Bodhidharma

In a small martial arts class on a street corner, the children had just finished a set of moves. Sweat beaded on their faces, and they were still catching their breath. On the wall in front of them hung an old painting. It showed a monk with a thick beard and wide, blazing eyes, wrapped in a red robe. A boy looked up and asked his teacher who the man was. The teacher smiled, pointed at the painting and said, "That is Bodhidharma, the Patriarch."

The man in that painting lived a truly remarkable life.

Bodhidharma was born a prince in India, in a kingdom of the south. By rights he would have spent his whole life in a palace. But he chose to let go of everything to seek something deeper than gold and silver: the truth about the human mind. He studied under a great teacher named Prajnatara. In time he became an heir of the Thiền line. Thiền is the Vietnamese name for Zen, a school of Buddhism that puts meditation at its heart. The tradition counts Bodhidharma as its 28th patriarch, from the time of the Buddha.

Once he had fully grasped the way, he did something few would dare. He boarded a ship and crossed the sea to another country, to pass on what he had come to understand.

The voyage was long. There were days of wind and waves, with nothing but sky and water all around. At last the ship reached the shores of China. It was around the 6th century, in the time of a ruler known as Emperor Wu of Liang.

This emperor was deeply devout. He had many pagodas built, many sutras copied, and many monks supported. The story goes that when he met Bodhidharma, he asked with great pride, "I have done so many things like this. How much merit have I earned?" Bodhidharma looked at the emperor and gave a short answer: "No merit at all."

The whole court fell silent. The emperor was stunned. He was used to thinking that doing many good deeds gathered up a great deal of merit, the way people gather up wealth. But Bodhidharma wanted to show him something else. When someone does good while counting gains and losses inside, always hoping for praise and reward, the heart is still not truly open. Real merit lies in purity and in letting go, not in a number that can be counted.

The two men did not see eye to eye. Bodhidharma quietly took his leave and went north.

Here the Zen tradition tells a beautiful legend. When he came to a great river, it is said, Bodhidharma needed no boat. He picked a single reed from the bank, laid it gently on the water, and calmly stepped onto it to cross. He moved with a slow, steady ease, as if nothing in the world could shake him. This is a legend, not history. Still, it carries a meaning: when the heart is at peace, one walks steadily wherever one goes.

Across the river, he climbed to the Shaolin Temple on Mount Song. And there he did something that looked like doing nothing at all. He sat facing a stone wall, silent, in meditation. According to Zen legend, he sat like that for nine whole years. Later generations called it the nine years facing the wall.

Even one minute of sitting still can feel long, yet he sat for nine years. But sitting still here was not laziness or boredom. It was his way of looking deep into his own heart, so that every thought that arose could be seen clearly, the way a still lake mirrors the sky. For Zen, sitting still until the mind grows clear again is the hardest and most precious thing in the world.

Legend tells that one day, with snow falling white over everything, a man came looking for him. His name was Huike. He stood silently out in the snow and waited patiently. The snow covered his shoulders and the cold cut to the bone, yet he did not move. With his whole heart, he asked to be taught the way. According to legend, to prove how complete his sincerity was, Huike showed his longing to learn in the most powerful way the people of old could imagine. Bodhidharma felt the depth of that devotion. He took Huike as his student and passed on to him everything he had come to understand.

From teacher to student, the lamp of Zen was handed on in this way. It is said that the line was passed down through a robe and a bowl, as signs of succession. Each generation lit the way for the next, and the lamp never went out.

In time, that lamp reached Vietnam. Around the end of the 6th century, a Zen master named Vinitaruci brought this line to Pháp Vân Pagoda. It stands in what is now Bắc Ninh. His became the first school of Zen in the country, and it ran in one unbroken line back to Bodhidharma.

So the painting of the bearded monk on the wall of the martial arts class is not foreign at all. Each time a child in Vietnam sits down, back straight, eyes closed, breathing slowly and keeping the heart quiet for even one minute, that child carries on the very line the man in the painting began. He was the monk who crossed the sea, stepped across a river on a single reed, and sat facing a stone wall for nine years.