“A special transmission outside the scriptures;
No dependence upon words and letters;
Direct pointing at the soul of man;
Seeing into one’s nature and the attainment of Buddhahood.”
These four lines as describing the principles of Zen teaching as distinguished from other schools of Buddhism already in existence in China were formulated later and not by Dharma himself. We cannot exactly tell who was the real author, as we have no definite information on this subject. One historian, Tsung-chien,[4.20] who compiled from the T‘ien-tai point of view a Buddhist history entitled The Rightful Lineage of the Śākya Doctrine in 1237, ascribes it to Nansen Fu-gwan[4.21]; probably the formula originated in those days when Baso (Ma-tsu), Hyakjo (Pai-chang), Obaku (Huang-po), Sekito (Shih-tou) and Yakusan (Yüeh-shan)[4.22] were flourishing in the “West of the River” and in the “South of the Lake.” Since then they have been regarded as characteristically Zen, and it was Dharma that breathed this spirit into the minds of the Chinese Buddhists. The latter had more or less been given up, on the one hand, to philosophising, and, on the other hand, to practising contemplation. They were not acquainted with the direct method of Zen which was to see straightway into the truth of Enlightenment and attain Buddhahood without going through so many stages of preparation prescribed by the scholars.
Our knowledge of the life of Bodhi-Dharma comes from two sources, the one which the earliest record we have of him is by Tao-hsüan[4.23] in his Biographies of the High Priests which was compiled early in the T‘ang dynasty, A.D. 645. The author was the founder of a Vinaya sect in China and a learned scholar, who however was living before the movement of the new school to be known as Zen came into maturity under Hui-nêng, the sixth patriarch, who was nine years old when Tao-hsüan wrote his Biographies. The other source is the Records of the Transmission of the Lamp, A.D. 1004, compiled by Tao-yüan[4.24] early in the Sung dynasty. This was written by a Zen monk after Zen had received full recognition as a special branch of Buddhism, and contains sayings and doings of its masters. The author often refers to some earlier Zen histories as his authorities which are however lost now being known by the titles only.
It is quite natural that these two accounts of the life of Bodhi-Dharma should vary at several points. The first was written when Zen was not yet fully established as a school, and the second by one of the Zen masters. In the first, Dharma, the founder of Zen, is treated as one of the many other Buddhist priests eminent in various fields as translators, commentators, scholars, Vinaya-followers, masters of meditation, possessors of miraculous virtues, etc., and Dharma could not naturally occupy in such a history any very prominent position distinguishing himself from the other “high priests.” He is described merely as one of those “masters of meditation” whose conception of dhyana did not differ from the old traditional one as was practised by the Hinayana followers. Tao-hsüan did not understand the message of Dharma in its full signification, though he could read in it something not quite of the so-called “practice of meditation.” And therefore it is sometimes argued by scholars that there is not much of Zen in Tao-hsüan’s account of Dharma worthy of its first Chinese promulgator and that therefore Dharma could not be so regarded as is claimed by the followers of the Zen school of Buddhism. But this is not doing justice to Zen, nor to Tao-hsüan who never thought of writing a Zen history before Zen came to be known as such. Tao-hsüan could not be a prophetic historian. While the biographical history of Tao-yüan contains much that is to be discredited as regards the life of Bodhi-Dharma, especially as regards that part of his life before he came to China, we have reason to believe that the greater part of Tao-yüan’s account of Dharma’s doings after his arrival in China is historical. In this latter respect, Tao-hsüan must be taken as complementing Tao-yüan. It is not quite in accord with the spirit of fair critical judgment to be partial to one authority at the expense of the other without duly weighing all the historically known circumstances that contributed to the making of these histories.
According to Tao-hsüan, Bodhi-Dharma left many writings or sayings which were apparently still in circulation at the time of the author of the Biographies of the High Priests, but the only authentic writing of the Zen founder’s at present in our possession is a very short one which is preserved in Tao-hsüan’s Biographies as well as in Tao-yüan’s Records. There are some other essays ascribed to Dharma,[f80] but most of which, though deeply imbibing the spirit of Zen, are spurious except one which I am inclined to think to be genuinely his. It is entitled “On the Pacification of the Soul.”[4.26] Together with the first one which is generally known under the title, “Meditation on Four Acts,”[4.27] we have just two pieces of writings handed down as Dharma’s. Though I do not think that “The Meditation on Four Acts” could be the best possible specimen of writing to be bequeathed by the founder of Zen, which will admit us straightway into the very essence of Zen, I will give here an English translation of it as the most reliable essay of Bodhi-Dharma, the first patriarch of Zen in China.
There are two versions as I said before of this writing, the one in the Biographies and the other in the Records, and they do not quite agree with each other in some points. The main drift is the same, but in detail they vary. The question now is, which is the more original one? Chronologically, the Biographies were compiled earlier than the Records, but the latter presupposes some earlier writings which were utilised for its compilation. We have no means to ascertain the reliability of the documents thus made use of, and then the authority of the Biographies is not absolute. Therefore, the only profitable method of judging the respective merit of the two versions is to compare them from the literary point of view and see what light such comparison will shed on the nature of each. The result I have reached is that the author of the Biographies used the one preserved in the Records, which is more faithful to the original if there were any such besides this very version. The reason for this conclusion is that Dharma’s writing appears much improved after the editing of Tao-hsüan, the author of the Biographies; for he had to edit it for his own purposes. Thus edited,[f81][4.28] Dharma’s writing is now in a better style, that is, more concise, more to the point, and more refined. For this reason the following translation[4.29] is made from Tao-yüan’s Records in which the author had every reason to reproduce the original as it stood.