other aspects of Taoism. Taoist yoga practices influenced Ch'an's mediation style, and from folk religion it picked up deities like Kuan Yin, a syncretization of a Taoist goddess with the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion Avalokiteshvara, to create a character often described as the Buddhist goddess of mercy..
After a few centuries of marinating in Taoism, around 1200 Ch'an Buddhism came to Japan, where they called it Zen. It was never the most popular form of Buddhism in Japan, but because it was favored by the samurai and the shoguns, it came to have a disproportionate impact on Japanese culture.
While Zen/Ch'an also spread into Korea and Vietnam, it was from Japan that it was introduced to the West in the late 1800s, as part of a Buddhist revival throughout the East. This revival was connected in surprising ways to a revival of old occult ideas in the West -- both were part of a web of reaction to the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution, tying together Transcendentalists, Romantics, Buddhists, Theosophists, Magicians, Witches, Beat poets, and the 1960s counter-culture, and eventually the modern Pagan movement.