Bodhidharma was the founder of the Chan (Zen) lineage in China, and is said to have lived some time during the 5th or 6th century. The details of Bodhidharma's life are largely unknown and surrounded by myth and legend. According to the Transmission of the Lamp, Bodhidharma was the 28th in the line of Indian Patriarchs of Zen, who had received a wordless transmission that was unbroken since the time of the Buddha. His teacher was Prajnatara, and his successor was the Second Chinese Patriarch Huike. He is sometimes referred to as "The Red-Bearded Barbarian", or "The Blue-Eyed Barbarian" (Chinese: 碧眼胡; pinyin: Bìyǎnhú) in Chan texts.
Why did the First Patriarch come from the west?
Bodhidharma was the son of a king, who came from India to China to transmit the dhyana teaching (although the earliest extant source refers to him as a Persian). Tanlin, Bodhidharma's disciple, appended a brief biography to the long text of The Outline of Practice (or: Two Entries and Four Practices), which is perhaps the earliest account of the Bodhidharma's life that is most in line with later tradition. He states that: "The Dharma Master was a South Indian of the Western Region. He was the third son of a great Indian king. His ambition lay in the Mahayana path, and so he put aside his white layman's robe for the black robe of a monk […] Lamenting the decline of the true teaching in the outlands, he subsequently crossed distant mountains and seas, traveling about propagating the teaching in Han and Wei."
One famous story that ensued was Bodhidharma's visit to the emperor, who asked the First Patriarch how much merit had been attained by the emperor's building of temples and shrines, printing sutras, etc. The doctrinal answer would be that the emperor had built up a great store of merit (good karma). Bodhidharma's unorthodox response was, "No merit." The rest of the exchange is recorded in the Blue Cliff Record:
Emperor Wu of Liang asked the great master Bodhidharma, "What is the highest meaning of the holy truths?"
Bodhidharma said, "Empty, without holiness."
The Emperor said, "Who is facing me?"
Bodhidharma replied, "I don't know."
The Emperor did not understand. After this Bodhidharma crossed the Yangtse River and came to the kingdom of Wei.
Later the Emperor brought this up to Master Chih and asked him about it. Master Chih asked, "Does your majesty know who this man is?"
The Emperor said, "I don't know."
Master Chih said, "He is the Mahasattva Avalokitesvara, transmitting the Buddha Mind Seal."
The Emperor felt regretful, so he wanted to send an emissary to go invite (Bodhidharma to return).
Master Chih told him, "Your majesty, don't say that you will send someone to fetch him back. Even if everyone in the whole country were to go after him, he still wouldn't return."
After this exchange, Bodhidharma engaged in the practice of "wall-gazing" for a period of nine years. In the traditional account of things, this involved Bodhidharma literally sitting and staring at a wall. Some scholars have suggested that the term biguan (wall-gazing) found in the Outline of Practice does not in fact refer to literal wall-gazing, but that later tradition merely interpreted it this way.
The most important source for Bodhidharma’s life is the Xu gaoseng zhuan, a work written by Daoxuan in 645 and revised before his death in 667. While this work was very influential in shaping a more complete picture of Bodhidharma, it was still composed more or less a century after the First Patriarch would have lived, so it is impossible to be certain about its accuracy. Nevertheless, it states that Bodhidharma was a brahman from southern India. After studying the Buddhist tradition of the Greater Vehicle (Mahāyāna), Bodhidharma decided to travel to China in order to spread Mahāyāna doctrine. He arrived by sea at Nanyue, in the domain of the Liu Sung dynasty (420–479), and later traveled to Lo-yang, the capital of the Northern Wei (386–534). In Lo-yang, he attempted to win converts, apparently without great success. Nonetheless, he eventually acquired two worthy disciples, Huike (487–593) and Daoyou (dates unknown), who studied with him for several years. He is said to have transmitted the Lankāvatāra Sūtra, the scripture he deemed best fitted for Chinese practitioners, to Huike.
Bodhidharma seems also to have met with some hostility and slander. Daoxuan stresses that Bodhidharma’s teaching, known as “wall-gazing” (biguan), or as the “two entrances” (via “principle,” liru, and via “practice,” xingru), was difficult to understand compared to the more traditional and popular teachings of Sengchou (480–560). Daoxuan concludes by saying that he does not know where Bodhidharma died. In another section of the text, however, Daoxuan states that Bodhidharma died on the banks of the Lo River. Bodhidharma’s teachings are said to have evoked hostility in China; after his death, it is traditionally held that his disciple Huike felt it necessary to hide for a period. Since the locale mentioned is known to have been an execution ground, some have speculated that Bodhidharma was executed during the late Wei rebellions. However, in his biography of Fachong, Daoxuan also records a great many disciples for Huike, which lends less credibility to the idea that Bodhidharma's lineage was persecuted or forced into hiding. Another possibility is that the memory of the Buddhist persecution (that occurred closer to the time when Sengcan is supposed to have lived) had a profound impact on how later practitioners saw the origins of their school, and was retroactively applied to Bodhidharma and Huike as well.
Although Daoxuan’s account is straightforward, succinct, and apparently fairly authentic, it presents some problems. Most important, it presents two different, almost contradictory, images of Bodhidharma—as a practicer of “wall-gazing,” intent on not relying on the written word, and as a partisan of the Lankāvatāra Sūtra. Daoxuan clearly has some difficulty in reconciling his divergent sources. Primarily, he draws on the preface to the so-called Erru sixing lun (Treatise on the two entrances and four practices), written around 600 by Bodhidharma’s (or Huike’s) disciple Tanlin (dates unknown) and on information concerning the reputed transmission of the Lankāvatāra Sūtra. This latter had probably been given to Daoxuan by Fachong (587?–665), an heir of the tradition. In any case, at the time of Daoxuan’s writing, Bodhidharma was not yet considered the twenty-eighth patriarch of Indian Buddhism.
Bodhidharma was from a family of the warrior caste, and his original name was Bodhitara. He was the third son of a rajah of southern India. That king was unusually devoted to Buddhism, and he once gave a priceless jewel to the Buddhist master Prajnatara.
In order to test the wisdom of the three princes, Prajnatara showed the jewel given him by their father and said, "Is there anything comparable to this jewel?"
The first and second princes said, "This jewel is the finest of precious stones; there is certainly none better. Who but someone of your sanctity could receive such a jewel?"
But the third son Bodhitara said, "This is a worldly jewel, and cannot be considered of the highest order. Among all jewels, the jewel of truth is supreme. This is a worldly luster, and cannot be considered the finest. Among all lusters, the luster of wisdom is supreme. This is a worldly clarity, and cannot be considered the best. Among all clarities, clarity of mind is supreme. The sparkle of this jewel cannot shine by itself, it needs the light of knowledge to discern its sparkle. When you discern this, you know it is a jewel, when you know this jewel, you know it is precious. When you understand that is is precious, the value is not value in itself. If you understand the jewel, the jewel is not a jewel in itself.
"The jewel is not a jewel in itself because we need the jewel of knowledge to distinguish it as a jewel in the worldly sense. Value is not value in itself because we need the treasure of knowledge to understand the value of truth. Because your Way is a treasure of knowledge, you have been rewarded with a worldly treasure. So that treasure has appeared because there is enlightenment in you, just as the treasure of the mind appears in anyone with enlightenment."
Hearing the eloquent explanation of the prince, Prajnatara knew that he was an incarnated sage and perceived that the prince would be his spiritual successor. However, he waited because he knew the time was not yet ripe.
Later, Prajnatara asked Bodhidharma, "What among things is formless?"
Bodhitara said, "Nonorigination is formless."
Prajnatara asked, "What among things is paramount?"
Bodhitara said, "The sense of self and others is paramount."
Prajnatara asked, "What among things is greatest?"
Bodhitara said, "The nature of reality is greatest."
Although the minds of teacher and apprentice communicated through such a dialogue, Prajnatara waited still for the opportunity to ripen.
Subsequently, when the king died and everyone was mourning, Bodhitara sat alone in front of the casket and went into a trance. He came out of the trance seven days later, then went to Prajnatara to request ordination as a Buddhist monk. Prajnatara knew the time had come, so he ordained the prince and invested him with the precepts. After that, Bodhitara sat in meditation for seven days in Prajnatara's presence, and Prajnatara gave him thorough instructions in the subtle principles of meditation. Hearing these instructions, Bodhitara developed unsurpassed wisdom. Then Prajnatara said to him, "You have already attained full comprehension of all principles. Dharma has the meaning of greatness and comprehension, so you should be called Dharma."
Thus, he changed his name to Bodhidharma.
The following is list of the sources on Bodhidharma's life in chronological order of appearance.
John McRae has written about the mystery surrounding the term biguan:
…the term “wall contemplation” (biguan)... has bedeviled the Chan tradition ever since its introduction [in Outline of Practice]. Ultimately, no one really knows what the term means. It only occurs in one other more-or-less contemporaneous source, a list of meditation practices recommended for beginners, where it occurs without explanation. The occurrence of the term in this list is not terribly helpful, especially since the estimation of it as a beginner’s practice is at odds with the comments made by the historian Daoxuan (596–667) that the “achievements of Maháyána wall contemplation are the highest.” Eventually, the term came to be interpreted in the Chan tradition as referring to the act of sitting in meditation facing a wall, but as indicated in the discussion of Bodhidharma’s hagiographical evolution above, it took some time for this meaning to take hold.
Paul Swanson has recently suggested that the compound biguan might be a combination of two characters that both stand for the word vipasyaná or “insight meditation.” Hence the character bi is not used in its substantive meaning as “wall” but rather as the transliteration of the first syllable of vipasyaná, a Sanskrit term usually translated into Chinese as guan, the second character in the compound. The character guan can, of course, be used in diªerent senses in Chinese, but here the compound biguan was thus intended as “the meaning of guan that corresponds to vipasyaná.” Unfortunately, the phonology does not quite work: In medieval Chinese the character for “wall” had a final k ending (in modern Japanese the character is pronounced heki), and it seems never to have been used for transliteration purposes. Finally, the association of biguan with vipasyaná seems off; there is no sense of meditative investigation or discernment about the “entrance of principle.”
Zhiyi’s magnum opus on meditation theory and practice, the Great Calming and Contemplation (Mohe zhiguan), includes what I suspect is a better possibility: “Concentration (zhi, samatha) is wall concentration (biding), in which the evil perceptions of the eight winds cannot enter. Concentration is pure water, which overflows the eight confusions of lust. In glossing the term biding, Zhanran (711–82) writes that a room has four walls, so the eight winds cannot enter. If one is able to stop them, then one has transcended this realm’s evil perceptions of internal and external, concordant and discordant. The eight winds are only the four discordant and four concordant. . . . The room’s walls also prevent these eight winds [from entering]; hence they are used as a metaphor.
This usage by Zhiyi and Zhanran seems to fit the Treatise on the Two Entrances and Four Practices very well: “wall contemplation” in that text might be considered to mean “fixed in samatha or concentration meditation, without allowing the eight winds of good and bad fortune to influence one at all.” Whether the specific reference to the eight winds applies to Bodhidharma’s treatise or not, the general sense of “wall contemplation” as the solid exclusion of distractions fits well with the “entrance of principle.” Although this metaphoric explanation seems reasonable, it was apparently not transparent to the members of the later Chan movement, who eventually introduced the more graphic image of Bodhidharma sitting in front of a cave wall. The issue is profoundly irresolvable, and we should take clear note of the uncertainty that exists.