Zen Buddhism 4

 1) What, according to Bernard Faure, is the relationship between hagiography and the availability of historical texts? Can you think of any analogous examples of biographical representations in non-Buddhist, non-Western contexts that similarly reflect this relationship?

2) After working through the 9/15 reading, think about how it relates to the EZB entries assigned for this week. What role do these concepts play in the image we have (or we think we have) of Bodhidharma? 

Bernard Faure B O D H I D H A R M A AS
T E X T U A L A N D
R E L I G I O U S P A R A D I G M

In the last few decades, the study of Ch’an or Zen Buddhism has
progressed greatly due essentially to the rediscovery of the Tun-huang
manuscripts and to the role of Chinese and Japanese scholars such as
Hu Shih, Ui Hakuju, Sekiguchi Shindai, and Yanagida Seizan. These
scholars have attempted to detach themselves from the sectarian
affiliations that once dominated the field of Ch’an studies and to
approach the history of this tradition from an objective point of view.
We owe to them an understanding of Ch’an/Zen that is sometimes
quite different from the traditional account exported to the West by
D. T. Suzuki, which unfortunately too often still prevails. Despite
Suzuki’s lasting influence, the situation of Ch’an studies in the West is
gradually changing, and the early Ch’an tradition in particular is
being placed by some scholars in its proper historical context.’ This
historical approach is certainly necessary and needs to be encouraged.
But it also raises various problems, particularly in the case of the
so-called founders of Ch’an schools. I would like to consider some of
those problems here. Generally speaking, there are two alternatives
to the historical approach: philosophical hermeneutics and structural
criticism. I limit myself here to the structural approach and take

See, e.g., Philip B. Yampolsky, The Plarform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1966).

Q 1986 by The Univers~ty of Chicago. All rights reserved
0018-2710/86/2503-0005SOI.00

188

Bodhidharma

as an example the legendary founder of Ch’an, the Indian monk
Bod hidharma.

Bodhidharma’s biography is very obscure, yet his life is relatively well
known. This is less paradoxical than it may sound. I shall argue that
hagiography flourishes precisely owing to the scarcity of historical
materials. The main task of historians, usually, is to try to uncover
the facts behind the legend. The texts concerning Bodhidharma are
considered by historians as documents that need to be interpreted
using the historical method so as to bring to light their hidden truths.
Often enough, after this mortuary washing, only a skeleton remains,
and it is this skeleton that will enter the museum of history. In fact,
some missing bones may have to be taken from another skeleton to
complete the exhibit. Indeed, though some may consider biography
the opposite of hagiography, the biographical process is in most cases
only an unconscious duplication of the hagiographical process. Both
are characterized by an attitude that I would call “substantialist,” in
that they consider a personage as some kind of individual entity
whose essence is reflected in specific texts-biographical or doctrinal.

Thus, we have many biographical notices concerning Bodhidharma
and several works attributed to him. Sekiguchi Shindai has shown
that most of these Treatises of Bodhidharrna were apocryphal.2 Only
one of them, the so-called Treatise on the Two Entrances and Four
Practices, is presently considered to be Bodhidharma’s teaching as
recorded by his disciple an-lin.’ In this work is also found the first
biographical notice concerning Bodhidharma. According to this
account, he was a South Indian monk who came to China to transmit
the essence of Mahayana teachings. After his arrival in Canton, he
went to Lo-yang, then the capital of the Northern Wei. These
biographical elements reappear in Tao-hsiian’s Continued Biographies
of Eminent Monks, written in 645 (and revised down to 664) more
than one century after Bodhidharma’s mysterious death.4 According
to Tao-hsiian, Bodhidharma’s type of practice, the so-called wall
contemplation, was considerably different from and much more diffi-
cult to understand than the classical Indian dhyiina then prevalent in

2 Sekiguchi Shindai, Daruma daishi no kenkyii [A study of the great master
Bodhidharma] (Tokyo: Shunjusha, 1957).

3 See J. A. Jorgensen, “The Earliest Text of Ch’an Buddhism: The Long Scroll”
(M.A. thesis, Australian National University, Canberra, 1979).

4 See Taishd shinshii daizdkyd [TaishO edition of the Buddhist canon], ed. Takakusu
JunjirO et al. (Tokyo: 1924-32). 50, 2060, 551c (hereafter abbreviated as T.: the
references give the volume number, the catalog number, and the page and column).

189 History of Religions

Northern china.’ He therefore attracted only a few followers. Among
them was Hui-k’o, who later became the second patriarch of Ch’an. A
passage in Hui-k’o’s notice tells us that Bodhidharma transmitted to
him a Buddhist scripture, the LankBvatBra-stitra, as the essence of his
teaching;6 hence the Ch’an school was first known as the “LankBvatHra
School.” Another earlier mention of Bodhidharma is to be found in
the Record of the Buddhist Monasteries of In this text, ~ o – ~ a n ~ . ~
Bodhidharma is presented as a very old Central Asian monk who
spent several days singing in praise of the great stupa in the Yung-ning
monastery.

After endless discussions, historians have harmonized these con-
flicting images of Bodhidharma-as a devout and somewhat senile
monk, as an austere practitioner of some esoteric type of meditation,
and as a transmitter of Buddhist scriptures-to give a coherent account
of his personality that differs greatly from that of the legendary figure
of the Ch’an tradition. Yet all these discussions and the subsequent
conclusions may have missed the point. As I mentioned earlier, the
historiographical process that leads to the elaboration of this biog-
raphy bears important resemblances to the hagiographical process on
which it relies. Both share the same obsession with filling the chro-
nological gaps by borrowing from various sources, and both are there-
fore ideological products. By considering the texts as documents that
will yield valuable information, historiography completely ignores
their worklike n a t ~ r e . ~ Such an easy division between “historical” and
“hagiographical” components does violence to the texts and deprives
the historian of valuable information about the evolution of Ch’an
thought. Historiographical discourse often assumes that the earliest
sources are the most authentic without questioning that assumption.
In other words it is a rather arbitrary reconstruction that ignores or
hides its ideological motivations and simply “submits a literary genre
to the laws of another-historiography.”9 In the case of Ch’an
historiography, a teleological conception of history appears to hold
sway, one which takes classical Japanese Zen as the logical end of
the Ch’an tradition, which in turn makes the “search for the real

5 T. 50,2060, 596c.
T. 50, 2060, 552b.
See A. C. Soper, Literary Evidenc,e,for Earlv Buddhist Art in China. Artibus Asiae.

suppl. 19 (Ascona, Switzerland: Artibus Asiae Publishers, n.d.), p. 1 1 I; see also Paul
Pelliot, “Notes sur quelques artistes des Six Dynasties et des T’ang,” Tbung Pao 22
(1923): 253-61.

8 On the distinction between the documentary and “worklike” aspects of a text, see
Dominick Lacapra, Rethinking intellectual History: Texts. Contexts. Language (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983). p. 30.
9 Michel de Certeau, L’Pc,riture de I’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). p. 275.

190 Bodhidharma

Bodhidharma” meaningful only as a legitimation of the Zen tradition.
If Bodhidharma was no more than an ordinary Central Asian monk,
we may as well dismiss him as irrelevant to an understanding of
the Ch’an and later Zen traditions. Bodhidharma does not, then,
deserve attention as a historical person; and Buddhist historiographers
should perhaps stop searching for “eminent monks” and writing their
“biographies.” The biographies that exist already have literary but
not historical value; Bodhidharma should be interpreted as a textual
and religious paradigm and not be reconstructed as a historical figure
or a psychological essence.

But one may object that we possess works attributed to Bodhidharma
and that his thought, at least, is relatively well known to us. Here
again, we may be misled by thinking that is too “substantialist.” As a
working hypothesis Michel Foucault’s definition of the author might
yield much better results. According to Foucault, “The author is the
principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning. . . . [He] is not an
indefinite source of significations which fill the work; he is a certain
functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes and
chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free
manipulation, the free composition, decomposition and recomposition
of fiction^.”‘^

Such a redefinition of the author may help us avoid the type of
historicist reductionism that can still be found in very recent Ch’an
studies. In one such study, for example, we find an attempt at re-
constructing the thought of the dhyiina master Seng-ch’ou (480-560),
the contemporary and successful rival of Bodhidharma (according to
Tao-hsiian’s Continued ~ iogra~hies) . ” Seng-ch’ou is credited with a
number of works that are clearly the products of a much later period
and reflect the point of view of the so-called Northern School of
ch’an.I2 The same type of reductionism is found in the study of
eminent Ch’an monks such as WO-lun,” Shen-hsiu, or ~ u i – n e n ~ . ‘ ~
This traditional discussion of authorship is reminiscent of Borges’s
fiction about the world of Tlon, in which all books are considered

lo See Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Texrual Srraregies: Perspectives in
Post-srructuralist Criticism. ed. Josue V . Harari (lthaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
1979), p. 159.

1 1 T. 50, 2060, 553b.
l 2 See Jan Yiin-hua, “Seng-ch’ou’s Method of DhyBna,” in Early Ch ‘on in China and

Tibet. ed. Lewis Lancaster and Whalen Lai (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1983), pp. 54-63.

13 See Wu Chi-yii, “Wo-lun ch’an-shih i-yii Tun-huang T’u-fan-wen (Pelliot 116
hao) i-pen k’ao-shih,” Tung-huang hsiieh 4 (1979): 33-46.

I4This may be equally true in the case of Bodhidharma’s Treatise on the Two
Entrances, which is strongly reminiscent of Seng-ch’ou’s Hsin-hsing lun [Treatise on
mental practice].

History of Religions 191

the work of a single author: “The critics often invent authors: they
select two dissimilar works-the Tao-te ching and the 1001 Nights,
say-attribute them to the same writer and then determine most
scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de ~ettres.”‘~
As the literary critic GCrard Genette points out, “Fundamentally,
Tlonian criticism is not the contrary of our positivist criticism, it is
rather its hyperbole.”‘6

STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS

I would therefore like to treat Bodhidharma’s “life” as a literary piece
belonging to the genre of hagiography. The first step toward under-
standing its meaning, then, is to ask what this genre is and by what
rules it is governed. In other words, what is its syntagmatic structure
(i.e., “the actual link between various functions in a given text”)?17
Michel de Certeau has proposed an answer worth considering, namely,
that “hagiography is characterized by a predominance of precisions
concerning places over precisions concerning time. . . . The life of a
saint is a composition of places.”18

The second step is to examine the paradigmatic structure of the
hagiographical text (i.e., “the virtual relations between analogous or
opposed functions, from one text to the other, in the whole corpus
under consideration”). This leads me to ask whether the meaning of
the hagiographical text itself has ever been fixed once for all. Accord-
ing to Ferdinand de Saussure: “To imagine that a legend begins with
a meaning, has had since its first origin the meaning that it now has,
is an operation beyond my understanding. It seems to suppose really
that there have never been any material elements transmitted on this
legend through centurie~.” ‘~

De Saussure contends that in any particular legend each of the
characters “is a symbol for which one can observe variations of:
(a) name, (b) position vis-A-vis others, (c) character, and (d) function
and actions. If a name is transposed, it could follow that part of the
action is reciprocally transposed or that the whole drama is entirely
changed by an accident of this kind.””

This, 1 believe, can provide a good starting point from which to
examine Bodhidharma’s life as a narrative. It is, in a sense, more

‘ 5 Jorge Luis Borges, Lab.r.rinrhs(New York: New Directions, 1964). p. 13.
16 Gtrard Genette, Figures I (Paris: Seuil, 1966). p. 129.
17 Ibid., p. 154.
18 Certeau, p. 286.
19 See Jean Starobinski, Words upon Words: The Anagrams of Ferdinand de

Saussure (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 8.
20 Ibid., pp. 5-6.

192 Bodhidharma

flexible than Vladimir Propp’s theories concerning the f~ lk t a l e ,~ ‘
which do not take into consideration the semantic value of the hero’s
name and are somewhat too systematic for our purpose. The same
may be said of Roland Barthes’s and Claude Bremond’s attempts at
analyzing the logic of the narrative, not to mention Ltvi-Strauss’s
study of mythology.22 Hagiography is a hybrid type of narrative that
offers more resistance to structural analysis than the folktale or the
myth; yet recent developments in the field of textual analysis may still
yield significant results.

Let us reconsider Bodhidharma’s life in the light of de Saussure’s
definition by focusing on two of its elements, the function and the
name. In the Continued Biographies of Eminent Monks, Bodhidharma
is contrasted with the dhyiina master Seng-ch’ou, whose method of
meditation, although deemed of a rather inferior type, was quite
popular. To quote Tao-hsiian: “Thus, when we look at these two
tenets [of Seng-ch’ou and Bodhidharma, it is clear that] they are like
the two wheels of the same cart. [Seng-] ch’ou embraced the [practice
called] the ‘foundations of mindfulness’, a model of purity to be
venerated. Bodhidharma relied on the teaching of emptiness, whose
purport is obscure and deep. Due to this fact, his principle was
intrinsically difficult to comprehend, while Seng-ch’ou’s model was
easily acce~sible .”~~

This contrast is a typical literary device, and the opposition between
the two men was probably not so clear cut. It is reminiscent of
another famous antagonism, that of the respective founders of the
so-called Northern and Southern schools of Ch’an, Shen-hsiu and
~ u i – n e n ~ , ~ ~who became paradigms of the two main types of Ch’an
practitioners. Any later Ch’an monk was, in a way, a Hui-neng or a
Shen-hsiu. Again, it is clear that the contrast between the two has
been exaggerated for hagiographical purposes.

But, more than the contrast itself, what I would like to stress is
that, in the early Ch’an tradition, both Bodhidharma and Seng-ch’ou,
or Hui-neng and Shen-Hsiu, are symmetrical figures that imply each

21 Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folkrak (Bloomington: Indiana University
Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore and Linguistics, 1968).

22 Roland Barthes, “lntroduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” in Image-
Music-Texr (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977); Claude Bremond, Logique du rPcit (Paris:
Seuil, 1973); Claude Lbvi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology. 2 vols. (New York: Basic
Books, 1963-76).

23 T. 50, 2060, 596c.
24 Yampolsky (n. I above), pp. 130-32.

History of Religions 193

other. They constitute a narrative “actor,” to use Terence Turner’s
terminology. According to Turner, “An ‘actor’ may become polarized
into two contrasting figures, sharing one attribute but opposed upon
one or more others.”*’ The text is a whole, and the literary device
used clearly affects the account of the life of each protagonist. It may
therefore be artificial to dissect this kind of “biography” and to keep
only what concerns Bodhidharma or Seng-ch’ou. Furthermore, the
polarization between the two figures might be more than a simple
literary device and might reflect instead a preexistent connection a t
the level of popular cons~iousness .~~

Another possible model is provided by Barthes’s hypothesis that
many narratives “set two adversaries in conflict over some stake; the
subject is then truly double, not reducible further by substitution;
indeed, this is even perhaps a common archaic form, as though narra-
tive, after the fashion of certain languages, had also known a dual of
persons.”27 (Note that the French word duel has both meanings of
“duel” or contest, and “dual” [the category in Greek grammar inter-
mediate between singular and plural].) One of the protagonists of the
duel (contrast or conflict) may change, but the duel itself remains.
Thus, the contrast between Bodhidharma and Seng-ch’ou is struc-
turally analogous to the rivalry between Hui-neng and Shen-hsiu,
which is its sectarian hyperbole. It reflects the opposition and com-
plementarity between the two levels of truth (absolute and conven-
tional) or, in Zen terminology, between the theories of kybge betsuden
(special transmission outside of the Scriptures) and kydzen itchi
(harmony between Zen and the Scriptures), that is, between purity
and eclecticism.

The syntagmatic contrast between Bodhidharma and Seng-ch’ou is
obvious from Tao-hsiian’s notice. The paradigmatic equivalence
between them can be found in the fact that to both are attributed
parallel theories concerning the “two entrances” and that both were
considered candidates for the position of “first patriarch” by the early
Ch’an school. Both, in de Saussure’s terms, have the same function in
Ch’an discourse and legend, where they are represented as Taoist
immortals, Bodhidharma achieving immortality through the so-called

2′ Terence Turner, “Narrative Structure and Mythopoiesis,” Areihusa 10, no. I
(1977): 155.

26 We may think here of what Renk Girard, in his book on Violence and the Sucred
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). has said about “antagonistic
mimesis” and the scapegoating process leading to the eviction of the double, later
glorified as a “founder.” Bodhidharma’s death remains mysterious, and some Japanese
scholars have suggested that he may even have been executed. The legend tells us that
he was poisoned by jealous rivals.

27 Barthes, p. 108.

Bodhidharma

deliverance from the corpse, Seng-ch’ou manifesting his supernatural
powers by taming two tigers and causing the welling up of a “divine
source.”28 Thus, Seng-ch’ou appears as the main double of Bodhi-
dharma: on the syntagmatic axis of the hagiographical narrative, he is
a rival, on its paradigmatic axis, he is a s u b ~ t i t u t e . ~ ~ Both Seng-ch’ou
and Bodhidharma were apparently regarded by Ching-chiieh, the
author of the Leng-ch’ieh shih-tzu chi, as the patriarchs of the two
main trends of early ~ h ‘ a n . ~ ‘ The amalgam between the two figures
was achieved around the same time, as we can infer from a poem by
Ts’en Chen (715-70) about a foreign monk who concentrated on the
LankBvatHra-sMra and who had subdued two tigers and a dragon (an
allusion to the “divine source” kept by a dragon).3’

On the paradigmatic axis of Bodhidharma’s hagiography, we find
legends related to other thaumaturges such as Pao-chih and Fu “the
Mahasattva” (alias Fu Hsi). Both characters served as models for a
certain trend in Buddhism that considered dhvijna as a way to acquire
supernatural powers. Fu Hsi (497-569), the “Chinese Vimalakirti,” is
also considered as the precursor of the T’ien-t’ai school (as is Seng-
ch’ou). The famous meeting between Bodhidharma and the Liang
emperor Wu (another typical example of “duel”)32 is a variant of the
encounter between Fu Hsi and this emperor.33 In both cases, Pao-
chih plays the role of a clairvoyant witness who reveals to the per-
plexed emperor the real identity of his interlocutor (Fu Hsi being a
manifestation of the future Buddha Maitreya, Bodhidharma an avatar
of the Bodhisattva AvalokiteSvara [Chinese Kuan-yin]).

The similar function played by Fu Hsi and Bodhidharma is reflected
in the comment by the T’ien-t’ai monk Chan-jan that the “Incarnation
from Tusita Heaven” (Fu Hsi as Maitreya) surpasses the “coming of
the Indian saint,”34 which is to say, T’ien-t’ai teaching is superior to

28 See Yanagida Seizan, Shoki Zenshii shisho no kenkjjfi [A study of the histo-
riographical works of the early Ch’an school] (Kyoto: HGzGkan, 1967). p. 597. The
names of Bodhidharma and Hui-neng are also related to similar “divine sources,” and
the latter is known in the legend as a “dragon-subduer.” See Michel Soymi&, “Sources
et sourciers en Chine,” Bullerin de la Maison franco-japonaise, n.s., 7, no. 1 (1952):
33-34.

29 The same could be said in the case of Hui-neng and Seng-ch’ou, who are at the
same time rivals in the narrative (syntagmatic axis) and functional equivalents (para-
digmatic axis) as “sixth patriarch” of the early Ch’an tradition.

30 T. 85, 2837, 1284~; and Yanagida, p. 518.
3 1 See “T’ai-po hu-seng ko” [Song of the barbarian monk of T’ai-pol, in Ch’iian

Tang shih. chiian 199, ed. Sheng Tsu (Taipei: Hung-ye shu chii, 1977). 1:2057 ff.
32 See Pi-yen lu [The record of the blue cliff], “case” I (T. 48,2003, 140a).
33 Ibid., “case”67 ( T . 48, 2003, 197a).
34 See Chih-kuon i-li(T. 46, 1913,452~).

196 Bodhidharma

Bodhidharma’s name appears sometimes truncated as Bodhi, or
more often as Dharma (Ta-mo). In the first case, it may be confused
with another of his rivals, Bodhiruci. Incidentally, Bodhiruci (d. 527)
was a translator of the LankBvatBra-sMra, in a recension different
from the one supposedly transmitted by Bodhidharma to his disciple
Hui-k’o. According to the legend, Bodhiruci and another monk,
Kuang-t’ung, jealous of Bodhidharma’s fame, tried to poison him
several times and eventually s~cceeded.~ ‘ Kuang-t’ung (alias Hui-
kuang, 468-537) was himself a disciple of Seng-ch’ou and had also
studied on Mount Sung at the famous Shao-lin monastery. This
monastery had been built by the emperor Hsiao-wen of the Northern
Wei for another Central Asian monk named Fo-t’o or Pa-t’o (Chinese
transcription for Buddha or ~ h a d r a ) . ~ ‘ It is only much later, due to
specific historical circumstances into which I cannot enter now, that
Bodhidharma’s name came to be associated with the Shao-lin monas-
tery, leading him to become the posthumous founder of the martial art
known as “Shao-lin boxing” (Shbrinji kempb). From the Sung-shan

we can assume that there was an apparent amalgamation
of the lineages of Fo-t’o/Seng-ch’ou and of Bodhidharmal Hui-k’o.
Bodhidharma comes to play the same role as Buddha (or Bhadra) as
the patriarch of the Shao-lin ssu.

Pa-t’o is also the abbreviated transcription used for Gunabhadra
(394-468), the first translator of the LankBvatBra-siitra. Gunabhadra’s
translation is precisely the recension transmitted by Bodhidharma to
Hui-k’o. In the Leng-ch’ieh shih-tzu Gunabhadra is presented
as the master of Bodhidharma, and this biographical interpolation
may result from his role as transmitter of the LankBvatBra-siitra or
from a confusion among the founder of the Shao-lin monastery, the
dhyiina master Pa-t’o, and Bodhidharma’s hypothetical nine years’
practice near this monastery. In a later work of the LankBvatBra
tradition,44 the relationship between Gunabhadra and Bodhidharma
is inverted, and Bodhidharma becomes the master of Gunabhadra. In
any case, the duallduel structure remains.

Thus the different elements of the legend discerned by de Saussure
reinforce each other and are in fact rather difficult to distinguish.

40 The story first appears in an eighth-century work, the Li-tai,fa-pao chi (T . 51,
2075, 180c).

41 Concerning this monk, see Pelliot (n. 7 above), pp. 262-64.
42 See, e.g., Tung Kao, Ch ‘iian Tbng wen, chuan 5 14 (Taipei: Hua-wen shu chu,

1965). 1 1 :66 19.
43 T.85,2837, 1284c. “See the Leng-ch P h ching ch hn-men hsi-I hn chang (T . 85, 2779, 536a); and Paul

DemiCville and Jao Tsong-yi, Airs de Touen-houang (Touen-houang k’iu): Airs a
chanter des VIIIe-Xe si?cles (Paris: CNRS, 1971). pp. 86-87.

197 History of Religions

However inconclusive or impressionistic this argument may seem, all
these clues point toward the same conclusion: Bodhidharma’s life is
a hybrid textual construction, and it is only a part of a larger struc-
ture that is also at work in the lives of masters apparently as different
as Seng-ch’ou, Pao-chih, Fu Hsi, Fo-t’o (Pa-t’o), Gunabhadra,
Bodhiruci, et cetera. All these characters, before being historical
figures, are textual paradigms. Their meaning is not primarily in their
historicity but in the significant modifications achieved by their
legends.

But biographies, however hagiographic they may be, are not simply
legends or myths and are more resistant to a structural analysis than
the latter genre. The approach we have taken here cannot be applied
indiscriminately. It will prove most useful with certain categories of
traditional figures, the so-called founders of a school or the representa-
tives of certain trends. Significantly, most founders have a very dim
historical existence. Most of the Buddhist schools start in relative
obscurity and are organized by a second- or third-generation suc-
cessor, who, 1 would argue, is in most cases the real founder. The first
patriarch is retrospectively promoted to his honorific rank in order to
give more legitimacy to the new school. He serves as a blank space on
which one may project all the necessary “biographical” elements. In
other words, there is no real origin to the patriarchal tradition, no
real “founder.” The character who plays that role is, to use LCvi-
Strauss’s expression concerning myth, a “virtual focus,” a virtual
object whose shadow alone is His “biography” will proliferate
around this obscure source, and historical details will soon turn into
legend.

Besides that of Bodhidharma, other well-known embellished biog-
raphies are the lives of the so-called third and sixth patriarchs of the
Ch’an tradition, Seng-ts’an and Hui-neng. In fact, they may have
provided the missing links in the patriarchal lineage. The main pur-
pose of this lineage itself was to link artificially several different
schools. The first school, called the “School of Bodhidharma,” orig-
inated probably with Hui-k’o or with a later LankBvatBra master
named Fa-ch’ung (587-665?). The second school, the so-called Tung-
shan or Eastern Mountain School, was founded by the “fourth pa-
triarch” Tao-hsin (580-65 l ) and drew its legitimacy from the obscure
figure of Seng-ts’an. The first detailed biographical account concern-
ing the future “third patriarch” is to be found in the Leng-ch’ieh shih-
tzu chi. The third school, the so-called Southern School, originated

45 Claude LCvi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked(New York: Harper & Row, 1969),
p. 5 .

198 Bodhidharma

with Shen-hui (684-758) and not, as the tradition would have us
believe, with Hui-neng, whose chief merit was to be relatively un-
known. The lives of these three Ch’an masters (Bodhidharma, Seng-
ts’an, and Hui-neng) are reconstructions dating from the eighth
century, at a time when sectarianism was intense.46 Their purpose is
largely ideological. In the same way, the “classical” Ch’an of the ninth
century traces its source back to two unknown disciples of Hui-neng,
Nan-yiieh Huai-jang and Ch’ing-yiian Hsing-ssu. Being fundamen-
tally paradigms for orthodox practice, these Ch’an masters should be
treated as such and not given a false psychological identity through
misguided erudition. This means that all variants of a hagiographical
topos should first be considered in a synchronic perspective, without
trying to sort out the historical kernel from the shell of legend. This
metaphor of shell and kernel, implicit in the work of most historians,
should itself be questioned. By thus widening the scope of our study
and abandoning-at least for the founding figures-the obsolete con-
cept of historical individuality, we might get closer to the global
structure that regulates the transformations of actual biographies.

But this may not suffice to explain why we get, for example, the
type called Bodhidharrna as the first patriarch of Ch’an, instead of
other possible types such as Seng-ch’ou or Fu Hsi. It seems that we
have to reintroduce the historical or diachronic dimension in the last
resort in order to make sense of these apparent contingencies. T o
interpret hybrid texts, our method must be itself hybrid. Although it
will stress a kind of structural analysis, it must be aware of the failure
of all systems that claim in their perfection to transcend history. Only
by rejecting all methodological extremes, in a typical Buddhist fashion,
may we reach a new, although limited, understanding of “the meaning
of Bodhidharma’s coming from the West.”

CorneN University

46 On the formation of these legends, see Yampolsky (n. I above), pp. 3-88.