There is a Zen tradition that one day while the Buddha was seated at Vulture Peak he was offered a flower and requested to preach on the law. He took the flower, and holding it at arm's length, slowly turned it in his fingers, all the while saying nothing. It was then that his most knowing follower smiled in understanding, and the silent teaching of Zen was born. That wordless smile is believed to have been transmitted through twenty-eight successive Indian patriarchs, ending with the famous Bodhidharma (ca. a.d. 470-534), who traveled to China in 520 and founded the school of Ch'an Buddhism, becoming the first Chinese patriarch.
What Bodhidharma brought to China was the Indian concept of meditation, called dhyana in Sanskrit, Ch'an in Chinese and Zen in Japanese. Since the transmission of the wordless insights of meditation through a thousand years of Indian history must, by definition, have taken place without the assistance of written scriptures or preaching, the identity and role of the twenty-eight previous Indian patriarchs must be approached with caution. It has been suggested that the later Chinese Ch'an Buddhists, striving for legitimacy of their school in the eyes of colleagues from more established sects, resurrected a line of "patriarchs" from among the names of obscure Indian monks and eventually went on to enshroud these faceless names with fanciful biographies. These Indian patriarchs reportedly transmitted one to the other the wordless secrets of dhyana, thereby avoiding any need to compose sutras, as did the lesser-gifted teachers of the other schools.
Although Bodhidharma clearly was an historical figure, he made no personal claims to patriarchy and indeed was distinguished more by individuality than by attempts to promulgate an orthodoxy. Arriving from India to teach meditation, he was greeted by an emperor's boasts of traditional Buddhism's stature in China. Bodhidharma scoffed and marched away, reportedly crossing the Yangtze on a reed to reach the Shao-lin monastery, where he sat in solitary meditation facing a cliff for the next nine years. This famous interview and Bodhidharma's response were the real foundation of Zen.
Bodhidharma seems to have gone essentially unnoticed by his contemporaries, and in the first record of his life—Biographies of the High Priests, compiled in 645—he is included simply as one of a number of devout Buddhists. He is next mentioned in The Transmission of the Lamp, a sourcebook of Zen writings and records assembled in the year 1004. In point of fact, Bodhidharma, like the Buddha, seems not to have left a written account of his teachings, although two essays are extant which are variously attributed to him and which probably maintain the spirit if not necessarily the letter of his views on meditation. The most quoted passage from these works, and one which encapsulates the particular originality of Bodhidharma, is his praise of meditation, or pi-kuan, literally "wall gazing." This term supposedly refers to the legendary nine years of gazing at a cliff which has become part of the Bodhidharma story, but it also may be taken as a metaphor for staring at the impediment that reason places in the path of enlightenment until at last the mind hurdles the rational faculties. His words are reported as follows:
When one, abandoning the false and embracing the true, and in simpleness of thought abides in pi-kuan, one finds that there is neither selfhood nor otherness. . . . He will not then be guided by any literary instructions, for he is in silent communication with the principle itself, free from conceptual discrimination, for he is serene and not-acting.1
This emphasis on meditation and the denial of reason formed the philosophical basis for the new Chinese school of Ch'an. By returning to first principles, it was a denial of all the metaphysical baggage with which Mahayana Buddhism had burdened itself over the centuries, and naturally enough there was immediate opposition from the more established sects. One of Bodhidharma's first and most ardent followers was Hui-k'o (487-593), who, according to The Transmission of the Lamp, waited in vain in the snows outside Shao-lin monastery, hoping to receive an auThence with Bodhidharma, until at last, in desperation, he cut off his arm to attract the Master's notice. Some years later, when Bodhidharma was preparing to leave China, he left this pupil his copy of the Lankavatara Sutra and bade him continue the teachings of meditation. Today the one-armed Hui-k'o is remembered as the Second Patriarch of Ch'an.
It seems odd that one who scorned literary instruction should have placed such emphasis on a sutra, but on careful reading the Lankdvatara, a Sanskrit text from the first century, proves to be a cogent summary of early Ch'an teachings on the function of the counter mind. According to this sutra,
Transcendental intelligence rises when the intellectual mind reaches its limit and, if things are to be realized in their true and essence nature, its processes of mentation . . . must be transcended by an appeal to some higher faculty of cognition. There is such a faculty in the intuitive mind, which as we have seen is the link between the intellectual mind and the Universal Mind.2
Regarding the achievement of self-realization by meditation, the sutra states,