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| Da Mo |
Bodhidharma Between Myth and History
Few figures occupy a more important place in the mythology of Chinese martial arts than Bodhidharma (菩提達摩).
According to the familiar story, Bodhidharma was an Indian Buddhist master and prince who travelled to China during the sixth century. He met Emperor Wu of Liang, crossed the Yangtze, arrived at the Shaolin Monastery, meditated for nine years facing a wall, established Chan Buddhism and eventually taught physical exercises to the monks that became the foundation of Shaolin kung fu.
It is a magnificent story.
The problem is that almost every part of it becomes more complicated when we examine the historical sources.
This does not necessarily mean that Bodhidharma was fictional. Early Chinese sources suggest that a Buddhist teacher remembered by this name probably did exist.
But the historical Bodhidharma and the legendary Bodhidharma are very different figures.
Searching for the Historical Bodhidharma
Reconstructing Bodhidharma's life is difficult because the sources closest to his supposed lifetime tell us remarkably little.
Later Chan literature provides increasingly elaborate biographies, but these texts were written as religious literature rather than modern historical biography.
As the centuries passed, Bodhidharma acquired a birthplace, teachers, disciples, encounters with emperors, miraculous events, an Indian patriarchal genealogy, nine years of wall meditation and eventually a connection with Shaolin martial arts.
The important historical question is therefore not simply:
Did Bodhidharma exist?
A better question is:
Which parts of the Bodhidharma story appear in the earliest sources, and which appeared later?
The Earliest Bodhidharma
One of the earliest texts mentioning someone called Bodhidharma is Yang Xuanzhi's Luoyang qielan ji (洛陽伽藍記), usually translated as Record of the Buddhist Monasteries of Luoyang, completed around 547.
It describes a foreign Buddhist monk named Bodhidharma visiting the magnificent Yongning Monastery at Luoyang.
This Bodhidharma is described as coming from the western regions and as being extraordinarily old.
The account is brief.
There is no meeting with Emperor Wu.
There is no nine-year meditation at Shaolin.
There is no story about strengthening weak monks.
And there is certainly no kung fu.
Whether this figure can be identified with complete certainty as the Bodhidharma of later Chan tradition remains a scholarly problem, but the passage demonstrates that a monk bearing that name was remembered in China remarkably early.
Tanlin and the Two Entrances
Another extremely important early source is associated with the monk Tanlin (曇林).
A preface attributed to Tanlin presents Bodhidharma as a South Indian Buddhist teacher and describes teachings associated with him through the Two Entrances and Four Practices (二入四行).
The two entrances are generally described as entrance through principle and entrance through practice.
This material is important because it brings us much closer to an early Bodhidharma tradition than the colorful biographies that appeared centuries later.
Again, however, the famous martial-arts stories are absent.
The Bodhidharma emerging from these early materials is primarily a Buddhist teacher associated with meditation and Mahayana practice.
Daoxuan's Bodhidharma
A further major source is Daoxuan (道宣), whose Continued Biographies of Eminent Monks (續高僧傳) was compiled during the seventh century.
Daoxuan describes Bodhidharma as a Brahman from southern India who travelled to China and taught Mahayana Buddhism.
He associates Bodhidharma particularly with a practice called biguan (壁觀)—often translated as "wall contemplation" or "wall gazing"—and with his disciple Huike (慧可).
Later tradition transformed this into the famous story that Bodhidharma spent nine years literally sitting in meditation facing a wall.
Whether biguan originally meant precisely that is considerably less certain.
This is one of the recurring patterns in Bodhidharma's history.
A relatively obscure early statement gradually becomes a detailed story.
Did Bodhidharma Meet Emperor Wu?
One of the most famous Chan stories concerns Bodhidharma's meeting with Emperor Wu of Liang (梁武帝).
Emperor Wu was an enthusiastic supporter of Buddhism.
According to later tradition, the emperor asked Bodhidharma how much merit he had accumulated by building monasteries, supporting monks and promoting Buddhism.
Bodhidharma supposedly answered:
"No merit."
The conversation develops into a classic Chan encounter demonstrating the difference between external religious accomplishment and direct realization.
As Chan literature, the story is brilliant.
As biography, it is much more problematic.
The episode does not appear in our earliest accounts of Bodhidharma and belongs to the developing hagiographical tradition surrounding him.
That distinction does not make the story meaningless.
It changes the question we should ask about it.
Instead of asking whether we possess a transcript of an actual sixth-century conversation, we can ask what later Chan Buddhists were trying to teach through the story.
Did Bodhidharma Found Chan Buddhism?
Traditional Chan genealogy identifies Bodhidharma as the First Patriarch of Chan in China and the twenty-eighth patriarch in a continuous transmission beginning with the historical Buddha.
That is enormously important within Chan tradition.
Historically, however, Chinese meditation traditions did not suddenly begin when Bodhidharma arrived.
Buddhist meditation had already been practiced in China for centuries. Indian and Central Asian monks had translated meditation texts and taught contemplative practices long before Bodhidharma.
The development of what eventually became identifiable as the Chan school was gradual.
During the seventh and eighth centuries, emerging Chan communities increasingly constructed genealogies connecting their teachers through a succession of patriarchs. Bodhidharma eventually became the crucial figure connecting Chinese Chan with an imagined direct transmission extending back to India and ultimately to the Buddha.
This does not make Bodhidharma unimportant.
Quite the opposite.
His transformation into the First Patriarch tells us something fundamental about how Chan understood itself.
The Twenty-Eighth Patriarch
The familiar genealogy presents Bodhidharma as the twenty-eighth Indian patriarch after the Buddha.
Again, this should be understood primarily as a religious lineage rather than as an independently documented succession of twenty-eight historical teachers.
Lineage became extraordinarily important in Chan.
Authority was increasingly expressed through transmission:
teacher to disciple,
mind to mind,
generation after generation,
ultimately reaching back to the Buddha himself.
Bodhidharma provided the bridge between India and China.
His position in the genealogy therefore expressed something much more important to the tradition than ordinary biography: legitimacy.
Bodhidharma and Shaolin
For martial artists, this is where the story becomes particularly interesting.
Today Bodhidharma is almost inseparable from the Shaolin Monastery in popular culture.
Yet the earliest sources concerning him do not present him as the founder of Shaolin martial arts.
The association between Bodhidharma and Shaolin developed gradually.
Shaolin Monastery itself already existed independently of him. It was established during the Northern Wei period for the Buddhist monk Batuo (跋陀).
Other monks associated with the early monastery, particularly Sengchou (僧稠), became famous in Buddhist literature for remarkable physical abilities.
Later traditions increasingly connected Bodhidharma with Mount Song and Shaolin.
Eventually the relationship became so strong that separating Bodhidharma from Shaolin became almost impossible in popular imagination.
But association with the monastery is not the same thing as evidence that he created its martial arts.
Did Bodhidharma Invent Kung Fu?
No.
This is the easiest part of the legend to reject.
Chinese martial practices existed many centuries before Bodhidharma's supposed arrival.
Chinese armies, weapons systems, wrestling traditions, archery, fencing and other forms of combat are documented long before the sixth century.
Bodhidharma therefore could not have introduced martial arts to China.
The more modest version of the legend claims that he created Shaolin kung fu.
According to the familiar story, Bodhidharma discovered that Shaolin monks were physically incapable of enduring prolonged meditation. He therefore taught them exercises designed to strengthen their bodies.
These exercises supposedly developed into Shaolin martial arts.
Again, early Bodhidharma sources tell us nothing about this.
The Yijin Jing Problem
One of the most important texts in the development of Bodhidharma's martial reputation is the Yijin Jing (易筋經), usually translated as the Sinews Transformation Classic.
Later tradition attributed this system of physical cultivation to Bodhidharma.
The attribution created an apparently ancient connection between Bodhidharma, physical training and Shaolin.
But modern historical research has shown that the text is much later than Bodhidharma.
The famous preface attributing the work to him is not credible evidence of sixth-century authorship.
By the seventeenth century and especially during the Qing period, stories connecting Bodhidharma with physical cultivation became increasingly influential.
Eventually the distinction between exercises attributed to Bodhidharma and Shaolin martial arts became blurred.
The result was one of the most successful creation legends in martial-arts history.
Shaolin Martial Arts Without Bodhidharma
Rejecting Bodhidharma as the founder of Shaolin kung fu does not diminish Shaolin's genuine martial history.
Shaolin monks really did develop a significant martial reputation.
The important difference is chronology.
The strongest historical documentation for Shaolin martial activity belongs to periods many centuries after Bodhidharma.
By the Ming dynasty, Shaolin monks had become particularly famous for staff fighting, and contemporary military writers discussed their skills.
That history is fascinating enough without requiring a sixth-century Buddhist monk to invent it.
In fact, removing Bodhidharma from the origin story allows the actual development of Shaolin martial culture to become much clearer.
The Empty Grave and the Missing Sandal
Another famous legend concerns Bodhidharma's death.
According to later stories, after Bodhidharma died and was buried, a Chinese official encountered him travelling westward carrying a single sandal.
When Bodhidharma's tomb was subsequently opened, his body had disappeared.
Only one sandal remained.
This is religious hagiography, not archaeological evidence that Bodhidharma's grave was found empty.
My old version of this article stated that Bodhidharma's grave had actually been excavated and that no evidence of burial was discovered.
That statement was too confident.
The empty tomb belongs to the legendary tradition surrounding Bodhidharma and should be treated accordingly.
So Was Bodhidharma Real?
Probably—but that answer requires qualification.
There is early textual evidence for a Buddhist teacher or monk called Bodhidharma, and traditions concerning him appear close enough to the period in which he supposedly lived that simply dismissing him as a completely fictional character goes beyond what the evidence allows.
At the same time, reconstructing a reliable biography is extremely difficult.
We cannot confidently recover the Bodhidharma familiar from later paintings, novels, temple traditions and martial-arts stories.
The historical figure is faint.
The legendary figure is enormous.
And perhaps that difference is the most interesting thing about him.
Why Did the Legend Grow?
Religious traditions do not preserve stories only because those stories provide historical information.
Stories communicate identity.
Bodhidharma came to embody several ideas that became central to Chan:
direct realization;
meditation;
discipline;
independence from excessive attachment to texts;
transmission from teacher to disciple;
and continuity between Indian Buddhism and Chinese Chan.
The famous stories surrounding him dramatized those ideas.
Whether Bodhidharma literally spoke every sentence attributed to him was ultimately less important to later practitioners than what those stories expressed about Chan itself.
Martial culture subsequently performed a similar transformation.
Once Bodhidharma became firmly associated with Shaolin, he provided an ideal legendary ancestor for physical cultivation and eventually martial arts.
The Buddhist patriarch became a martial patriarch.
Between Myth and History
Bodhidharma therefore should neither be accepted uncritically nor simply dismissed as fiction.
There are several different Bodhidharmas.
There is the obscure Buddhist teacher glimpsed through early Chinese sources.
There is the patriarch constructed by developing Chan genealogies.
There is the fierce, bearded meditation master of Chan and Zen art.
There is the legendary monk who sat facing a wall for nine years.
And finally there is the martial Bodhidharma—the supposed creator of exercises that eventually became Shaolin kung fu.
These figures developed at different times and served different purposes.
Understanding that process does not destroy the legend.
It allows us to understand how the legend was created and why it became so powerful.
For students of martial-arts history, Bodhidharma provides an almost perfect lesson.
A story can be historically doubtful and still possess enormous cultural importance.
The task of historical research is not simply to declare:
"True" or "false."
The more interesting questions are:
When does the story first appear?
How did it change?
Who repeated it?
What purpose did it serve?
And perhaps most importantly:
What can the earliest surviving evidence actually support?
In Bodhidharma's case, that evidence points toward a Buddhist teacher whose historical life remains obscure.
The founder of kung fu came much later.
He was created by legend.
ources and Further Reading
Primary and early sources
- Yang Xuanzhi (楊衒之). Luoyang Qielan Ji (洛陽伽藍記, Record of the Buddhist Monasteries of Luoyang), c. 547. One of the earliest textual sources mentioning a monk named Bodhidharma.
- Tanlin (曇林), attributed preface to the Treatise on the Two Entrances and Four Practices (二入四行論). Important early material associated with Bodhidharma's teachings; the early textual tradition emphasizes the “Two Entrances” rather than the later colorful biography.
- Daoxuan (道宣). Xu Gaoseng Zhuan (續高僧傳, Continued Biographies of Eminent Monks), 7th century. Essential early biographical source for Bodhidharma and Huike.
Modern scholarship on Bodhidharma and early Chan
- McRae, John R. Seeing Through Zen: Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism. University of California Press, 2003/2004. Probably the most useful single source for this article. Chapter 2 specifically examines the evolving hagiography of Bodhidharma and the early Two Entrances and Four Practices material.
- Broughton, Jeffrey L. The Bodhidharma Anthology: The Earliest Records of Zen. University of California Press, 1999. Very important for the earliest textual material associated with Bodhidharma.
- Faure, Bernard. The Rhetoric of Immediacy: A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism. Princeton University Press, 1991. Useful for understanding the construction of Chan tradition, lineage and hagiography.
- Buswell, Robert E., Jr., and Donald S. Lopez, Jr. The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism. Princeton University Press, 2014. Useful reference for Bodhidharma, early Chan terminology and texts.
Shaolin and martial-arts history
- Shahar, Meir. The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008. Essential for the Bodhidharma–Shaolin–martial arts section. Shahar reconstructs Shaolin's actual martial history from historical, religious and literary evidence rather than beginning with the traditional Bodhidharma story.
- Lorge, Peter A. Chinese Martial Arts: From Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge University Press, 2012. Excellent broader context demonstrating that Chinese warfare and martial practices long predate Bodhidharma.
- Henning, Stanley E. “The Chinese Martial Arts in Historical Perspective.” Military Affairs 45, no. 4 (1981): 173–179. Useful older corrective to popular martial-arts origin narratives.