According
to tradition, Zen was brought from India from China by a pilgrim monk named
Bodhidharma who came to be recognized as the First Patriarch. When the reigning
Emperor, who was a Buddhist, learned that a monk from the land of the Buddha’s
birth was in his kingdom, he had Bodhidharma brought to his court.
Concerned
about the misdeeds of his younger years – which had brought him to the throne –
the Emperor and had tried to compensate for them through a variety of
devotional acts. He had sponsored the
translation of Buddhist texts, supported large numbers of monks and nuns, and
assumed the cost of building temples. Eager to know if his religious activities
balanced the crimes of his past, he described all he had done to promote
Buddhism in his country then asked Bodhidharma, “What is your opinion? What merit have I accumulated as a result of
these deeds?”
Bodhidharma
replied bluntly and tactlessly: “No merit whatsoever.”
“Why
no merit?” the Emperor asked.
“Motives
for such actions are impure,” Bodhidharma told him. “They are undertaken solely for the purposes
of attaining future rebirth. They are
like shadows cast by bodies, following those bodies but having no reality of
their own.”
“Then
what is true merit?”
“It
is clear seeing, pure knowing, beyond the discriminating intelligence. Its essence is emptiness. Such merit cannot be gained by worldly
means.”
This
was unlike any exposition of the Buddhist faith the Emperor had heard before,
and he asked, “According to your understanding, then, what is the first
principle of Buddhism?”
“Vast
emptiness and not a thing that can be called holy,” Bodhidharma replied at
once.
The
Emperor spluttered: “What does that mean?
And who are you who now stands before me?”
To
which Bodhidharma replied: “I don’t know.”
Then he left the court.
[Bodhidharma - Zen Masters of China: 35-44; The Story of Zen: 132-34]
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