Bodhidharma (c. 440-c. 528)

Two contemporary witnesses who contradict each other

Modern historiography on Bodhidharma begins with an embarrassment: the two oldest documents mentioning him, written at most a few decades apart, agree neither on his age nor on his origin^[23]. The first is a brief passage of the Luoyang Qielan Ji ("Record of the Buddhist Monasteries of Luoyang"), written in 547 by the official Yang Xuanzhi, describing a foreign monk come to admire the Yongning pagoda at Luoyang:

"He claimed to be one hundred and fifty years old and to have travelled through countless lands; nowhere, he said, was there such an edifice — not even in the western countries he had crossed. He joined his hands and chanted hymns for several days." — Yang Xuanzhi, Luoyang Qielan Ji, 547, quoted and translated from Jeffrey L. Broughton, The Bodhidharma Anthology, University of California Press, 1999, pp. 54-55^[24]

Yang Xuanzhi identifies this monk as "a Persian Brahman from Central Asia"^[25]. The second witness, the preface written by the monk Tanlin (506-574) for the Treatise on the Two Entrances and Four Practices, describes Bodhidharma on the contrary as "a South Indian from the western country, third son of a great Indian king", who supposedly renounced his princely status to embrace monastic life and spread the Mahāyāna^[26]. Between a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old Persian elder and a South Indian prince turned monk, there is no way to decide with certainty: both texts, written within the same generation, apparently describe the same man in irreconcilable terms^[27].

The following table summarizes what each of the two oldest testimonies asserts about the monk's identity, so the scale of their disagreement can be taken in at a glance:

Reading the table: both sources date from the same generation as Bodhidharma's supposed death, which rules out a mere late confusion; their disagreement more probably reflects oral traditions that were already distinct in the 6th century^[28].

A dating that remains disputed

Classical Chan tradition, fixed from the 10th century onward, places Bodhidharma's arrival in China under the Liang dynasty (502-557), during the reign of Emperor Wu (502-549). But older sources, including Tanlin's, suggest instead an arrival during the previous Liu Song dynasty (420-479), which would push his birth back by at least a generation^[29]. Contemporary scholarship, by way of synthesis, retains a broad range running from the middle of the 5th century to the first third of the 6th century^[30]. The oldest and most circumstantial biography to have come down to us, the one the monk Daoxuan (596-667) wrote in 645 in his Xu Gaoseng Zhuan ("Continued Biographies of Eminent Monks"), places Bodhidharma's death before 534, the date of the fall of the Northern Wei dynasty, since his disciple Huike then left Luoyang for the city of Ye^[31].

One more precise hypothesis, advanced by the historian Bernard Faure, deserves mention: the fact that the old sources place Bodhidharma's death "on the banks of the Luo River" could echo the terrible Heyin massacre of 528, in which the troops of General Erzhu Rong executed thousands of officials and nobles of the Northern Wei court on the banks of that same river — and the Chinese Buddhist canon reports that a monk was among the victims^[32]. This hypothesis remains one among others and commands no definitive consensus, but it illustrates the method of critical history applied to a figure whose legendary biography was written long after the events: seeking, beneath the legend, the faint traces of a dated and verifiable event.

Persian, Brahman or Indian prince?

The uncertainty over Bodhidharma's geographical and social origin has never been resolved, and Chan tradition itself ended up favouring the most prestigious version for its own founding narrative: that of a South Indian prince, often identified since the 20th century with the Pallava kingdom of Kanchipuram, who renounced the throne for monastic life^[33]. This late identification with the Pallavas, attractive because it roots Bodhidharma in a historically attested Buddhist kingdom, is nevertheless supported by no independent ancient source: it belongs to traditional reconstruction rather than documentary attestation^[34]. What the two 6th-century witnesses have in common, despite their disagreement on nationality, is presenting Bodhidharma as a foreigner from beyond China's western frontiers, bearer of a meditation practice judged both impressive and disconcerting by his contemporaries^[35].

"No merit": the dialogue that founded Chan

The most famous story attached to Bodhidharma is his audience at the court of Emperor Wu of Liang (r. 502-549), a notoriously pious sovereign who had monasteries built, financed the copying of sūtras and authorized the ordination of many monks and nuns^[36]. This story appears in the sources only from the 8th century onward — in the writings of the monk Shenhui around 758 — more than two centuries after the traditional date of the event, and it takes its definitive literary form only in the Biyan Lu ("Blue Cliff Record"), a collection of kōans compiled in 1125 by Yuanwu Keqin from the verses of Master Xuedou Chongxian (980-1052)^[37]. Its value is therefore not that of a contemporary historical testimony, but that of a founding text of Chan spirituality, meant to illustrate through a striking dialogue the difference between outward piety and inner awakening.

According to this story, the emperor lists to Bodhidharma his pious works, then asks him:

"What merit have I accumulated through all these virtuous actions?" Bodhidharma answered: "No merit." The emperor asked: "Why no merit?" Bodhidharma said: "These are inferior deeds, which would cause their authors to be reborn as men or as gods [...]. They are like a shadow following a form: although they exist, they are not real." — Dialogue reported in the Biyan Lu, case 1, compiled in 1125, quoted from the English translation by Thomas Cleary and J. C. Cleary, The Blue Cliff Record, Shambhala, 1977^[38]

The emperor presses on: "Then what is true merit?" Bodhidharma answers: "Pure, wondrous and perfect wisdom, whose substance is intrinsically empty and still. Such merit is not sought through the works of this world." The emperor then asks: "What is the first principle of sacred truth?" Bodhidharma answers: "Vast emptiness, nothing sacred." The emperor, disconcerted, finally asks: "Who then stands before me answering me?" — and Bodhidharma concludes: "I do not know."^[39]

Crossing the Yangtze on a reed

Realizing that the emperor does not grasp the scope of his teaching, Bodhidharma leaves the Nanjing court without further delay. Legend has it that he crossed the Yangtze River balanced on a single reed stalk — a scene that became one of the most depicted motifs of Chan and Zen iconography, down through the Japanese painting of later centuries^[40]. He then heads north, into the kingdom of the Northern Wei, where he finally settles at Shaolin Monastery on Mount Song, in present-day Henan^[41].

The "wall-contemplating Brahman"

It is at Shaolin Monastery that the most decisive episode for Bodhidharma's doctrinal posterity takes place: according to tradition, he practised there for nine years a seated meditation, motionless, his face turned toward a stone wall^[42]. This practice, designated in Chinese by the term bìguān (壁觀, literally "wall contemplation"), earns him in the ancient sources the nickname of "wall-contemplating Brahman" (bìguān Póluómén)^[43].

To grasp simply what this famous expression covers, two frequent misunderstandings must be avoided. The first would be to see in it only an extreme ascetic performance, a kind of physical endurance record: Chan tradition sees in it on the contrary a method of purifying the mind, in which the wall serves as a neutral support for attention rather than an object of contemplation in itself. The second misunderstanding would be to believe that "wall contemplation" means fixing one's gaze: modern commentators on Chan Buddhism understand the term rather as a metaphor for the stability and unshakeability of the mind, "firm as a wall", detached from outward solicitations and mental projections^[44]. The motionless body thus becomes the visible image of an inwardness that has ceased to stir with desires and aversions.

What is wall contemplation, concretely?

The rare sources that attempt to specify the exact nature of bìguān remain elliptical, and scholarly debate over its precise meaning is not closed^[45]. Three main interpretations emerge from contemporary academic work: a seated meditation practice proper, on the model of classical Indian dhyāna; a specific contemplative technique aimed at bringing all discursive movement of thought to a halt; or a general philosophical orientation, that of a mind become "like a wall" — unshakeable, with no crack through which the turmoil of the world could seep^[46]. These three readings do not necessarily exclude one another: they perhaps describe, at different degrees of generality, one and the same experience of inner stabilization that later tradition systematized under the name of the Chan school — literally, the school of meditation (chan being the abbreviated Chinese transcription of the Sanskrit dhyāna)^[47].

Entrance through principle

Of all the texts tradition attributes to Bodhidharma, only one commands relatively broad scholarly assent as to its substantial authenticity: the brief Treatise on the Two Entrances and Four Practices (Erru Sixing Lun), transmitted originally with Tanlin's biographical preface and preserved, among other places, in the Lengjia Shizi Ji ("Record of the Masters and Disciples of the Laṅkāvatāra"), compiled around 1007^[48]. This text of barely six hundred Chinese characters sets out a path of liberation articulated in two entrances: entrance through principle (lǐrù) and entrance through practice (xíngrù)^[49].

Entrance through principle rests on a fundamental conviction, formulated in the text itself:

"Through principle, one enters by believing that all sentient beings, ordinary or holy, possess the same true nature, but that it remains covered over by false senses and obscured by adventitious impurities, unable to manifest itself. If one rejects the false to return to the true [...], remaining firmly unmoved, no longer following any written letter, one is in silent and perfect accord with principle." — Erru Sixing Lun, treatise attributed to Bodhidharma, English translation by Jeffrey L. Broughton, The Bodhidharma Anthology, University of California Press, 1999, pp. 8-9^[50]

Entrance through practice: four concrete disciplines

Entrance through practice, for its part, unfolds in four exercises of progressive detachment: the practice of retribution for resentment, which consists in welcoming all suffering as the fruit of past faults, without anger or complaint; the practice of accepting circumstances, which teaches remaining unmoved even in good fortune, knowing it is fleeting; the practice of absence of craving, which aims at freeing oneself from desire, the source of all suffering; and practice in accord with the Dharma, which consists in acting in agreement with the realization that all beings share one and the same true nature^[51]. This four-exercise structure, of remarkable doctrinal sobriety compared with later Chan developments, explains why contemporary specialists regard this short treatise as the textual core closest — if not to Bodhidharma's own hand, at least to the teaching effectively spread under his name in 6th-century monastic circles^[52].

A disciple who refuses to be turned away

Bodhidharma's designated successor is the Chinese monk Dazu Huike (487-593), whose conversion legend has become, like the Yangtze crossing, one of the founding narratives of Chan iconography^[53]. According to this story, Huike presents himself before Bodhidharma's meditation cave and asks to become his disciple; Bodhidharma first refuses to receive him. Huike then stands in the snow all night, until the snow reaches his waist. Asked why he is there, he answers that he wants the master to "open the gate of the elixir of universal compassion to liberate all beings"^[54].

Bodhidharma refuses a second time, in terms reported as deliberately harsh:

"How can you hope to obtain the true religion with so little virtue, so little wisdom, a shallow heart and an arrogant mind? It would only be a wasted effort." — Reply attributed to Bodhidharma, reported in the biographical tradition of Dazu Huike^[55]

To prove the sincerity of his resolve, Huike then cuts off his left arm and presents it to the first patriarch. It is following this gesture, according to legend, that Bodhidharma agrees to instruct him and finally transmits to him the robe and bowl, symbols of patriarchal succession, as well as — according to some versions of the story — a copy of the Sūtra of the Entry into Laṅkā (Laṅkāvatāra-sūtra)^[56].

"Skin, flesh, bone, marrow": four disciples, four degrees of understanding

Another transmission story, later and reported in the Annals of the Transmission of the Lamp of the Jingde Era (Jingde Chuandeng Lu), compiled in 1004, shows Bodhidharma questioning four of his disciples on their understanding of the teaching before his departure^[57]. Three of them each answer with a doctrinal formula, which Bodhidharma successively judges to have reached his "skin", his "flesh" and then his "bones". The fourth, Huike, steps forward, bows deeply in silence, then straightens up without a word:

"Bodhidharma then said to him: 'You have obtained my marrow.' He thus transmitted the Dharma and the robe to him." — Jingde Chuandeng Lu (Annals of the Transmission of the Lamp of the Jingde Era), 1004, quoted from the English translation available in traditional Chan kōan collections^[58]

This story, built as a gradation, illustrates a central conviction of Chan tradition: the deepest understanding is not necessarily formulated in elaborate words; it may manifest, on the contrary, in the silence of a rightly disposed inner attitude — a theme that would become one of the most characteristic distinctive traits of Chan and then Zen, set against the more scholastic Buddhist schools.

The empty tomb on Mount Xiong'er

According to tradition, Bodhidharma is buried on Mount Xiong'er, west of Luoyang^[59]. But the most famous episode of his death is a posthumous story, reported notably in the Chuan Fabao Ji ("Record of the Transmission of the Treasure of the Dharma"): three years after his burial, an official named Songyun, on a mission in the Pamir Mountains, claims to have met Bodhidharma on the road, wearing a single sandal and declaring he was returning to India. Bodhidharma then supposedly predicted the imminent death of his sovereign — a prediction fulfilled shortly after Songyun's return to court^[60].

The emperor, sceptical at this account, ordered Bodhidharma's tomb to be opened: nothing was found in it but a single sandal^[61]. This motif of "deliverance from the corpse" — the miraculous disappearance of the body, leaving only a symbolic object behind — actually belongs to a body of Taoist beliefs well predating Chan Buddhism, illustrating how Bodhidharma's legend was built up through successive borrowings from several Chinese religious traditions, well beyond the doctrinal framework of Buddhism alone^[62]. The single sandal has become, in Chan and then Zen iconography, a recurring motif depicting Bodhidharma on the road, his staff over his shoulder, a single shoe on his feet.

What the oldest biography says — and does not say

The popular association, today worldwide, between Bodhidharma and the martial arts of Shaolin rests on no historical foundation^[63]. The oldest and most circumstantial biography, the one Daoxuan wrote in 645 in the Xu Gaoseng Zhuan, presents Bodhidharma exclusively as a meditation master; at no point does it mention any physical or martial teaching^[64]. No Chinese source before the 17th century establishes any link between Bodhidharma and any combat practice.

The Yijin Jing, a forgery unmasked by modern historians

The link between Bodhidharma and the martial arts appears for the first time with the spread of a qigong manual entitled Yijin Jing ("Classic of the Transformation of Muscles and Tendons"), a text 20th-century Chinese historians — foremost among them Tang Hao, along with Xu Zhen and Matsuda Ryūchi — demonstrated to be a forgery of the Ming era or early Qing era, most probably composed in the early 17th century^[65]. It was only in the 19th century, as the Yijin Jing gained popularity in military circles and the monks of Shaolin themselves began using it, that Shaolin's martial tradition gradually became associated with Bodhidharma's name^[66]. This late myth, today unanimously dismissed by serious historical research, nevertheless continues to feed much of the world's popular culture around Bodhidharma — further evidence of the considerable distance separating the historical man, already largely elusive, from the legendary figure built upon his name over the centuries.

A genealogy appearing centuries after the events

The idea that Bodhidharma was the twenty-eighth patriarch of an unbroken lineage going back to the Buddha himself appears only late in the sources: it is attested in the Song of Enlightenment (Zhengdao Ge) by Yongjia Xuanjue (665-713), one of the principal disciples of the sixth patriarch Huineng, then systematized in the Anthology of the Patriarchs' Hall (Zutang ji), compiled in 952^[67]. This genealogy traces the transmission back to Mahākāśyapa, the disciple to whom tradition attributes having received from the Buddha, in silence, the "mind to mind" transmission during the legendary "flower sermon"^[68].

The historian John R. McRae, in his landmark study Seeing Through Zen, insists on a decisive methodological point: nothing indicates that the immediate disciples of Bodhidharma and Huike saw themselves as belonging to a unified movement comparable to a "Chan school", nor that they were aware of any continuity with the tradition that would claim them several centuries later^[69]. The Japanese master D. T. Suzuki, whose works did much to make Zen known in the West in the 20th century, already argued that Chan's growing popularity in the 7th and 8th centuries had drawn criticism reproaching this school for having "no authorized record of its direct transmission from the founder of Buddhism" — and that Chan historians then raised Bodhidharma to twenty-eighth patriarch precisely to answer this objection^[70].

Why build such a genealogy?

Several contemporary scholars, including Bernard Faure, argue that this genealogical construction also served a very concrete issue of institutional legitimation: in the highly competitive Buddhist landscape of the Tang and then Song dynasties, where several schools vied for imperial patronage and official recognition, claiming an unbroken, authenticated transmission from the Buddha in person was a decisive argument of authority against rival schools^[71]. This historical observation in no way disqualifies the spiritual value of Chan as a discipline of life; it only invites distinguishing, with the rigour an encyclopedia owes its readers, a religious genealogy's legendary function from its documentary value as verifiable historical reconstruction.

Reading the table: the numbering of the first twenty-seven Indian patriarchs, today recognized by academic research as a retrospective reconstruction, appears in texts only from the 10th century onward; the dates of the first six Chinese patriarchs are better supported by the available biographical sources, though not free of uncertainties^[72].

The split between Northern and Southern Chan

A century and a half after Bodhidharma, Chan tradition underwent its gravest crisis with the rivalry between Northern Chan, represented by Shenxiu, advocate of gradual awakening, and Southern Chan, represented by Huineng (638-713) — sixth patriarch according to the tradition that ultimately prevailed — advocate of sudden awakening^[73]. It is this southern branch, centred on the experience of immediate awakening rather than gradual progress, that dominates all later Chinese Chan and subsequently spreads throughout East Asia.

Spread to Japan, Korea and Vietnam

Chan reached Japan from the 12th century onward, giving birth to the Rinzai (introduced by Eisai in 1191) and Sōtō (introduced by Dōgen in 1227) schools, grouped under the generic name of Zen — simply the Japanese reading of the same Chinese character chan^[74]. The tradition also passed to Korea, where it took the name Seon, and to Vietnam, as Thiền. In each of these cultural areas, Bodhidharma remains venerated as the founding first patriarch, under the local names of Daruma in Japan and Dalma in Korea^[75].

The Daruma dolls

In Japan, Bodhidharma's memory gave birth to an object that has become emblematic of popular culture: the Daruma doll, a round figurine weighted at its base so it always rights itself when tipped over, traditionally sold without painted pupils — the owner paints one when making a vow, then the second when the vow is fulfilled^[76]. This rounded shape, with no visible limbs, originates in a late legend according to which Bodhidharma's arms and legs atrophied after his nine years of meditative immobility — a legend which, like that of his cut-off eyelids becoming tea plants to conquer sleep, belongs to popular folklore rather than to learned biographical tradition^[77].

A sound intuition: inner discipline and detachment from outward works

The Second Vatican Council, in its declaration Nostra Aetate, recognizes that Buddhism, "according to its various schools", perceives "the radical insufficiency of this changeable world" and teaches "a way by which men, with a devout and trustful heart, can acquire the state of perfect liberation"^[78]. This recognition casts particular light on the most famous episode of Bodhidharma's legendary life: his "no merit" reply to Emperor Wu of Liang converges, on one precise point, with the Christian intuition that multiplying outward works — foundations, donations, buildings — never suffices, by itself, to produce holiness if the heart performing them remains attached to its own glory or its own spiritual calculation. A Catholic has no reason to despise the rigour of this inward demand, nor the discipline of detachment proposed by the Treatise on the Two Entrances and Four Practices toward resentment, fortune and craving: the Church herself, through the voice of many saints, has always taught the vanity of works done without charity (1 Cor 13:3).

A decisive divergence: imageless emptiness versus the revealed personal God

The most radical divergence between Chan and the Catholic faith concerns the very nature of what meditative discipline ultimately aims at. When Emperor Wu asks Bodhidharma what "the first principle of sacred truth" is, the answer reported by tradition is unambiguous: "Vast emptiness, nothing sacred"^[79]. This contentless emptiness, without image, without determinate concept — which the reader finds again in Bodhidharma's final refusal even to name himself ("I do not know") — constitutes the ultimate goal of Chan discipline: the dissolution of every representation, including that of the meditating subject.

It is precisely this type of meditation that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in its 1989 letter Orationis formas, urges Christians never to confuse with authentic Christian prayer:

"In such methods of meditation, [...] one seeks to set aside as far as possible all that is earthly, sensible and conceptually limited, in order to ascend or to immerse oneself into the sphere of the divinity, which as such is neither earthly, nor sensible, nor capable of being grasped by concepts." — Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Orationis formas — Letter to the bishops of the Catholic Church on some aspects of Christian meditation, 15 October 1989, §11^[80]

The same document, a few lines further on, explicitly names the risk that, for a Christian, lies in equating the Buddhist void with the transcendence of the Trinitarian God:

"Others do not hesitate to place the imageless and conceptless absolute, proper to Buddhist theory, on the same level as the majesty of God, revealed in Christ, which towers above finite reality [...] in favour of immersion 'in the indeterminate abyss of divinity'." — Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Orationis formas, 15 October 1989, §12^[81]

The God whom Christ reveals is not an impersonal "vast emptiness" in which the subject would ultimately dissolve: He is a personal God, Father, Son and Spirit, who makes Himself known through a Word and an Incarnation historically situated. Authentic Christian prayer, far from seeking to set aside "all that is earthly, sensible and conceptually limited", starts on the contrary from the concrete works God accomplished in history, in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word^[82].

"I do not know" before the Revelation of a God who makes Himself known

The last word legend attributes to Bodhidharma before the emperor — "I do not know" — fascinated generations of Chan commentators as the supreme expression of detachment from all fixed identity. Seen from Catholic faith, this word nevertheless marks the ultimate limit of a wisdom which, however rigorous in its critique of the ego, remains unable by itself to answer the most decisive question: who is this God toward whom all authentic inner discipline should, logically, tend? The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines contemplative prayer not as dissolution into the indeterminate, but as a personal friendship:

"Mental prayer in my opinion is nothing else than an intimate sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with him who we know loves us." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2709, quoting Saint Teresa of Avila, Vida, ch. 8^[83]

Where Chan proposes a progressive extinction of every question and every answer — down to Huike's final silence, judged superior to any doctrinal formula — Christian Revelation answers on the contrary with an excess of positive determination: God names Himself, makes Himself known through His Son, and promises the purified soul not the anonymity of a void but vision face to face:

"Those who die in God's grace and friendship and are perfectly purified live for ever with Christ. They are like God for ever, for they see him 'as he is' (1 Jn 3:2), face to face." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1023^[84]

This difference takes nothing away from the legitimate admiration a Catholic may feel for the radicality of the renunciation practised by Bodhidharma and his heirs: it only situates that renunciation as a possible stage of human purification, fruitful and estimable in itself, but which never closes, in the Catholic vision, upon the void it attains — because the human soul, "immediately created by God" and "immortal"^[85], is made for encounter with a truly personal Other, not for its own dissolution into a nameless "vast emptiness". On the broader Catholic critique of no-self, karma and the cycle of rebirths in Buddhism, see Buddhism and why reincarnation is a false belief; on the sister philosophical school of Yogācāra, founded a century or two before Bodhidharma, see Asanga and Vasubandhu.

• Buddhism — overview of the history, doctrines and Catholic objections
• Why is reincarnation a false belief? — Catholic critique of the cycle of rebirths
• Asanga — co-founder of Yogācāra, the other great philosophical school of Mahāyāna Buddhism
• Vasubandhu — Asanga's younger half-brother, second great doctor of Yogācāra