Why Buddha Touched the Earth

Can't talk about Zen without Bodhidharma. Rough draft of a chapter introducing him.

A Red-Bearded Barbarian

Tucked away in off a side street in Kyoto, about a mile from Nijo Castle - where the last shogun announced to his daimyo the restoration of the Emperor and the end of the shogunate - is a small Zen temple known as Daruma-dera (though it's official name is Hoorin-ji).

Daruma is the Japanese name for Bodhidharma, the man considered to be the founder of Zen - and also of many of the healing and martial arts that trace their origin to China, including both karate and shiatsu. He is probably the most-portrayed gaijin in Japan, his image is everywhere - not just in portraits, but in a peculiar sort of figurine. 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 when the 10th abbot, who took up his position in 1933, who used the Daruma figurines as a teaching tool and started the famous collection. [http://www.amie.or.jp/daruma/Hoorin-ji.html]

The temple was not in my guidebook, but I found a little bit about it on the web and knew I had to check it out. Fortunately it's marked on the Periplus map of Kyoto I bought this morning. It's not much of a international tourist destination, no English brochure or signs other that the one in front, but it's definitely worth a visit if you know a bit about Daruma.

He lived around 500 C.E. or so, and came to China from either India or Persia. Classically he is depicted with wild 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.)

Daruma arrived in China after Buddhism was well-established - but a degraded sort of Buddhism, more concerned with racking up merit (what we often call in the West "good karma") to get a good life on the next time around than with the Buddha's teachings about the end of suffering.

Thus have I heard:

The Emperor of China was just such a "merit collector" Buddhist, and Daruma 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 Daruma, "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 Daruma was having none of it.

"None at all," he replied.

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?"

Daruma's answer has echoed down the ages, forming what many believe is the core of Zen: "I don't know."

(I have tried to make a Discordian koan out of this: "Upon hearing this great teaching of Bodhidharma, Chairman Tao exclaimed, 'Don't know?! 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.)

So after his unsatisfactory interview with the Emperor, Daruma went to the famed Shaolin Temple where he spent several years in seated meditation, staring at a wall - 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 figure, symbolizing perseverance.

The figures are weighted so that if the are tipped over, they right themselves, illustrating the Japanese proverb Nana karobi, ya oki - "If you fall down seven times, get up eight times."

They also come with both eyes blank, white. 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 magick.

Daruma supposedly found the monks at Shaolin too weak to endure the rigors of his style of meditation, so introduced a set of exercises (presumably from yoga) that became the basis of kung fu/wushu and, later, karate, and also of Asian bodywork therapies.

Resolving the armless and legless lump with the kung fu master is left as an exercise for the reader.

Anyway, Bodhidharma's negation of theory and focus on meditation and the right state of mind is considered the start of Zen, and he is its the First Patriarch.

Daruma is often shown wearing a all-covering 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

(Can I just mention here that it was the moment I saw the temple that the wind and rain stopped?)

I had the place to myself a bit, sat for a few minutes in the main hall with its tremendous collection of Daruma figurines, burned incense and lit a candle, paid a few yen to go in and look at the garden and the memorial hall for film stars. (I'm not quite sure how that ended up here, but Buddhist temples are generally where cemeteries and other memorials are found in Japan. The native animism, Shinto, considered death to be the ultimate impurity and has very little in the way of funerary ritual; this is where Buddhism first found its foothold in Japanese culture.)

Daruma is revered as the founder of Zen; and gets all the credit; but it was with the Sixth Patriarch, Hui Neng, that Zen really came into its own.