Shenguang (later Huike) and Bodhidharma
A middle-aged monk named Shenguang has been told by divine spirits that Bodhidharma can liberate him from confusion. He stands outside the cave for days in the snow to demonstrate his resolve. Bodhidharma scolds him but Shenguang won’t leave. He asks Bodhidharma to pacify his mind. Bodhidharma says, “Show me this mind.” Shenguang says, “I look for it, but I cannot find it.” Bodhidharma says, “I have pacified your mind.” Shenguang is accepted as Bodhidharma’s student and receives the Dharma name Huike.
Bodhidharma eventually has four students: Daofu, a nun named Congzhi, Daoyu, and Huike. He Transmits his skin, meat, bone, and marrow to them. In a kuden or oral Teaching regarded as inauthentic, the nun Congzhi was also known as Dharani and was Bodhidharma’s tantric consort. This is probably an attempt to come up with some explanation of what a woman was doing there. Huike becomes his principal Dharma-heir and receives his robe and bowl as a sign of the Transmission.
He also recommends to Huike the study of the Lankavatara sutra. There is a variant legend by a few early branches of the Lineage in which Bodhidharma was considered the heir of Gunabhadra, a translator of the Lanka.
Bodhidharma then makes several prophecies about the future of Dharma. He is repeatedly attacked and poisoned by monks who only lecture on the sutras and resent him. Finally, he allows himself to poisoned to death. He is buried on Mount Xionger.
A variant is that the coffin was opened and inside there was only a single shoe. A traveler reports having met him at a Western border pass, on his way back to India. Another minor variant has him appearing in Japan as an old beggar who receives generosity from Prince Shotoku, dies, and then whose body mysteriously vanishes.
I don’t want to trace the course of the development of the legends in too much detail. But I think it will be useful for us to look at the earliest strokes on the scroll. When one examines a sho, a work of brush calligraphy, one always looks at the quality of the first stroke. The moment of brush meeting paper reveals a great deal.
- Ven. Anzan Hoshin roshi continuing teisho 3: “No Text, No Trace, No Corpse” on October 9, 2000 and the series “Bodhidharma’s Eyes.” If strange characters instead of 漢字 hanji or kanji appear this means that you need to enable UTF-8 in your Character Encoding settings.)