Tracking Bodhidharma (7 page)

 

FIGURE 8. Buddha Hall Typical Layout.

Of course, the idea that the “self” is a fiction created by our brains is not at all unique to Buddhist thinking. Innumerable religious books and figures, plus countless philosophers of East and West, have taught this idea for a very long time. For example, in a college philosophy class, I studied a book by the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre entitled
The
Transcendence of the Ego.
In the book Sartre argued that the ego was a creation of the brain's flowing consciousness. He said individuals are deluded into believing in the self by looking back on their stream of consciousness and projecting the existence of an “ego” onto the stored sensory data. Perhaps the most famous expounder of this idea in the West was the great Scottish philosopher David Hume, who brilliantly expounded this idea in his
Treatise on Human Nature
in the eighteenth century. But while many other religions and philosophical schools have talked about the illusory nature of the “self,” it's probably the Buddhists who, over many centuries, have refined and defined this point of view most carefully and, in the case of Zen, most metaphorically and poetically.

 

FIGURE 9. Dharma Hall Typical Layout.

The third main hall of the traditional Zen temple, lying
behind the Buddha Hall,
is the Dharma Hall. The
Dharma
can be translated as the “Law,” which broadly means both Buddhist teachings and the underlying moral component of life, the nature of the “wheel of birth and death.” This hall symbolizes the third “nature” of conscious activity, the “Perfected True Nature” (Sanskrit:
Parinispanna
).This refers to normal consciousness that, having understood the “dependent co-arising nature” taught in the Buddha Hall, is no longer overly attached to ideas of an inherent “self” and “other.”

In the Dharma Hall, there were typically no statues or symbols of devotion. In this hall of Zen's highest teaching, it's the nature of one's own mind that is honored, not outward symbols of religiosity. This
absence of symbols or icons is connected to the idea of signlessness, an important idea that underlies Zen Buddhism. It equates Zen with people's “ordinary mind,” the mind that doesn't seek any salvation beyond what is revealed by examining one's “self.”

The founding myth of the Zen tradition is a story of the Buddha giving a teaching at a place called Vulture Peak in ancient India. What the Buddha said emphasizes the importance of the “signless” idea very clearly. According to the story, the Buddha held up a flower before his followers and said, “I have the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, the sublime mind of nirvana, whose true sign is signlessness, the sublime Dharma Gate, which without words or phrases, is transmitted outside of the [standard] teachings, and which I bestow upon Mahakasyapa.” Mahakasyapa was Buddha's disciple credited with understanding this teaching by the Buddha, where an upheld flower was the “signless” symbol of the teaching. I translate the Chinese
wu xiang
used in this and other Zen passages as “signless” instead of the more common translation “formless,” partly because the Buddha held up a flower. Using a flower to represent the signless teaching is apt. A flower, though beautiful, is not something extraordinary or other worldly, and therefore it best conveys the idea of signlessness. A flower is not “formless.” Translating the phrase in question as “formless” leads to an unwarranted and un-Zen-like emphasis on “emptiness” and an incorrect nihilistic interpretation of Zen teachings.

Examining the Zen
koan
I mentioned before, the apparent gibberish recited by the Zen master Linxi starts to make sense. He declared that his teaching was about “mountains and rivers,” a traditional Zen symbol of “signlessness”—of something beautiful and yet ordinary. The people who live in the realm of his teaching are said to be “behind the Buddha Hall,” that is, the location of the Dharma Hall where signlessness dominates, and “in front of the temple gate,” meaning the ordinary everyday world of people who live outside the temple's religious activities. These are Zen's signless places, the places where people live their life without being corrupted by external religious symbols. Linxi's great teaching is not found in the Buddha or Heavenly Kings Halls, where the “signs” of religiosity abound.

One final note on this subject. There are indications in early records that certain very early Zen temples, such as the one established by Zen
Master Baizhang (about whom I'll speak more later), had only a Dharma Hall and did not have the other two halls I've discussed. Other records from the same period mention all three of the halls in the temples of famous Zen teachers. Perhaps some early Zen temples, especially private remote temples that were not generally open to the public, emphasized Sudden Enlightenment and eschewed the “stages” on the path to enlightenment that the other two halls represent.

GRAND BUDDHA TEMPLE, like so much else in China, is currently under renovation and reconstruction. And like other temples in China, it has slightly changed the traditional layout of the three main halls I've just discussed. While the Heavenly Kings Hall and Buddha Hall have remained in the positions they formerly held, the Dharma Hall has lost its position of importance and, at the time of my visit, seems to have been eliminated altogether. This departure from the traditional layout has become increasingly common in modern times. Temples today often no longer have a formal Dharma Hall positioned where it used to be. Now the importance of written scriptures is emphasized more, and in place of a Dharma Hall there may be, for example, a Sutra Storage Hall. I think this change in the layout of many modern Zen temples directly reflects the loss of early Zen teachings, the idea that meditation reveals something outside the traditional (read “scriptural”) teachings. Instead of following Bodhidharma's instruction about just observing, practitioners everywhere now focus on the words and phrases of Buddhist scriptures.

Grand Buddha Temple's existing Buddha Hall is over a thousand years old, certainly one of the oldest structures of its kind in China. It is still used daily for morning and evening services. A service is being conducted as we pass the building, with drums beating and bells ringing, the monks chanting and bowing before a grand statue of Shakyamuni Buddha.

We enter the temple's secondary buildings built around its perimeter. There, in a guest-reception room at the top of some stairs, I'm introduced to a bespectacled and earnest-looking man holding several books. I learn his name is He Fangyao (
), the man who recently wrote about the famous monks who passed through Guangzhou on their way to and from India in ancient times. Upon receiving a message that a
foreign guest had expressed an interest in the subject of his work, he dropped everything and ran over to Grand Buddha Temple to deliver his book to me personally. This typical kindness and solicitous response to my interest afforded me the opportunity to ask him some questions. Suffice it to say that the book Professor He (pronounced
Huh)
wrote is extremely detailed and will be a useful part of my picture of how Zen Buddhism came to China.

Professor He can't stay long because of some personal matters, so we thank him for taking time to meet us, and he goes off leaving us signed copies of his book. Then the abbot proposes that Ruxin and I have some lunch while he attends to some other pressing matters. Before we go to the temple restaurant, I follow Ruxin on a tour of the building. He leads me into an impressive library that the temple offers not only to its Buddhist members but also to the general public. Its books cover a wide range of subjects, including Western literature and philosophy, as well as topical subjects like business management and computing. Ruxin explains, “Buddhism always flourishes when China flourishes, and now China is flourishing again, and we are following suit. It's natural that we offer subjects that are timely, not only related to Buddhism, but to society at large.”

In ancient times, monks of both East and West were often society's most literary group, and writing and printing was society's advanced technology of the day. The trend to stay on the cutting edge of things seems to be continuing here.

Ruxin takes me to the temple restaurant where we walk between two lines of lay workers and attendants greeting us and other patrons at the door. They all cheerfully clap their hands and welcome us with shouts of “
Huanying!
” (“Welcome!”). The inside of the place is very pleasant, with bamboo and water art and accents. We enter a small private dining room off the main hall, tastefully and subtlety decorated with natural fibers and plant motifs, conveying the vegetarian theme of the restaurant.

The food offered in the temple restaurant is top tier. I find it especially satisfying after having endured a breakfast of flavorless noodles in boiled water, the only “vegetarian” fare they could scrape together at the Fragrant Beef House across from my hotel. The temple restaurant offers platters of mushroom and vegetable dishes, plus “chicken” drumsticks
that taste like the real thing, all followed by a fine nonalcoholic apple brandy.

The food here is a great leap forward from the innumerable banquets I experienced as a businessman in China, where I was forced to “bottoms up” the ghastly
bai jiu
(“clear alcohol”) that is widely and mysteriously celebrated here. I simply couldn't drink the stuff. Even partaking of a small glass caused anything I ate to remain in my stomach like a rock for twelve hours.

A couple years after I started learning Chinese, President Nixon went to China. The comedian Bob Hope went along on the trip, and I remember his stand-up comedy routine that was televised from the Great Hall of the People or some such place. Imagine a big hall filled with Communist Party officials listening to Bob Hope tell jokes through an interpreter! The audience reacted with a dreadful silence to his routine, failing to comprehend his subtle, self-effacing wit so beloved by Americans. Bob Hope was dying up there, not just in front of all those Communist Party members, but also in front of an international satellite audience that had no laugh machine to leaven the deadly silence of the hall. At one point of his routine Bob poked fun at China's national alcohol, called
mao tai
, that he was forced to drink at the state banquet. He said something like “And your alcohol here! I heard it comes in two grades, regular and ethyl!” The interpreter looked puzzled, then turned to the audience and said, “He's saying something about gasoline but I don't understand what he means.” The audience let out their first big laugh of the night, thinking it funny that the interpreter was confused. Bob Hope, on the other hand, took their laughter to mean he finally connected with the sea of blue Mao jackets in front of him, and he smiled broadly at the TV camera that was broadcasting the event around the globe.