BODHIDHARMA’S EMPTINESS 

Robert Aitken

 

BLUE CLIFF RECORD, CASE 1

Story

EMPEROR WU OF LIANG asked the great master Bodhidharma, “What is the first principle of the holy teaching?” Bodhidharma said, “Vast emptiness, nothing holy.” The Emperor asked, “Who stands before me?” Bodhidharma said, “I don’t know.” The Emperor did not understand. Bodhidharma then crossed the Yangtze River and went on to the kingdom of Wei. Later, the Emperor took up this matter with Duke Chih. Chih said, “Your Majesty, do you know who that was?”

The Emperor said, “I don’t know.” Chih said, “That was the Great Personage Kuan-yin, conveying the mind-seal of the Buddha.” The Emperor felt regretful, and wanted to send an emissary to invite Bodhidharma to return. Chih said, “Your Majesty, don’t say you will send someone to bring him back. Even if everyone in the whole country were to go after him, he would not return.”

Personae

Emperor Wu, Liang Wu-ti (Ryu Butei), ruled 502–549 in the Southern Sector of the Six Dynasties (428–588). Bodhidharma, d. 532, is traditionally considered to be the 28th Dharma successor of the Buddha Shakyamuni, and is venerated as the founder of Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism in China. Duke Chih (Shi), the priest Pao-chih (Hoshi), (417/421–514), was Wu’s religious advisor.

Comment

 At the time of this audience, Buddhism had been established in China for five hundred years. The Emperor Wu of Liang was an especially devout and learned follower. He wrote commentaries on Prajñaparamita literature and on the Nirvana Sutra. During his reign of forty-seven years, he convened a total of sixteen Dharma assemblies, at which he would sometimes don a monk’s robe and explicate a sutra. These were great gatherings, it is said, with as many as fifty thousand people taking part. Era names were changed in honor of these occasions. General amnesty was given to criminals. During the conventions, the Emperor would work as a menial for a while at a Buddhist temple. He gave of his own treasure to Buddhist establishments, and also set up a system of dana, whereby wealthy patrons of Buddhism could deposit their money as endowments for temples and monasteries. He was, we can understand, known as the Imperial Bodhisattva.

Bodhidharma appeared in Southern China after a long career in India as a master of the Buddha Way. His distinguished reputation preceded him, and the Emperor invited him to an audience. It did not go well.

The Emperor asked, “I have endowed hundreds of temples and monasteries, and endorsed the ordination of thousands of monks and nuns; what is my merit?” Bodhidharma replied, “No merit.”

Merit, here, is the compound word kung-te. Both elements of this term mean “merit”; kung refers to an act of benevolence, while te is the authority one accumulates with selfless conduct that is appropriate for the world. It is the te of the Tao-te ching, translated by Arthur Waley as “The Way and Its Power.” With each act of rectitude, your acknowledgment by others and your inner assurance builds a little, like incense-ash building in its receptacle. Among traditional peoples, te by whatever name is the path to the status of elder, and in all cultures the nobility of a Gough Whitlam, a Vaclav Havel, or a Dag Hammarskjold, is widely acknowledged.

The denial of kung-te in the face of universal, timeless experience is, of course, a denial of karma itself, a denial that action leads to consequence. Bodhidharma was making a point beyond points, and the Emperor was astute enough to sense this much. He had the flexibility of an experienced interlocutor. It wasn’t the first time that he had fallen back in a religious encounter.

If there is no merit in saving the many beings, he might be saying, if indeed I have no merit in establishing a dana system of accumulating large donations and dispersing them for the advancement of the Dharma, then let’s look deeper.

He knew from his discussions with Fu Ta-shih and other wise Buddhist teachers of his time that appearance is the conventional and the real is its vacancy. Yet the two, he knew, are one. Form and emptiness are the same. As Yüan-wu implies, this is surely what the Emperor had in mind when he asked, “What is the first principle of the holy teaching?”

Bodhidharma was ready with a response every bit as uncompromising as his first reply. “Vast emptiness,” he said, “nothing holy.” How many people have bowed in reverence at such a holy teaching!—without a speck of irony! Yüan-wu quotes his teacher, Wu-tsu, saying, “If you can just see into ‘Vast emptiness, nothing holy,’ then you can return home and sit in peace.”

Can you do that? It is at this point that you are vulnerable to the scrutiny of the ancients. You are vulnerable to the scrutiny of your spouse and children, your colleagues and superiors, and the lady at the bank. How do you show Bodhidharma’s position?

The Emperor then asked,” Who stands before me?” Some say this was the defense of a veteran colloquist who had reached the end of his seasoned patience. He felt his back was to the wall. He used the imperial “me,” a pronoun reserved for the Son of Heaven. Was he getting on his high horse a little?

No, it seems that the Emperor was not a defensive kind of person. Reading his brief biography in Kenneth Ch’en’s Buddhism in China, I find a man who took his role as emperor seriously, but did not let it master him. I think he was simply making a final effort to grasp Bodhidharma’s meaning. I don’t understand, he was saying. If you say there is no such thing as essential truth, then who are you? Aren’t you a distinguished priest of truth? Who are you to say that the first principle of the holy teaching is empty and not holy?

Bodhidharma loosed his final shaft. “I don’t know.” It was his ultimate endeavor to convey the fundamental fact of facts to the Emperor Wu—the cap to his earlier responses. Patiently, compassionately he had made the same point, first this way, then that. There is no merit, there is no first principle, and there is nothing holy. There is nothing at all. Finally, I can’t say anything even about myself.

“Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?”—this was a stock question in T’ang period dialogues. Lin-chi said, “If he had any reason, he could not have saved even himself.” Shih-t’ou Hsi-ch’ien said, “Ask the post standing there.” When the monk said he didn’t understand, Shih-t’ou said, “My ignorance is worse than yours.”

I take a leaf from Wu-tzu. Unless you can acknowledge, “I don’t know” to the very bottom, you can never return home and sit in peace, but you will live your life to the very end in meaningless chatter.

If, however, you come before a true teacher and, with a show of consequence, chant “I don’t know,” you still might be sent away. The words themselves, however emphasized, are not necessarily the message of the old founder. How do you see Bodhidharma here, confronting his Imperial Majesty with the inexpressible verity?

Just as form and emptiness are the basic complementarity of Mahayana Buddhism in its metaphysics, so intimacy with the other and with the unequivocal void are the basic complementarity of Mahayana experience. We perceive forms in our earliest childhood, and experience intimacy with the other in puberty, not only sexually, but also in nature and in the arts. Emptiness is still hidden, however. Bodhidharma and his great successors take students in hand to show how all perceptions are totally vacant. We evolve from what John Keats called the “sole self” to the universal, and from there with rigorous practice to realize vast and fathomless nothingness. Just as the sole self does not work in a relationship, so the universal self must drop off both the universe and the one who perceives. Then the self and forms of the world can be seen as they are, in their colors and sounds and textures, in their beauty and ugliness, but essentially without any substance whatever.

Moreover, it is not that I see that all things are void, but I myself am unknown and unknowable. This is by no means merely an experience of undifferentiated vacuum. It is liberation at last. In the Cheng-tao ke we read:

 

The mind-mirror shines brilliantly, without obstruction;

its light reaching worlds as countless as sands of the Ganges.

The ten-thousand things are all reflected here,

illumined perfectly, neither inside nor outside.

 

Teachers worth their salt will nod patiently while students rhapsodize upon oneness, and will wait until those students can truly show “I don’t know” with a radiant smile and flashing eyes. Then it is prudent to go on to the ten thousand things.

There is, of course, the phenomenon called the “Den of Mara,” the cave of Satan, where one is stuck in emptiness, and nothing matters. There is no distinction between old and young, male and female, virtue and vice. Nothing happens and everyone is paralyzed. Over and over the literature of Zen Buddhism renews the archetype of the Buddha Shakyamuni, arising from his samādhi beneath the Bodhi Tree to seek out his five disciples in Benares. His liberation and ours brings weighty responsibility. You can’t stay under the Bodhi Tree. You can’t go on babbling “Nothing special.”

Nonetheless, it is under that Bodhi Tree that realization arises. Even the interbeing of the plenum as the self remains an incomplete perception, unless it is clear in peak experience that everything is void, empty, vacant. Even the marvelous panorama of the Hua-yen, with its model of the universe as a multidimensional net with each point containing all other points, is just a romantic notion, unless it is realized by the one with no skull and no skin.

But Bodhidharma could not get his message of essential emptiness across. “Your Majesty,” asked the Duke, “Do you know who that was?” “I don’t know,” the Emperor replied. Yüan-wu asks,” Is this ‘I don’t know’ the same as Bodhidharma’s ‘I don’t know?’” Honored friends, what is your opinion?

Bodhidharma put away any thought that he might convert the Emperor from devotion and scholarship to the freedom of a great laugh, and any thought that such enlightenment might trickle down to the masses of the Chinese people. He crossed the Yangtze River and journeyed to the kingdom of Wei in Northwestern China.

There he found a ruined temple and took up residence in a cave behind it, facing a wall in zazen, it is said, for the last nine years of his life. Four disciples gathered, three men and one woman, including the monk we venerate as Hui-k’o (Eka), through whom the Dharma line descended, ultimately in another seven generations to blossom in the efflorescence of Ch’an during the T’ang period.

Several masters in our great tradition became advisors to the emperors of their time—in China, then in Korea, Vietnam, and Japan—but the ideal of Zen Buddhism as a rigorous teaching for the few has never been completely lost. Duke Chih, about whom we know very little except that he was a priest the Emperor held in highest regard, intuitively understood Bodhidharma. “He is the Great Personage Kuan-yin,” the Duke said. He is the incarnation of mercy and compassion, conveying the transmission of the Buddha that has been passed from mind to mind for twenty-eight generations. And he won’t come back, ever, ever, ever.

The Emperor felt remorseful at the time, and indeed for the rest of his life. When Bodhidharma died, the Emperor mourned him, and personally wrote an inscription for his monument. It read:

Alas! I saw him without seeing him; I met him without meeting him; I encountered him without encountering him. Now as before, I regret this deeply.

“He wrings his hands and beats his breast, addressing a plea to the sky,” as Yüan-wu says. But the Emperor further eulogized Bodhidharma by saying, “If your mind exists, you are stuck in the mundane for eternity. If it does not exist, you experience wondrous enlightenment instantly.” He gained some insight at last, it seems, but he could not meet again with the old foreigner to have it examined.

Many of us have had the experience of missing the truth on the first round. When I was sixteen or so, my Sunday-evening class at Central Union Church in Honolulu took up non-Christian faiths. We visited the Honpa Hongwanji Mission, the local headquarters of the Jodo Shinshu school of Buddhism, and heard a talk by the Venerable Ernest Hunt, a Theosophist turned Buddhist, who was a priest of that temple. He held forth on the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, and I thought it was the driest, more boring lecture I had ever heard in my whole life. Yet thirty years later Dr. Hunt and I were fast friends, and we exchanged insights with delight.

If Bodhidharma would not return to the palace, why didn’t the Emperor hitch up his robes and chase after him? He couldn’t. Maybe he could scrub toilets in a monastery for a day or so, but everybody knew this was part of his function as the Imperial Bodhisattva. As Emperor, however, he couldn’t go haring off into somebody else’s kingdom, even in disguise. He probably didn’t even consider it. He was imprisoned by his position.

If, as Wu-men says, the truth is like a racehorse that dashes by your window, and you miss it because you blink, then it is important to place yourself where it can dash by again, and again, until you finally get a glimpse of it.

Do you have a glimpse? How do you see Bodhidharma as he makes his three responses? Please don’t begin your reply with, “Well, I think he is…” That puts the old boy back in Asia in the sixth century. This is not a story about far away and long ago. It is my story and yours—our way to mature humanity.

 

John Daido Loori. Sitting with Koans: Essential Writings on Zen Koan Introspection (p. 299). Wisdom Publications. Kindle Edition.