Tracking Bodhidharma (33 page)

Although this version of events surrounding Bodhidharma is fanciful, it goes back quite far in history. From the mid-eighth century on, there are different accounts that contain parts of the above story. What is clear is that, starting from about the mid-700s, Bodhidharma became a larger-than-life figure to the Chinese Zen world, and certain myths about him became widespread. The dividing line between simple
historical uncertainty and obvious myths about his life occurred around that time.

While Huiyuan is telling me the story of Bodhidharma, a man approaches us and sits on one of the other chairs around the table. When Huiyuan is finished they exchange some words, and it is obvious they are well-acquainted. I greet him and learn that his name is. Xu (pronounced
Sue
) and he comes up the mountain every day or so to deliver bottled water to Huiyuan. “The water situation here is not good,” he says.

Mr. Xu, whose accent is far easier to understand than Huiyuan's is, tells me that many people come up the mountain on weekends to hear Huiyuan lecture about Buddhism. He says the table would be filled with people who normally come to hear him but for the fact that it is chilly today. Then I ask if it's okay to look in the caves, and Huiyuan says to go ahead and take a look. I stick my head in the door of the cave that appears to contain some statues inside and discover that its interior is about fifteen feet square. In the center are some carved Buddhas, while on the dirt and stone floor there are a handful of bowing and meditation cushions. At the back of the cave there is a small shrine set up to honor Bodhidharma that contains a stone engraved with his presumed likeness.

I ask Mr. Xu if people in Nanjing are aware of the special history connected with the place and want to preserve it. He answers that this is certainly true. He says Nanjing is not a big capital city like Beijing and Xian, where international sights like the Great Wall and Terra Cotta Warriors draw crowds from everywhere. Instead, Nanjing has a special historical flavor connected to certain important periods in Chinese history. One of those periods, the South-North dynasties period, the time that surrounded Emperor Wu's rule, has special importance. Nanjing people are aware of and very proud of that fact, even if people elsewhere don't appreciate it.

Could Bodhidharma really have stayed at this place? While the story is obviously silly, it might have evolved from some real geographic connection to the old sage. Because the cave is such an unusual geographical feature on the dolomite slopes of the mountains, it seems likely that later storytellers would have connected him to the place for this reason. However, if Bodhidharma actually stayed in the Nanjing area for a long
period of time, as I believe he did, then this place might be one of many where he spent some time. The location, which during Emperor Wu's time was concealed in the river hills about five miles from the city, was a suitable place for him to avoid the world. Perhaps in Bodhidharma's day believers made their way into the hills to hear him speak. He did, after all, have “followers like a city,” and many of them could have conveniently lived in Nanjing and visited Bodhidharma in nearby areas, much as Huiyuan's students do now. Maybe they peered quietly into the cave to see him gazing in meditation at its stone wall.

While other emperors might have made a fuss about someone refusing to come see them, Emperor Wu apparently did not take offense at this. There are many other stories related to his rule that indicate he was a man of reasoned disposition who avoided punishing people whose actions might have led other emperors to order severe punishments. Emperor Wu's oldest daughter neglected her studies and fancied a handsome aristocrat, also a close relative, who secretly wanted to gain the throne. The two visited Emperor Wu at the palace, intent on killing him, but Wu, knowing the plot, prevented it from happening while maintaining a friendly and patient manner with them. He did not punish them afterward. Such stories about Emperor Wu show he could have tolerated Bodhidharma's presence without forcing him to come to the court or punishing his failure to do so.

As the day recedes I bid farewell to Huiyuan and Mr. Xu and make my way down the mountain toward the Yang-tse. Along the riverbank, the city of Nanjing has created a park on new landfill that stretches two or three miles in each direction. When I visited the spot a year ago, the place was bare ground intersected by the foundation of a new road. Now the park and road are finished, and the ponds and traditional bridges in the park have attracted a few men who quietly try their luck fishing in the new artificial pools. I walk a few hundred yards to a new dock where some boats are moored and some large bronze statues of four horses plus a dragon appear to be coming out of the river. A story about the place says that some ancient kings of China came here on horseback. Suddenly one of the horses turned into a dragon, an omen that its rider would soon become emperor. Naturally, he did so. The spot, called Five Horses Crossing the Yang-tse, is considered one of the “forty-eight famous scenes” of ancient Nanjing. Some other statues
would be appropriate here, including one of Bodhidharma standing on his stalk of bamboo and heading out over the placid waves with his imperial pursuers watching him from the shore.

Unfortunately, the new bus terminal at the site is still under construction, and without bus service or any visible taxis on the new road, I end up walking two or three miles back to the north end of Nanjing's Central Road, which stops near the river. I pause near the end of my walk to visit the slim white granite memorial stele commemorating the thousands of Chinese who were executed here at the riverbank by invading Japanese troops during World War II. Night is falling when I finally manage to wave down a taxi.

EMBRACING BUDDHISM but largely rejecting Taoism, Emperor Wu nonetheless continued to honor China's third religion, the one concerned with statecraft, known as Confucianism. Confucian philosophy emphasized loyalty and filial piety, and among the first temples the emperor built were two that honored his late mother and father.

For the first few hundred years after Buddhism arrived in China, the delineation between Buddhism and Confucianism gradually blurred. Emperors who promulgated and spread Confucian rhetoric to legitimize their rule absorbed Buddhist beliefs into their propaganda. But many Buddhists were at pains to maintain the distinction between these two movements. Previously I mentioned that Huiyuan, the famous monk and translator who lived at East Woods Temple, wrote a treatise entitled “A Monk Does Not Bow to a King,” meant in part to confirm the clear boundary between the two religions. He argued that there is a difference between the home-leaver's life and the world of Confucian loyalties. Monks should not bow before kings, he said, because the realm of the home-leaver was outside normal human relationships. But such relationships were the defining feature of Chinese Confucian society. So how, it must be asked, could these two contradictory philosophies ever find harmony with one another in China? This leads to another facet of how Buddhism transformed itself when it arrived in the Middle Kingdom.

Some of the answer to this dilemma can be explained by a Confucian idea called the “Way of Kings.” This Confucian concept, articulated by the Confucian philosopher Mencius (372—289 BCE), prescribed the moral behavior by which a king must guide his country.

Mencius pointed out that a king must first and foremost rule by example. His position in relation to his vassals was likened to the North
Star that sits unmoving in the sky, reposed in “nonaction” while all the other stars move around it. Thus the proper functioning of the empire, according to this astrological metaphor, must take as its model the king's personal virtue. Most Chinese emperors at least tried to project such a virtuous Confucian face to the public (while privately enjoying the benefits of absolute despotism). But Emperor Wu appears to have taken this Confucian model quite seriously. To Emperor Wu, virtuous conduct meant following Buddhism. His sincere performance as a model sovereign fused Mencius's Way of Kings with the Way of Buddha.

King Ashoka, the Buddhist king of India, also emphasized Confucian-like filial loyalty, as evidenced in his writings on old stone monuments that remain from the time of his rule. Undoubtedly, King Ashoka faced the same challenge that Emperor Wu and other Buddhist monarchs faced, which was to make sure that the idea of home-leaving was not confused with the idea of rebelling against one's parents or king. Rebellious princes who might usurp the throne were especially not to be tolerated.

Emperor Wu regarded Confucianism as the “outer” teaching, while Buddhism was the “inner” teaching. Records tell how Emperor Wu emphasized Confucian values to his son, Prince Zhao Ming. At the age of eight, the boy recited the
Filial Classic,
a Confucian text extolling filial piety, to the assembled royal court.

A key to understanding how the two conflicting philosophies of Confucianism and Buddhism merged in China can be further seen in the Buddhist scripture I mentioned earlier called the Dharma King Sutra. This text, which expounds the Bodhisattva Precepts, offered these vows with a Confucian twist, thus smoothing out any kinks in the strange weave of Confucian filial loyalty and Buddhist home-leaving. The text instructs its readers that filial piety, a very Confucian idea, is actually a Buddhist moral demand of central importance:

Through this and other texts that were recorded centuries after the Buddha lived, the home-leaving ideal seems to have surrendered to the idea of obedience to one's parents as the true Buddha Way. Using the Dharma King Sutra and other texts, Emperor Wu transformed the Buddhist precepts and created his interestingly named Home-Abiding Home-Leaving Bodhisattva Precepts. This new account of the correct rules for conducting the Bodhisattva Vow ceremony killed two important political birds with one stone. First, it united the idea of loyalty to one's parents with the Buddhist precepts, in modern parlance making them “Buddhist precepts with Chinese characteristics.” Second, it went far to dissolve the difference between home-leavers and householders, granting exalted spiritual status to those who did not leave home. The Bodhisattva Vow was tailor-made for the spread of Imperial-Way Buddhism. Now, the original home-leaving teachings of early Buddhism might no longer be seen as the highest ideal of religious life. A
chakravartin
king might be seen as having an even higher religious status. This precepts revolution resonated through history. Emperor Wu's allowing both home-abiders and home-leavers to gain a sort of equal status is significant. Its effects are clearly seen today in Japan and Western countries today where the Bodhisattva Precepts may be taken by both clerical and lay believers.

This point is so important that it is worth emphasizing. With this action, through imperial fiat, Emperor Wu, more than any who had come before him, blurred the distinction between home-leaving and home-abiding Buddhist believers. In a religion that traditionally honored those who “leave the world” as having taken the highest spiritual path, now everyone, whether they were home-leavers or not, could attain a sort of exalted status. Prior to this innovation, the ceremony for receiving the Bodhisattva Precepts was intended for people who would later become or who were already monks. Prior to Emperor Wu, non-home-leavers only received a shortened version of the precepts more suitable for the lay lifestyle. Thus Emperor Wu made it possible for lay people, including emperors, to gain the exalted spiritual status of full-fledged bodhisattvas even though they hadn't left home. Naturally, the most exalted of these non-home-leaving exalted beings was the emperor himself. With a status even higher than the traditional home-leaver, the emperor effectively had his spiritual cake and ate it, too. He could now demand a monk to bow before a king.

NO TRACES REMAIN, at least above the ground, of the Tai Cheng Palace. The Hualin Hall library where Crown Prince Zhao Ming worked with its thousands of volumes, the first such library in China, is long vanished. The Eastern Palace where learned men from throughout Asia taught Buddhist doctrines to an eager court, as well as the Great Ultimate Hall from which Emperor Wu ruled over his realm, remain, if anything at all, obscure rubble a few meters beneath Taiping Road in modern Nanjing. The same goes for the Tongtai Temple, the place behind the palace, where Emperor Wu lived as a monk after each occasion of his trying to leave the world.

I walk north along Taiping Road toward Dark Warrior Lake. According to my estimate, the street lies nearly on the central axis of where Emperor Wu's palace stood. Now, on each side of the street, modern buildings sit above multiple layers of rubble from lost dynasties. The South-North dynasties period, the time when the Liang dynasty held sway, sits somewhere in the lower levels of the debris. As I proceed north from Taiping Road's intersection with Pearl River Street, I pass over what was likely the inner palace area, the place where the Qi emperor Baojuan had his musk hall, where deer musk was applied to the walls to enhance the sexual atmosphere of the place, the site of orgiastic parties. It's where Jade Slave sexually mesmerized the teenage boy and where plots to kill high officials were spawned and approved. Nanjing's modern nightclub district stretches to the east. An area of amusement today, it is also where the emperors of old took their pleasures with their nightly selections from the imperial harem.

Two particular symbols of modernity, a Starbucks and a Costa Coffee shop, compete side by side on a corner of Taiping Street. I enter the Costa Coffee shop to order an espresso. Three young girls are working
the counter, and since there are no other customers waiting, I take the opportunity to ask them a question.