Kill Bodhidharma On the Road
Why we crave infallible founders and why we are better off without them
When he noticed that his disciples lacked the strength to concentrate on their meditations, he taught them the first martial arts, thus inventing Shaolin Kung Fu with the 18 Arhat Fists, the Tendon Changing, and Marrow Washing Classics…
Once, he himself failed to stay awake during nine years of gazing at a wall. Cutting off his own eyelids in anger, he threw them to the ground. Tea trees sprouted from where they landed. Henceforth, all the monks could meditate through the night from the brew of that special plant...
Supposedly poisoned, he was met upon the road years later, barefoot and looking as healthy as ever, carrying one of his sandals. When his disciples exhumed his tomb, they found an empty casket bearing nothing but a single sandal…
These are just some of the stories of Bodhidharma, legendary Buddhist patriarch, and founder of Zen. The archetypal warrior monk. He had a stoic devotion to his faith, rigorous discipline to his art, and the audacity to speak bluntly with anyone, even the emperor. When the son of heaven asked how much good karma he had achieved for all his great works, our monk dared to tell him, “none at all!”
His legends are repeated to this day and, depending on who you ask, are utter heresy to deny.
But we know that the Bodhidharma myth grew slowly over centuries, from a brief first mention as a Persian Central Asian mystic, each account added more to the myth. Scholars viewed it all with skepticism into the Qing Dynasty, pointing out that martial arts had been around in China for thousands of years (and been used in countless wars) before Bodhidharma’s arrival. Tea plants don’t come from human body parts. And unlike real history, the more time passes, the more we seem to remember more about him.
What’s far more likely is that these stories are symbolic, the meanings of each being worthy of their own post. For now, I want to explore the similarities between Bodhidharma and other “Lawgiver” types. In doing so we might also understand our need for “O.G.”s, “founders” or “granddaddies”.
Like Moses of Israel, Solon of Athens, and Lycurgus of Sparta, Bodhidharma was also a foreigner/outsider who taught his adopted people their foundational principles and practices. Like the others, he was said to have magical powers and been divinely inspired. But living during the 5th or 6th century CE, he is close enough to us in time to trace the roots of his legends. There’s enough recorded history to know how it evolved. And if we squint, we can almost see the man behind the demigod that he became.
While Bodhidharma was indeed an important Buddhist Patriarch who traveled extensively throughout China and may have spent time at Shaolin temple, he was relatively unknown at the time of his death.
One explanation for his later explosion in popularity during the Qing Dynasty lies in the Shaolin Temple’s own destruction and the fact that China was under foreign rule. In the eyes of many Chinese people, their system must have failed, or else heaven would not allow them to be governed by Manchu barbarians. For the Shaolin survivors who sought to keep the temple going, they needed to answer two questions:
What made Shaolin different from so many other Chinese institutions which had failed the people and were then being discarded?
If what Shaolin taught was so great, how come they couldn’t prevent the temple’s destruction or protect the people from foreign domination?
To answer both questions, Shaolin’s defenders turned to Bodhidharma. An important patriarch in the temple’s history to be sure, but hardly the originator of all things Shaolin that he became. By opting for later accounts that Bodhidharma was an Indian prince and brahmin, the Shaolin tradition retroactively imbued itself with a purer strain of Buddhism, one straight from the religion’s source. Because it was “the real stuff”, Bodhidharma’s teachings (and all the Chinese practices which were accredited to him) also deserved preservation.
As for the second question, purity again came into play. Bodhidharma’s techniques were perfect, and they could have prevented the current catastrophes had it not been for more recent corruptions by less able monks.
It’s a very basic human need, to believe that there’s always something we could have done to avert disaster and somebody who can show us how. To accept that some of us get wiped out with no way to prevent it is just too terrible to comprehend, particularly for warriors and spiritual aspirants. Instead, the moral and physical corruption of those who are now all dead or irrelevant is always the reason for the fall. If we practice the O.G. way with diligent integrity, then we can make defeat, whether by illness, violence, or spiritual corruption, impossible.
Sure, he had his flaws as even the saints did. But what the lawgiver taught, the laws he left, must be beyond reproach.
This story appears everywhere, which is partly why the Old Testament is constantly hearkening back to the covenants and Golden Ages of yore, why we pine for the good old days of our parents’ generation even though the threat of nuclear annihilation didn’t lift until the last decade of the 20th century, and why despite the advent of the UFC, strip mall senseis still claim their art is superior (“what you saw on TV wasn’t real [insert style here]!”).
We need heroes, and we need them to be superhuman so that by the constant and correct practice of what they preach, we might also become superhuman.
But founder-worship definitely has its dark side. Dogmatic adherence to one person’s words and the explaining-away of their failures as our own shortcomings leads to stiff unworkable theories. Pure karate, hapkido, Kempo, boxing, wrestling, savate, taekwondo, and just about every other martial art met defeat in the Octagon not because its practitioners weren’t executing their styles closely enough to the original masters, but because they too close. Practitioners failed to recognize that their fighting systems had flaws. When these artists began to account for the holes in their training, i.e. by mixing their martial art with others, they became far better fighters.
Likewise, upon Steve Jobs’ return to Apple, he eliminated nearly all of the company’s product lines, from personal digital assistants to printers, keeping just four that they could do extremely well. But Apple could not become as massive as they are today had the company stuck to just a few products and not extended itself into everything from TV boxes to routers, keyboards, mouses, speakers, headphones, and watches, as they did after his passing.
As if dogmatic adherence to a founder’s ideas isn’t bad enough, unquestioning loyalty to his image is worse. It’s how Elizabeth Holmes, a college dropout with little understanding of medical science could defraud the world’s most accomplished venture capitalists into investing in her blood-testing technology by affecting cult-leader mannerisms and a closet full of black turtlenecks. Investors expected the next Steve Jobs, what they got was med tech’s first massive criminal.
Ironically, all this idolatry flies in the face of Zen, the sect of Buddhism Bodhidharma supposedly founded. There is a famous Zen koan (a kind of profound riddle or puzzle meant to shake us out of our worldly entanglements and grasp the underlying nature of existence) that goes, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” To which I would add, “…And loot his corpse.” None of us have any real idea of what the ‘founding fathers’ were really like. Nor does Zen think it would do us any good if we did. Our spiritual problems are uniquely our own, and only we can untangle them. Better to do away with your mental projections of what perfect people are supposed to be and act according to how the world is and who we are within it. Use what we can learn from the greats, and keep going.
The original Buddha only attained enlightenment after he stopped trying to be society’s idea of the perfect holy man, recognizing instead the perfection that already exists within all things. He kept the yogic and meditative practices that worked for him and did away with the rest. Bodhidharma in turn did not try to be a perfect Buddha but pursued his own path.
As much as it’s ingrained in us to want to hold flawless ideas and believe unquestioningly the legends who came up with them, we must challenge our beliefs and defeat our founders. Only then can we throw off the restraints of dogmatic thinking and live out our own legends.
Yes, we need more of this critical thinking. That doesn't detract from tradition; it strengthens it.
"It’s a very basic human need, to believe that there’s always something we could have done to avert disaster and somebody who can show us how. To accept that some of us get wiped out with no way to prevent it is just too terrible to comprehend, particularly for warriors and spiritual aspirants. Instead, the moral and physical corruption of those who are now all dead or irrelevant is always the reason for the fall. If we practice the O.G. way with diligent integrity, then we can make defeat, whether by illness, violence, or spiritual corruption, impossible."