Tracking Bodhidharma: A Review

TRACKING BODHIDHARMA: A Journey to the Heart of Chinese Culture

Andy Ferguson

2012, Counterpoint, Berkeley $26.00 Hardcover

A Review by

James Ishmael Ford

In the Zen tradition Bodhidharma, twenty-eighth heir in direct transmission from the Buddha Shakyamuni, is the great missionary carrying the Zen way into China in either the fifth or maybe the sixth centuries of our common era. There the tradition he taught took root and flourished, and in time would extend first to the countries within the Chinese influence and from these to the West.

Called the Western Barbarian, Bodhidharma’s glowering eyes and red beard, so different from China’s other Zen teachers is easily identifiable, and just as easily he captures the imagination. For those of us informed by koan literature his image also peeks out at us through many different stories gathered in the major anthologies. His encounter with the Emperor Wu is recorded as the first case of the Blue Cliff Record and the second in the Book of Serenity and in the Gateless Gate we have his encounter with his Chinese disciple and successor Dazu Huike.

And for those of us familiar with the contours of contemporary scholarship, we know his historicity has been challenged by the main stream of the academic community. The facts of a living, breathing person hanging by a few slender threads, a Record of the Buddhist Monasteries of Luoyang, the Further Biographies of Eminent Monks, and the prefatory material to a collection of teachings attributed to him, Two Entrances and Four Practices. It isn’t until the tenth century Anthology of the Patriarchal Hall, four or five centuries after his death that we even get the story we commonly know.

And now we have Andy Ferguson’s Tracking Bodhidharma.

Andy Ferguson is an independent scholar and author of the magisterial Zen’s Chinese Heritage: The Masters and Their Teachings. Writing from the edges of the academic community he is free to challenge the conventions of the academy, and here he does, advocating Bodhidharma’s historicity with verve. I admit I wasn’t convinced, but he brought me close to believing, and left me completely sympathetic to his stance.

But in fact this book has three parts, of which the argument for Bodhidharma’s life is but one, if an important one.

This is also an account of the living experience of Buddhism and particularly of Zen in today’s China described with a vividness that frequently leaves me thinking I was actually there. He is fluent in Mandarin and runs South Mountain China Tours, sometimes collaborating with his longtime friend Bill Porter, who writes as Red Pine. Ferguson knows the insides of Buddhist China with a depth few contemporary Westerners can equal. The subtitle of the book is “A Journey into the Heart of Chinese Culture.” Perhaps it would more accurately read “A Journey into the Heart of Chinese Buddhist Culture.” And that it is. And if there were nothing more to this book than this travel narrative, it would be worth the price.

But there is yet more to the book, a third part. And, for me, possibly this is the most important. It turns on Ferguson’s treatment of the Emperor Wu and a contrast between the emperor and the patriarch. In my experience from the koan repeated in the Blue Cliff and the Book of Serenity, the Emperor is a bit full of himself, completely missing the importance in his encounter with the sage from India. Ferguson sets the matter straight for me. The emperor is of unspeakable importance in the establishment of Buddhism in China.

And, Ferguson takes this fact to open a reflection on the division between a tamed main stream Zen and a more dynamic wild Zen found only at the edges of establishment. The former he calls “Imperial Way” and it will become the Zen that is co-opted by the state most infamously for us in how the Japanese Zen churches supported the war effort in the Second World War in ways deeply embarrassing to those of us who follow Zen today in the West.

Ferguson makes a case for this dichotomy between an “imperial” and highly metaphysical Buddhism and Zen as at heart both anti-imperial and anti-metaphysical. And he makes a compelling case for how this tension has continued through history. And noticing it is critical to the shape of our forming “western” Zen. In a personal correspondence Ferguson summarizes some of this. “In my view, when Zen soberly acknowledges how it was infused with metaphysics under political influence, I think it will finally prepare the ground for being relevant and positive to modern society.”

It makes me think as Zen comes West how already there are tensions between a main stream slowly but relentlessly organizing itself, and a more wild and wooly fringe. Now, the main stream has no state support, and the culture isn’t likely to lead there. But there is something within the act of institutionalizing that can dampen the creative effort. Still, the current fringe of Zen in the West is inhabited by Dharma orphans, people with “legitimate” credentials but who are woefully inadequately prepared to teach, and simply flat out imposters. As someone with strong sympathies for the organizing inclination it gives me pause and broadens my sympathies for the creative possibilities at the edges, if, admittedly, examined with a clear eye, only rarely.

In a comment he made at Dosho Port’s brief and enthusiastic review of this book, Koun Franz a Zen teacher I’m coming to admire greatly observed, “Bodhidharma is considered important not because of all the zazen (though that matters a lot), and not even because of his movement from India to China (also important–monumentally so if true), but because of his encounter with Emperor Wu. That’s the story that gets told over and over again (and is the centerpiece of almost every hossen-shiki I’ve ever attended).

“Historically, Sotoshu (Japanese institutional Soto Zen) has pandered and scammed and compromised in all sorts of sad and terrible ways, but there’s always been this looming, overpowering figure in the background growling at us to hold to the center, to never tell people what they want to hear. Even in the darkest of times, that has carried a lot of weight.”

Says it better than I can. And points to the importance of Ferguson’s book, and his thesis.

Peeking out from the shadows, the mists of history and myth, Bodhidharma points a way for us.

Okay. In short I strongly recommend this book. It’s important. And unusual for something important, it’s a great read.

Buy it.

You’ll like it.

Or, perhaps not.

But, you will be challenged to see Zen with new eyes.

And that’s worth a lot.