wearing a mic today so they'll have evidence against me in court if I say something really bad welcome back if you came yesterday and welcome today if this is your first time to one of my talks or my talk this time yesterday I started by laying out a general view of Bodhidharma and his importance his teachings importance and how it can be seen in even the architecture of ancient Zen temples. I wanted to lay down why I think his teaching is so important, how it became the root of the Zen school, and expose how closely connected it is both to previous Yogacara philosophy and to later Zen practice and life in China. I tried to do that with the symbolism of the temples. in China, how they represented his teachings literally. They represented the teachings of the Yogacara by the way they are laid out.

[01:33]

So now that I've laid out an argument for why Bodhidharma is important and how integral and central he is to the Zen tradition, today I want to go into a whole new thing about Bodhidharma's life and give you a new interpretation Give you a new interpretation of what he did. Oh, that's beautiful, Michael. That's sensational. That's really sensational. Yeah. Tremendous. I need some tape to put that up on the door, yeah. Anyway, I'll go on and we'll appreciate Michael's paintings. But not only am I going to try to give you a new interpretation of Bodhidharma's life and travels today, a new way of looking at it, I'm also going to try to connect it again back to the life of Zen Buddhism in China today and talk about some variants, some heresies, if you will, in the life of the Buddhists of his tradition.

[02:52]

whether in India, in China, or Japan. And I'm going to throw this out there for you to consider. Talk about some of the evidence. And it's going to be food for thought. So more about Bodhidharma. We're going to start here with a photo. This is a photo of Shaolin Temple in China. Shaolin Temple, as most people know, was the place where Bodhidharma sat in a cave near here facing the wall. in the traditional story of Bodhidharma, sat in a cave for nine years up behind this temple. I'll show you some slides of that. But when we talk about the interesting thing about Shaolin Temple today is Chinese themselves say Shaolin Temple, the essence of Chinese culture. The essence, not just an important part, the essence of Chinese culture. But where do you find at Shaolin Temple? Well, you find a lot of reverence for Bodhidharma. You also find a lot of Kung Fu. Guys, beating each other up and practicing kung fu and fighting.

[03:55]

How did that happen? How did Buddhism, which is a leave the world, renounce war, renounce conflict philosophy, come to be bound up with this martial tradition? So this is going to be a little part of the story today when I talk about Bodhidharma. So the traditional story, let's start with that. So we'll have the baseline to go from. The traditional story of Bodhidharma is that around the year 520, he sailed from India to China. It supposedly took him about three years to arrive there. He came ashore in southern China down at Guangzhou. He went right up the Pearl River estuary by where Hong Kong is, sailed up the Pearl River, landed in Guangzhou, That city, which was a famous seaport even then, all these merchant ships were going back and forth between there and India and the Southeast Asia. So there was lots of ships he could ride on and lots of monks coming and going.

[04:58]

That was called the water silk road. People going back and forth to India. So about the year 479 to 502, which is prior to the traditional story, China was divided into two parts, the Wei kingdom in the north and the Qi kingdom in the south. In the year 502, that became the Liang dynasty of Emperor Liang Wudi, the emperor. So we're talking about this time period, first of all, where according to the traditional story, he arrived in 520 and it was the Liang dynasty. Here's the temple in southern China that now commemorates the spot where he landed and started teaching. It's called Hua Lin Temple, Flower Woods Temple. I have a slideshow about this and other things, but that's not today's topic. I'm going to have to just kind of scoot along today. I'm sorry. He went from Guangzhou, from that place, according to tradition. Emperor Wu invited him to come up and visit his capital, which is now at the city of Nanjing.

[06:05]

Nanjing, China. Nanjing means the southern capital. And for many dynasties in China, Nanjing was the capital of China, especially when it was divided into north and south. So Emperor Wu was at Nanjing. And there is a, I found a slide, Michael, but thank you for, anyway, here's some traditional depictions of Bodhidharma and Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty there in Nanjing where they met. This is actually a map of Nanjing today. And what you'll notice is this is the Yangtze River flowing up past Nanjing. Let's back up a second. See where it is right there? The Yangtze River comes down like this and flows up past it and then makes a right turn and goes down near Shanghai into the sea. And this is the river going past the central part of the city. This is a huge park. This is a place called Bell Mountain. There's a big mountain here. vast park, forest area.

[07:07]

And in the middle of modern Nanjing today, it was the place where the ancient palace was, where Emperor Wu had his court. And if you look at that spot, there's actually, archaeologists have reconstructed how Emperor Wu's palace looked. If you've ever been to China or know anything about the Forbidden City, it's a little like that. It's square like the Forbidden City. It's got big halls in the middle. It's got halls along the side. In the back is the living area, the rear palace. And there's a big garden in the back, just like in the Forbidden City in Beijing today. The important place to note here is this place called the Eastern Palace. The Eastern Palace was added on. This whole palace was built long before Emperor Wu because there were other dynasties there before him that used it. He took it over. But they had constructed an Eastern Palace. And Emperor Wu used that place to meet foreign monks. His son, Xiaotong, was a great lover of Buddhism.

[08:10]

And as a young man, his father had him invite monks from India to come and give talks. And they actually sent emissaries from Nanjing down to a place called Funan, which is what is now Cambodia, which was part of India then. And they would invite monks to come to Nanjing and teach in the Eastern Palace. And famous monks of the way, like Paramarta, And other monks actually came. There's lots of stories about them too. But they came and they would teach in the Eastern Palace. They would teach the Buddha Dharma because Emperor Wu was the Bodhisattva Emperor, the one that embraced Buddhism and upheld it and built temples and did everything to help Buddhism flourish. If you go to that place today, you basically just see city. The temple's gone. It's not... recreated or reconstructed or saved like the Forbidden City. It's been paved over. It's got military bases. It was a vast place, but now there's an army base and there's central government buildings and there's streets and stuff.

[09:12]

There is still this creek flowing down the eastern side. It was called the same thing in the old days, Clear Creek. It flows along where the palace would have been here and the creek flowed along. It was part of the moat along the eastern palace. So Emperor Wu, the traditional story is that Bodhidharma came and said, Emperor Wu said to him, I'm paraphrasing here. I didn't have time to go find my translation today. I'm paraphrasing. He said, I've extensively built temples. I've ordained monks and nuns. I've supported sutra study and translation. What merit have I gained from all these activities? Bodhidharma said, you have derived no merit whatsoever from doing all this stuff. Yet that is not what we're about. It's not what the Buddha Dharma is about, not building temples and all that stuff. There's no merit in that. So Emperor Wu said some other things like, well, who are you to say that? And Bodhidharma said, well, I don't know who I am. Like in Michael's painting, still doesn't know who he is.

[10:16]

But anyway, so the story is that at that point, Bodhidharma left Nanjing, crossed the Yangtze. Remember, the Yangtze went right by the river. He crossed the Yangtze right there. And then he went up to Shaolin Temple, which was in the Wei Dynasty, the northern enemy kingdom. They were enemies to the Qi. They were having a war all along their border all the time. He crossed over into the Wei, went to Shaolin Temple. This is Mount Song. This is the central holy mountain of China, the five holy mountains of China for both Buddhism and Taoism. Each of them share the center mountain. It's Mount Song, right in the middle. where Shaolin Temple is. It's the central Taoist mountain. It's the central Buddhist mountain before Shaolin Temple, before Bodhidharma. It was already a sacred place. It had many important, very early, the earliest temples in China, a couple of them were built here. One called Huishan and some others I'll mention a little later. On Mount Sung, here's Shaolin, the most famous temple and the central temple on that mountain.

[11:22]

And according to tradition, Bodhidharma went up on this mountain. This is a telephoto shot. And he went into this cave where this little paifang, this arch is. They've got a statue on top showing. And then he sat in the cave for nine years. Here's the cave. Here's a depiction by Setsu, a famous Japanese painter, sat in the cave. And then he... Eventually, he traveled from there over to the place where he died, a place called Empty Form Temple, or near there. He was actually traveling in that area, but it's said that he also taught there, an Empty Form Temple. He died there, near there, and his body was taken there and buried at the place where this pagoda is. This is a photo of Red Pine and I when we went to find his burial place in 2002, and we found... He's buried at the base of Bear Ear Mountain. Looks like a bear's ear, kind of.

[12:22]

And now this is a big... This was just before they reopened the temple. They were starting to build some new buildings there. So you can see one. It's not open yet. That's the Bodhidharma's Hall. Now every year there's a huge festival there where lay people and monks come from all over China and they commemorate Bodhidharma. I took L.A. Zen Center there last year. The road coming up to the temple, we all got out. made the bus stop and everybody would get out and prostrate ourselves going up the mountain every three steps. And we were on national TV the next day, as you can imagine. L.A. Zen Center prostrating themselves going up this mountain to Bodhidharma's temple, along with all the lay people and monks that had come for the celebrations. Anyway, that's the traditional. Now, of course, to finish the traditional story, the name of the temple, Kung Xiang, means empty form. It's a play on words in Chinese because you remember the story about how somebody... The emperor's envoy to India was coming back. A monk went to India, was coming back, saw Bodhidharma go by on the road carrying one sandal on his shoulder pole, came back and told the emperor.

[13:25]

The emperor went and they opened the tomb at this place, supposedly, and there was just one sandal inside. So the word kungsang, which means empty form temple, is a play on words. It also means empty chamber temple. This sounds the same. And so it was an empty chamber in his burial place. so that's the traditional there's the traditional story it runs from about 520 here's a timeline starting with the year 450 500 600 700 it starts about the year 520 and goes to about the year maybe 536 they don't know they think that's what it is but that or traditional story is what we have from the lamp records Remember I told you all about all the big body of lamp records yesterday that is the huge body of Zen literature? That's the story that it gives. But those were not written, actually laid down, until here, around the year 800 to 900. So scholars say that story doesn't hold any water.

[14:27]

He probably never even met, if he existed, he probably never, there's no renegation he actually met Emperor Wu because that was written 500 years later. And the Zen tradition was already trying to hold him up as their myth, their paradigm at this point. And so really probably didn't even happen according to the lamp records and the traditional story. However, there's another text which scholars recognize as authentic and it has It's called the Continued Biographies of Eminent Monks. This is a text that everybody, most scholars, most Chinese scholars in particular, regard as a real good text. It was written by a monk, very famous monk, named Dao Suan. And Dao Suan was famous, why? Because he was actually a teacher of the preceptual school. He taught the precepts. He didn't teach Zen. In fact, he established what's called the South Mountain School, like my travel agency's name, my tours.

[15:29]

South Mountain was the most famous precept school in China. It consolidated the preceptual schools. It was located in the Zhongdan Mountains. Remember, if you've read Bill Porter's book, Road to Heaven, his temple was there. And he consolidated, he set up the preceptual school. And then he wrote about all the famous monks of this era. And he wrote that book around the year 655, about the same time that he was living in Sian, in Chang'an, helping Xuanzang translate all the huge Yogachara scriptures that Xuanzang had brought back from India. He was helping him do that. So that's a pretty good text because here's a guy writing about monks of this era who is not a Zen monk. He's got no axe to grind. In fact, he didn't like Zen. He criticized it. He said, oh, those Zen monks, they're talking about mind and stuff. Wow. But actually, it's interesting because after he got influenced by Swan Zong in Yogacara's school, he really swung over and supported it. So Dao Swan became a big supporter.

[16:30]

But anyway, he wrote this book, and in the book, he has the story of Bodhidharma, and he also has the story of two of his disciples, the biographies of two of his disciples, Hui Ka, who we all know, who supposedly cut off his arm, and Bodhidharma's senior disciple named Sung Fu. And Sung Fu... is really the critical element in understanding Bodhidharma's real story. Because according to the continued biographies of him amongst, if you read Sun Fu's biography, it says, first of all, it says that Bodhidharma came to China in the year 470, not the year 520. He came before the year 479. So that puts him back here, in this era. And it says that he taught the Samadhi method. And everywhere he went, people were immediately enlightened. And he became very famous. But where did he go? He didn't go to Nanjing.

[17:31]

He went to Luoyang. He went to the city that was close to Shaolin Temple first. That's where he was. He was on Mount Sung. He was already up in that cave. And at that time, Shaolin Temple had not been established yet. It wasn't even known. So then what happens? So what are we... Anyway, what do we know from this? Emperor Wu taught, his dynasty started in the year 502 and went to the year 547. And according to the biography of Sun Fu in this book, who it says was his senior, it shows as his senior disciple by age, it says that he studied, Sun Fu went into the mountains to find a teacher. He found Bodhidharma and took him as his teacher. And then he studied under him, became his primary disciple, and left Luoyang and Mount Sung in the year 495. That's 25 years before the traditional story says Bodhidharma even came to China.

[18:38]

He left in 495. So that means that based on that view, Bodhidharma could have come into Guangzhou around the year before 479. We don't know when. Let's say 475. He came in at 475, went up to Luoyang, which is the city near Shaolin Temple. And then, what did he do? He must have gone to Nanjing after that. And probably, based on evidence, it's possible he came back again. In other words, he didn't go see Emperor Wu and then go off. According to this... old record and his disciples, he went to Luoyang and Xiao Lin first, probably was up, the record says that when Sun Fu went to find him, he was up in the mountains in caves. He'd hang out in caves. He wouldn't hang out in the city in a monastery. So, now we've got this situation where he might have gone up there in 478, around 47, or before, and Xiao Lin wasn't even built until 495.

[19:45]

And why was it built? It was built because the Wei dynasty, the emperor of the Wei dynasty, was up here at a city called Pingcheng, a capital city of the Wei. And he had a primary monk that was his guy. His name was Svotua, Buddha. There was a monk named Buddha. And he set up a big Zen monastery up there. Sounds shocking, right? I mean, Zen started with Bodhidharma. He set up a big Zen monastery up there. And the emperor loved him. But then the emperor decided to move his capital from Wei to Luoyang, right near Shaolin Temple. And remember, the two places where there's big statues, by the way, you know, the big statues in China and the grottos, are in two places, here and here, right next to Wei, because that emperor commissioned monks to carve statues into the rocks. So the two great grottos outside of Dunhuang in the west are here, now it's called Datong, the Datum Grottoes and the Lungmen Grottoes, which we go to on our tours, now in China.

[20:48]

Anyway, he moved, and so the carvers, everybody said, okay, we're going to stop carving booters up here, we're going to move down here, we're going to move in by Shaolin. When did this happen? 495. The same year that Bodhidharma, that his senior disciple got out of town and left. Why would that be? Why would that be? That's an important question. Because the court came down and the court had its guys. And this is true. Isn't this true? The emperor's got his fella. Now, just consider that for a while. We're going to come back to that question. At the same time, so Sung Fu left about then, about that time when the court came down, and he moved. And where did he move to? Nanjing. It says in the record he moved to Nanjing. So you've got... Sun Fu, he left Bodhidharma area around Luoyang, where they were setting up the new capital in 495, moved to Nanjing.

[21:51]

The record literally says, I'll tell you what Sun Fu's record says, people of his village thought he was strange, and he roamed widely. Binding up his provisions, he went looking for a teacher in places where he couldn't be found, in mountains and so on. And there was the Zen teacher Bodhidharma, who observed practice with right virtue. This is all from... Dao Swan's book, Sung Fu went into the cliffs and caves and asked him the profound, about what is profound. And he left home with Bodhidharma as his teacher. He embraced his teachings until no questions were made and was strictly devoted to practicing the doctrine of Samadhi and for all time thereafter did not read sutras. Instead, he followed the teaching that the wordless truth is found within oneself. So this is this early writing about the Zen masters by Dao Swan, by a perceptual monk. And then in the year 494, he traveled to Nanjing, where he resided at Lower Samadhi Forest Temple on Bell Mountain. Remember that Bell Mountain place I said, the park? That's where he lived. So, that sounds strange.

[22:55]

How are they traveling back and forth from these two places? Well, if you look at a map in China, and you go there and take a look, there's a river system here. It's the Yellow River. It goes past Shaolin Temple, near Shaolin Temple, and then... There's other rivers just below that that go down and connect to the Yangtze. And the Yangtze sails right down to Nanjing. This was all frequently traveled waterways. They had plenty of boats going up and down all the time. And this was a civilization, full communications and traveling with grain boats, everything else was going up and down the rivers. He could have gone a few miles south. got on the Tong River, connected to the Han River, connected to the Yangtze and been in Nanjing in no time and vice versa. It would have been no sweat for him to do that, to get out of there. If they wanted to leave town, if they all wanted to pull up and leave, they could have done it and gone south. So from 500 to 502, however, this whole area was, there was a huge civil war because Emperor Wu was overthrowing the previous Qi dynasty and setting up the Liang dynasty.

[24:00]

They probably would have gone down before that because there was actually war on the river at that point. They were fighting with boats on the rivers and stuff. So it might have been before 500, from 495 to 497, they could have all left, including Bodhidharma, and gone down to Nanjing. So you follow the water route down the river, down the Yangtze River to Nanjing. And what do you got? You've got the location along that water route of two places, which, according to tradition, the second and the third ancestors stayed during their lives. And both of them were right along the water route. In other words, the traditional story has a hard time explaining how the second ancestor came and lived here, because his Dharma seat was up here. And they say, well, during the Zhou dynasty, which occurred later, this northern Zhou dynasty, there was a suppression of Buddhism. And to escape that, he ran down to the south and stayed here. Well, that happened in 575. In other words, He would have had, if he studied under Bodhidharma at the time, they said, he would have had to have been 100 years old when he ran off from here and ran down here and went back again later and kept teaching.

[25:06]

That strains credulity. But that's what they say because they have no other way to explain how his temple ended up here unless they look at what I'm talking about, which is a new theory. And so nobody's ever really quite accepted what theory is correct. Well, yeah, I mean, he would have had to have been really old when he went down there. So why were they confused? Why didn't they know what they did? Well, they never even made it. None of this really even mattered until the Tang emperor said, you know, you've got to prove your lineage or we're not going to let you be a monk. So people got in a hurry. They went back and proved their lineage back to Bodhidharma. But they weren't clear on the history details. You know, they kind of... hobbled the story together. But I think it's clear that the reason that the second and third ancestors' temples are found down here is they probably went down the river and hopped off the boat. And let me propose something now. What if Bodhidharma didn't want to be around an emperor? What if he said, I mean, the emperors didn't like people that weren't in his group anyway. He had a guy. He had a high priest. And there were some monks that were leading rebellions. They had to crush two rebellions and execute several priests in the northern Wei dynasty.

[26:10]

just before this happened. So you had to be on the right crowd or you weren't with the court. You were an outsider. You could be a heretic. You weren't doing official canon. You weren't following Emperor Constantine and the right doctrines in the Bible. You've got to go with what the emperor says is right, not necessarily what you like, because the emperor doesn't want any independent people out there. He's paying for the monastery, remember? It's too cold here. So they went down to Nanjing possibly. Here's Nanjing again, the city map again I showed you. Here's Bell Mountain. These are the places in Nanjing that I've found where they say Bodhidharma lived. If you go to Nanjing, you go out on the mountains in the south, this is where he sat, right? Here's a temple where they say he stayed for three years. Here's another cave near the river, a group of caves where they say he sat. Here's another place where they say he crossed the river. Another temple.

[27:11]

Here's a temple where his main disciple lived and where some say that he would have gone to see his main disciple. We know his main disciple lived here. Here's the court. Here's his main disciple. that far apart the historical records say oh and here's another place here's Nanjing City we just looked at there is a record that indicates that Bodhi Dharma built a temple up here it's a record from the 17th century that refers to a record of the 12th century that says that that temple was built by Bodhi Dharma yes I mean Sung Fu oldest disciple would be Sung Fu we come might be the main lineage disciple for us but his oldest disciple was Sung Fu now this temple i'm going to this fall to find i've been looking for four years to find this location because i've been looking for there was this record that indicated another record that indicated it but every time i'd send people to go looking find it everyone say it doesn't exist nothing there but i finally found it the other day on the internet i found this remote reference to it in a tourist pamphlet about the city that's next to it.

[28:14]

And they said that this well is here. There used to be a temple here that was called True Victory Temple. Well, the record says True Victory Temple was the one that Bodhidharma built and lived in. So I'm going to this fall to find that one. And it's nice that there's a well, because I find wells wherever I go are looking for Bodhidharma. It's interesting. Anyway, so there's all this stuff that says that Bodhidharma not just stayed here, saw Emperor Wu cross the river and split. There's a lot of indication he was hanging out around there for a long time. And if you follow the timeline I'm talking about, he could have been there for 25 years. Well, how come there's no record for him if he was there for 25 years? How come they don't know? Well, let me tell you one thing that you should remember. This is what we have records for. This is in the biographies of eminent monks. This is where his senior disciple lived. Here's the court. It's about three miles away. Emperor Wu called Bodhidharma's senior disciple to come to the court and teach for years and years and years. He refused. He would not go.

[29:16]

And everybody praised him for not going to meet the emperor. He was completely in his practice. He was a home leaver. He was not a court goer. He was a home leaver. And that's what Bodhidharma, I propose to you, taught. He says, we're not about the world. When that emperor came down from the north, we're out of here. We're going to Nanjing because they're building a temple right there in front of, you know, Luminous Owl knows exactly where the temple is in relation to his cave. It's about a mile away when they built Shaolin Temple. It was about a mile away from the cave where he supposedly set. He could have said, and it was on a sacred mountain. Everybody would have come there. It would have been natural. That would have been where they built it. He said, I'm out of here. They're going to build some temple here. We're getting out. Could have gone down the river, settled here. His senior disciple went in and lived on this nice monastery in this mountain, never went to visit the court, according to historical records. No record of it. Now, Emperor Wu honored him when he died in 524.

[30:19]

The record says he died in 524. What does that mean? Well, would Bodhidharma's senior disciple die four years after Bodhidharma arrived in China? and started teaching according to the traditional story? No. That doesn't make any sense. Something was going on before. And the record says that Emperor Wu and his daughter, the princess Shao, and others honored his disciple when he died with a big deal. This is in the record. Now, it seems plot. Now, the scholars say, oh, Bodhidharma never met Emperor Wu. Couldn't have happened. I propose to you, even though there is no record of their meeting in the historical record of this time, if he was hanging out around here and refused to go to the court and said, I'm not a court goer, I'm a home leaver, and that's our practice. You leave, you go practice the way. That I propose to you that the only time they might have met was when Sun Fu died and they had a big funeral for him.

[31:26]

It's conceivable to me that Bodhidharma, senior disciple dies, Bodhidharma is within 10, 15, 20 miles of there his whole life, goes down for many years, decides, okay, I'm going to go to his funeral. Bodhidharma says, finally, the teacher came in. Come here, I'm going to talk to you. I've been trying to get you in here a long time. Look at all the stuff I've done. Isn't it great? Well, no. I don't like what you've done, and I don't like emperors generally. It's not home leaving. It's not leaving home. It's not practicing the way. It's just what all those other stupid monks that come from India do. First thing they do is try to get the emperor to pay to build a monastery. I'm not into that. I'm into living in a cave somewhere or practicing in somebody else's monastery or doing something like that. And in fact, one of the criticisms of the Zen school that scholars put forth all the time that used to drive me crazy was they'd say there was no Zen school. Those people all just lived in other people's monasteries. The Zen monks just lived in a perceptual monastery.

[32:27]

There wasn't even a Zen school until 400 years after Bodhidharma. Well, that's, of course, carrying the argument to absurd lengths. But the truth, I think, was that early on, they didn't want to go with the emperor. And the emperor, it was too cold in China to live in the forest. Like in India, they figured out real quick they needed a monastery. Well, who pays for it? If the emperor is paying for it, And the emperor picks the priests. Okay, you could have some problems right there. The emperor's picking the priests, and he's going to pick the guy that he likes, especially the guy that says the emperor is the greatest. Maybe the emperor is the real Buddha, or something like that. You know, like happened in Japan. The emperor was the Buddha. So you've got to consider this thing. This was a political question. It was politics about whether or not Bodhidharma was willing to go meet the emperor or not, and he wasn't. In fact, there were monks that were. All those other monks came, went to the Eastern Palace, talked to the emperor. Bodhidharma finally had to come.

[33:28]

His senior disciple died. He went to the funeral. Emperor Wu grabbed him, said, hey, finally the master came. We loved your student. What do you have to say? Didn't hit it off at all. No, I'm not into emperors, sorry. And what you're doing here is goofy. And left. So he went back. At that point, he might have said, well, it's time to get out of here. I've blown my cover. This is really more speculative. I feel pretty good about everything I've told you so far. Now I'm trying to sort out the rest of the story. I think he could have just gone right back because at this time would have been 25 years after the previous emperor was up there. There was a new emperor. Everything had changed. And he could have decided to go back up the Yangtze. And there's actually stories that he stopped at. Remember Donglin Temple? We went to the Eastwoods Temple. It was the Pure Land Temple. There are stories that say that Bodhidharma went there. And that's right on the river. He would have stopped going either way, started there going either way. Yeah. He was regarded as a great monk, a great teacher, and people would go hear him.

[34:41]

And in fact, the emperor's relatives invited him to completely leave Nanjing. There's a story that one of the relatives invited him to go to Sichuan and that he went to Sichuan. you know, so far away for several years and started Zen there, a Zen school in Sichuan, and then went back to Nanjing again, but he still wouldn't go to the court. That record is also in this book, that Bodhidharma's disciple did that, went all the way to Sichuan, and he came back, but he still wouldn't go to the court. So he was honored, but he refused to become part of the court scene. Other monks did. There's loads of monks. The book I'm writing about all this is... filled with the stories of so much other Chinese history came out of this. Like, have anybody heard of the Hungry Ghost Festival? Yeah, Hungry Ghost Festival started with Emperor Wu at this time because of a dream he had about his wife. There's all kinds of things in Chinese culture that came out of this. But this story of Bodhidharma, this is a new angle. So if you look at the river they sailed on, the Yangtze, and you look where the second and third ancestors' temples are, also the fourth and the fifth ancestors' temples that we went to are right near there.

[35:50]

I mean, here it is. Here's the Yangtze, and here's the temples. There's something going on there. There's people along that river that, you know, the ancestors of Bodhidharma stopped there, and that's where things got going. So there's a lot. There's more than me to say. You've got to look at the physical geography. The philologist scholars who go everything by text, they need to look at a map sometimes, I think, and see what the evidence is about how they could have traveled up and down the river, where the temples are. I mean, all that, I think, adds to the story. So we're back to Shaolin Temple again. He went back up, possibly to Shaolin. Now there's no clear evidence that he ever was there. He might have been up on the hill and they knew that. And that's where the story about him came from. Because they made up a lot of myths about Bodhidharma because he was so famous. He became so famous. They might have known that he was up there and they probably, they said, well, he was at, they weren't sure. Well, when was he here? Was he here before the temple or after, you know, who cares? We've got to... make an association with him because he's important now and we want to associate with his memory.

[36:52]

So the time frame could have gotten skewed because they, see, it wasn't until 200 years later that they really started worrying about who was whose student. When during the Tang Dynasty, the emperor said, if you can't prove your lineage, you can't be a monk. Great Tang Dynasty, China's greatest dynasty. And so they... And when he declared that and when he took a census of everything, it was two years later that the first big stele appeared commemorating Bodhidharma that was supposedly written by Emperor Wu. And I think it was written by Emperor Wu, but I don't think the stele existed until they had to prove it. I think they went and found an old record and they put it on a stele at that point. But that's all part of my second novel, or maybe the later part of the first one I'm working on now. But the point is, all this got kind of had to get made up later and they weren't sure well when would he there I'm not sure when did he live here so they cobbled together this story but the story doesn't really match the real historical record exactly the traditional story so when Buddhism entered China and underwent several changes now I've already alluded to this fact that that Buddhism came into China was too cold to go live in the woods like in India and they needed a monastery

[38:06]

Well, they don't have a dana tradition. They're not getting enough donations, really, unless the emperor builds the temples. And the early temples were all built by the emperor. He built the temples. And so, of course, it became an instrument of the emperor. Now, Shaolin Temple ultimately became the great imperial temple. And if you go to talk to the Shaolin monks today, they'll tell you, oh, this is special because all the other Zen temples in China are Zen temples, but we're the imperial. Zen temple. Shaolin is always connected with the crown. In fact, Shaolin monks saved the Tong Emperor in the year 620. Around the year 620, 13 Shaolin monks went and... See, here's this monastery. They can't live in the woods like they did in India. They need to support themselves. So the emperor builds them a temple and then gives them some land and they get the rents. to run their monastery. Now they're a corporation.

[39:09]

They're not home leavers out living in the woods. They're basically a corporation now. So when the Tang emperors, a rebel went against the Tang emperor, he went and stole a bunch of Shaolin's land at this place called Cyprus Valley. And so Shaolin monks got mad, and 13 of them went out at night, and they snuck into this guy's camp. He had declared himself the emperor of the new Jiang dynasty, and this was his main general. They snuck into his camp, kidnapped the guy, and gave him to the Tang emperor. This was the martial arts, the Kung Fu masters, right? And ever since then, they've had this real, Shaolin's had this real close relationship with the emperor. That doesn't sound like what Bodhidharma was talking about, that martial arts stuff. That doesn't sound like what it looked to me like Bodhidharma was doing, dodging the emperor wherever he was going. And so this political question about what you're going to do when you're going to build a monastery, Zen couldn't figure it out. Zen couldn't figure out what to do. Because this emperor Wei of northern China, he was a great Buddhist emperor, and he built all these grottoes that were beautiful and everything, and then he moved down south to where near Shaolin, built more at Lungmen.

[40:18]

He looked like a Buddhist. That guy looked like a Buddhist. Weighed 10,000, 50,000. There's over 100,000 Buddhas at the Lungmen grottoes carved into the cliffs. So that guy looks like a Buddhist, but... It didn't go with Zen. It didn't go with Bodhidharma. It didn't go with what his program was about. So three different vinyas had to develop. So how did the Zen school retain its independence? How could they stay away from the court but still survive in this hostile country? Well, the way they did it, the way that the clue to all this comes from Chinese scholarship today, which shows how the precepts changed in China. Because when Zen came into China and... they started developing China, this political question, how do we maintain independence, caused them a crisis. How do we stay independent but survive? And so what did they do? They became farmers. And after the first three generations, Bodhidharma, Hui Ka, Song San lived in other people's temples.

[41:21]

The fourth ancestor, Daoxin, started a temple in which he started farming. That was a violation of the precepts. The precepts, you don't farm. You can't do any manual labor. You can only live off Dana in India. So the Zen school changed and started farming. They had to survive. And the emperor sent three emissaries to the fourth ancestor and said, come under my control. Come to the capital. Come and see me. I'll give you the purple robe. You've got to come to the capital. Three times he sent emissaries. Each time, the fourth ancestor refused. He said, no, I'm not going. Oxhead school went. Oxhead master went and lived near Nanjing under the emperor. fourth ancestor Daoxin wouldn't do it finally they said come this time or we're cutting off your head he said okay that's not our thing we don't in the Zen school we don't go to the capital we're not your puppet you know we're about leaving home not going to the court and then the Emperor yeah well okay I guess you really are

[42:24]

serious, so I'll leave you alone. And then from that time on, the Zen schools started developing their own monasteries where they would farm to support themselves. The first classic Zen school, the Guiyang school, even had cows, would raise cattle. And so this was a total violation of the precepts up to that time, but it was the way the Zen school survived. And then they finally had to say, we've got to codify this somehow. What will it be? Bai Zhang said, a day without work, a day without eating. Here's the Chingue. This is the rules for the Zen monasteries. Okay, we're not doing it like an Indian anymore because we've got to do it here. We want to stay away from the court. And what happened to the people? So the Bodhisattva precepts and all that evolved out of this situation. And finally, so there was actually a big, right near Shaolin Temple, there's a In ancient times, there was a huge ordination platform called at Huishan Temple. And the emperor commanded that all the priests of the realm come there to get their precepts, to get the priestly precepts, to become a teacher, to become a true homely or bodhisattva precepts.

[43:35]

He had to go to Huishan Temple at the sacred center of the realm. And so Mazu did that. Jiaojo did that. All these teachers went at this preceptual place here to take those precepts. Now, the burial stupas also lent legitimacy to it. They had burial stupas there, and stupas show that this is a real important teacher of the realm. And at Shaolin Temple, they have the stupa forest where they have all these ancient stupas. But the biggest one was the stupa for the seventh ancestor. Ever heard of him? Heard of the sixth ancestor. Who's the seventh ancestor? Well, interestingly... Remember the north-south split where Shenzhou and Huyenung had their poetry contest, and then Shenzhou went north, became the northern school. Huyenung went south, became the southern school, and Huyenung got wiped out in the An Lushan rebellion. The northern school died out because rebellion took over the country. Anyway, let me backtrack a second.

[44:41]

The role of monasteries, anyway, became a way for the government to control the monks. And the monks even became servants of the emperor, became warriors. And it's actually known after that incident I told you about, there are other times when warrior monks from Shaolin went and fought in Korea against the Koreans and stuff like that. Is that Buddhism? Sounds weird to me. And Bodhidharma started this place according to tradition? Now something's really goofy. Something seems really goofy here. How did Bodhidharma, who from the, I think, was trying to dodge all that stuff, and somehow they took him and they stuck him as being the first ancestor. They say he wasn't the abbot, they acknowledge he wasn't the abbot, but they put him back there at Shaolin Temple. Anyway, that forest, the monastery became a tool for political control. The emperor could keep those warrior monks in one place where he'd keep his eye on them and make sure they were serving him. So, this is the fourth ancestor set up the first independent monastery where they went farming around it, Fourth Ancestors Temple.

[45:46]

It's a picture of that. So you might say this is the first true Zen monastery. That's the LA Zen Center sitting in the Zendo there. Here's the Fifth Ancestor, just a few miles away that went into the Fifth Ancestor and they were also big farmers. Bill Porter talks about how they had a huge farming community on the back of the Fifth Ancestor's Temple Mountain. This is supposedly where the poetry contest happened, right? Between Shenzhou and Wei Nung. So he went up there and lived apparently up in Shaolin Temple back in that area. We don't know exactly what happened. That's the abbot today, Shi Yongxian, and he really is a political animal. He's a rock star in China that basically has to balance between the demands of the government and the demands of the Zen School. He's a very honest, dedicated guy. He's not a dupe or a stooge by any means, but still, he's got a lot of work cut out for him.

[46:54]

Because all the monks are up there training today. They're still martial training, going up and down the stairs on their hands in the snow, all that kind of stuff. So is that Buddhism? Is that our idea of what's going on with Buddhism? I don't know. Actually, there's recent evidence has shown that the martial tradition might have come from the second abbot because he would train to protect himself from tigers at his old monastery before he became abbot at Shaolin Temple. They found that on his gravestones about six, seven years ago. His name was Sung Cho. Anyway, so all these temples, these temples became a political problem Like central, what do they mean? Central versus local authority. How do you keep? The emperor said all the monks had to come to the central temple, Shaolin, its sister temple, Wei Shan, right next door, to be ordained. Everybody had to keep under imperial control. So it was religious versus secular authority, orthodox and imperially sanctioned versus heretics, and spurious religious movements that could turn into rebellions.

[48:02]

A lot of rebellions in China had religious roots. In fact, that's what led to this whole thing. There were many rebellions in the northern way that they had to crush and kill the monks that were leading them. Cooperation or else competition between the three teachings, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. So the monasteries became the focus of all these conflicts. So is that what Bodhidharma was about, a monastery like that? I don't think so. See, where it's located was close to the two ancient capitals of China. It was called the Western Capital, of Chang'an or Xi'an now, and Luoyang, capital, moved back and forth in the old days a lot. So he was right in the middle of the political intrigues. And that whole area is where the northern school went. When Shen Xiu, when he lost the Pochicontas, went north, he became the teacher of three emperors. That was his title, the teacher of three emperors. And that whole area where he was was destroyed in 755, and his school was wiped out in the An Lushan Rebellion.

[49:02]

So see, Bodhidharma was right. Don't hang out with the emperor. Nothing good's going to come from it. Don't go there. And sure enough, bang. As soon as one emperor got overthrown, the in crowd was out. Then what are they going to do? So interesting, huh? Funny how it all got wiped out. Well, there was another student that nobody knows about. He was called the seventh ancestor. And he studied under Huinang. His name was Jingzong, pure store. And legend has it that when Huinang's disciples left and went out, there was the ones we know. There was Sagan and Nangaku, his two great disciples, which in Chinese, Qingyan and Nanyue. And we know all about them. We know we have writings about them, at least. And we know where their temples were down south. Well, his other disciple, Jingzong, went north. He went up to Mount Sung. And he stayed at Huishan Temple. And he lived there from around the year 700 to 750 before that rebellion.

[50:07]

And guess what? There's no record of him in the imperial record of the important monks of the court. The important monks of the court at Loyong, 60 miles away, there is no mention of Jingzong. Is this another one of the Zen disciples that said, no, we're not going to the court, but I'm bringing the teaching of Huishan to the north. but I'm not hanging out at the court. Or was he not important? Was he just a guy that went there and they didn't respect him that much? Well, when you look at all the stupas around Shaolin Temple in the Pagoda Forest, and I've looked at them all, I found out that there was a stupa for Jingzong. And the only record that exists about him was this plate on that thing. It says he was the seventh ancestor. So I said to L.A. 's insider, let's go. We're going to go see that. And I went to the temple before L.A. came there, and I tried to make arrangements to go. And they said, well, it's closed. You can't go in. I said, well, really? I really want to see that. This is the seventh ancestor. I've got to find out who this guy was. I want to see this stupa. They said, no, you better not.

[51:09]

We'll see. I said, OK, I'm coming back with the group. I came back with the group. The local historical guy came out to guide us. And I said, I've got to see that. I know about the seventh ancestor. I really let him learn. right in the riot act, because I really wanted to see this. He said, I'll see what I can do. Actually, it's on a military base. And so the film crew that was following us had to stay, the Chinese film crew. And we went into the military base. And they literally held the guard dogs down on the ground. And we walked by them. They had guard dogs there. And we walked into the military base. And here was the stupa of the seventh Zen ancestor. It was the biggest stupa I'd ever seen. I never saw a stupa that big at Shaolin, anywhere else. I said, wait a minute. There's no record of this guy, and he has the biggest stupa I've ever seen in China? I looked at that stupa. Everybody was walking up, and I was like at the end of the group, kind of make sure everybody got past the guard shack. And I walked onto that road. I started screaming. I couldn't believe it. And people were looking at me like I was nuts on a military base.

[52:12]

I was yelling so loud. I'd never seen anything so big. And I thought, this is the seventh ancestor of Zen, and nobody even knows who he is. And I ran down the road to the stupa, and I was like, look at this, it's fantastic. And nobody else had looked at that many stupas, and I didn't think it was such a big deal. But I was going, oh my gosh. And sure enough, it's the only example of this type of stupa from ancient times, and it's bigger than anything at Shaolin Temple. This guy meant something. But you know what? He had the bad luck of teaching here just before the An Lushan Rebellion broke out in northern China. An Lushan knew that the Tong monks, those monks at Shaolin Temple were working for the Tong Emperor. The rebel knew that. First thing he did was send an army up there and burn down everything, including the temples and the records. And all the records of this guy were lost nine years after he died. So we don't know who the seventh ancestor of Zen was. We know his name. His name was Jing Zhong. We know he stood under Hui Nung because it says so on the plaque that was here.

[53:13]

And it says that he was the seventh ancestor that brought Hui Nung's teachings to the north. But we don't know anything else about him. But he must have been somebody. They wouldn't build a stupa for nobody like that, especially on the sacred mountain of Mount Song. So what happened to the guy, the disciple of the Zen school who said, well, I'll go up and teach near the court. I don't have a problem with it. I just won't go there. I'll just stay on the sacred mountain nearby. He got wiped out too. All his records. He didn't get wiped out. He lived there a long time and died. Built a stupa for him. But we don't even know who he is. So is this something about Bodhidharma? That this guy was pretty smart? I mean, he had something going on about understanding what it meant to get involved with the court that other people didn't understand. Sixth Ancestor was clear down here. That's where he set up shop. And then his disciple... Ching Zong went back up to up there. Wow, that's interesting. Funny story going on here. And so finally, I'm going to tell you the story of Cheng Lu.

[54:16]

So look at how this political equation happened in China. Maybe what I'm saying here is nuts, but I don't think so. There's too much weird stuff going on here that doesn't match the old story of Bodhidharma that casts him in a whole new really interesting light to me. And the story of Changlu Temple, this is where he crossed the river to go to. He went on one blade of grass, crossed the river, you know. There was a temple there for 1,500 years that commemorated that. It was supposedly built to commemorate by Emperor Wu, to commemorate when his daughter recovered from illness. By the way, Bodhidharma's senior disciple, one of the reasons he was famous was he was curing illnesses in the Emperor Wu's family among the princes, his daughters and sons. Now, I don't know. It doesn't say that he cured his daughter, but it says he cured one of his sons. And he built that temple to commemorate that. Now, do we know what that means? Well, here's the temple today. It's a school. It doesn't exist anymore.

[55:17]

It's this middle school where a lot of students there. And the old well is there. And according to ancient records, this temple was huge, massive. It was in a place called Six Harmonies County. And there, there was a three treasures hall. There was a Bodhidharma hall. There was a one blade of grass hall where they had the blade of grass that he crossed the river on. People used to go and worship the blade of grass that Bodhidharma crossed the river on. They had the standing in the snow hall. Obviously, that's a reference to Huayca. They had the point directly at Mind Hall. All this stuff I've been talking about. They had all those halls there, according to the ancient records, but they don't have a temple anymore. But they have the wells. They have some of the old pillar bases. They have, you know, pieces of the temple are still lying around a little bit, some of the old pieces. They have a beautiful ancient ginkgo tree. Beautiful ancient ginkgo tree from the ancient times.

[56:21]

Yeah, and it's... It's just really beautiful. And they regard that as the symbol of the temple and of their school now. The school's taking it as their symbol. And really a gorgeous ginkgo tree that they commemorate. And they also have poems that were written by famous poets about this temple since the Tang Dynasty. They have the poems recorded, so they put them up on the wall. You can read poems by Li Boa, Li Bai, China's most famous poet. and others that came here and wrote about this place. Now, so here's Bodhidharma. I propose to you for your consideration that Bodhidharma said, I'm not a court-goer, I'm a home-weaver. I go in, we go up in the caves, if we have to, we'll hang out in a cave on a mountain, but we're not going to go take the emperor's money and become his stooges. And, you know, start dancing his song, saying how great the way of the kings is, as well as the way of the Buddha, like a lot of people did.

[57:26]

You know, we're staying away from that scene. I propose to you that the record indicates that Bodhidharma went to Luoyang, left when the emperor came from the north and they took over there, and the official priest took over, built Shaolin Temple, went to Nanjing, stayed there a long time, wouldn't meet the emperor Wu, finally met him when his senior disciple died and emperor Wu gave him a funeral, and then said, You know, this is too close to the court. I'm leaving. I'm going to go back north again. Went back up the Yangtze and went back up to Loyong and died up there at the burial temple that Bill and I showed you earlier. I propose to you that this is an entirely new story of Bodhidharma that I think is possible and that portrays him as someone utterly dedicated to the Buddha ideal. of leaving the world and practicing the way rather than just pandering to the powers that be so we could have a comfy monastery to live in.

[58:29]

Why isn't there a temple here anymore? Why is this temple gone? This is the controversial part of the program. During World War II, the Japanese army invaded Nanjing. One group, they went in. You've heard of the Nanjing Massacre, of course, Nanking Massacre. I went out to visit this temple. And I found it. And they said, ooh, yeah, you really want to see that? The guard wouldn't let me in at the front gate. He said, the school's closed. Sunday, you can't go in. I said, well, I really want to see this temple. And he said, OK, well, I'll call the director. See what she says. See what she says. So she talks to me on the phone. She says, well, you came all this way to see you. I guess we ought to show it to you. Yeah, so she said, let me talk to the guard. So the guard said, OK, come in. He showed me around. He showed me everything. And that night, I went back to Nanjing, and I was pretty impressed.

[59:33]

I thought, wow, I didn't even know there was a temple like that, where he crossed the river, and there was a temple there all that time. How come I've never heard of this? How come there's no history about this that's known? They told me when I was there, well, You're the first foreigner we've ever seen. Actually, three people came from Beijing to look at it once, you know, Chinese. Nobody else ever goes there, hardly. The local people know it, know what it is. Why would it be so remote? Anyway, it turns out, World War II, troops marched in, burned down the temple. Japanese imperial troops came in. Let me finish the story. I went back to Nanjing that night. I had dinner at the local hotel, a local hotel. Ordered vegetarian meal and the cook came out. He said, oh, you ordered vegetarian. I said, yeah. He said, oh, well, why did you do that? I said, well, I'm a Buddhist actually. And he said, oh, well, me too. Took off his hat and he was bald. And he said, I'm becoming a monk. I said, oh, really? We started talking. I said, he said, what are you doing here? And I said, well, I'm looking around for stuff for Bodhidharma today.

[60:34]

I went out to Changlu Temple. He said, oh, I know about that place. That's my home. I grew up in the village next to that. That's where I went to school. He said, that's cool. I said, really? He said, yeah. I said, what happened to it? He said, Japanese burned it down. And they came and invaded. I said, really? He said, yeah, my grandmother lived through the whole thing. She told me all about it. And I said, well, that's terrible. How come you didn't rebuild it or what happened or something? He said, well, the Japanese came in, they burned it down. And then the Soto Church said we all had to follow them now instead. Aleph has been written about the Soto Church's involvement in World War II. I don't need to go into it here. But my point is, this looks like something that Bodhidharma was trying to say to be on guard against, getting our religion mixed up with politics. It happened at Shaolin Temple. It happened to the seventh ancestor.

[61:35]

It happened to all these times. I propose to you that Bodhidharma's true teaching of meeting the Emperor Wu in Michael's beautiful paintings over there, had a far more profound importance than we usually give him credit for. We might say, yeah, he said all that stuff doesn't matter and all that matters is studying the nature of mind. He understood something that would behoove us to pay attention to and understand about our tradition and where it can lead if we don't really understand what Bodhidharma is about. Thank you. Any questions or comments? I've gone over time as usual. Sorry. I doubt it. I doubt it. It seems to me that the evidence that Sung Cho, the second abbot, came in with these martial arts skills.

[62:40]

Because he grew up at this monastery a little ways north of there in the mountains where there were a bunch of tigers. And on his tombstone that they dug up about 2003, it said that he was really adept at martial arts because he had to fight these tigers all around there. So they developed these techniques for fighting the tigers. And then he went and became the abbot of Shaolin. Just after Bodhidharma, yeah. The Kung Fu ancestor, yeah. You know, who knows? It seems more plausible to me. that this other abbot would have been doing that. And then the whole thing got put in concrete, so to speak, when the monks actually went out and saved the Tong emperor 200 years later, or 150 years later or so. Then everything kind of became set in stone. Now, they were really martial art monks, and not only that, they were the emperor's guys, fought for the emperor. And they also fought to defend their lands.

[63:42]

and to save their own lands, which sounds really weird to me. That sounds kind of goofy to me. So when you look at Shaolin, I do this other related slideshow called Shaolin, Essence of Chinese Culture, kind of question mark. And it goes into a bunch of these questions about what was going on here. And it deftails with this show, what happened. But it looks to me like Bodhidharma was about staying away from that stuff. I mean, if you look at the record and reinterpret what happened, it not only shows that he didn't just go to there and go there and that was that. He had a reason for going to places he went. He went back and forth and he was avoiding the court. And his disciples avoided the court. And the Southern School is famous, actually, for having not been involved with the emperor. But everybody thought, all the scholars say, well, that's just because the North got wiped out and they were left. But it looks to me like, well, maybe that's not true. Maybe the southern school really didn't want to mess with the emperor. And when the fourth ancestor said, cut off my head, I'm not going to Nanjing, he was serious.

[64:46]

And that was a defining quality of the Zen school. And Bodhidharma has taught that. So, you know, I don't know. I'm open to debate on all these questions because this is new territory. But I'm proposing, based on the evidence, that this is a new way to look at his life. Any comments? Okay, thanks a lot. Oh, let's take a look at these paintings. Oh, terrific. This is terrific, Michael. That's terrific. This is great. I am the emperor. I do good. By definition, what I do is good. And if it isn't, I'll cut your head off. They did that, too. That's what my novel's about. All the people that got their heads cut off because they didn't go along with Emperor Wu. I quoted.

[65:49]

Scholars take that as like the only reliable text of the era. Because for the reasons I said, it was written by somebody who wasn't. He just wrote about Zen monks and he wrote about other monks, too. He didn't have an axe to grind. He wasn't particularly friendly towards Zen. So he wouldn't have written it as a hagiography. In other words, as a record to extol the ancient ancestors that are so wonderful. He was just writing about who lived there. So it's regarded as better. And it also is the one that refers to, there's one text by Bodhidharma I talked about yesterday, the two entrances and the four practices. That text also refers to that text as being from Bodhidharma. So that's why emperors say that that two entrances and four practices is probably by Bodhidharma, because this text says it was. the one I just referred to. So it generally is regarded as the most reliable of the old texts about Bodhidharma. And I think it proves almost beyond a shadow of a doubt that he lived and that his disciples lived and all this stuff. But if you plot the timeline, something doesn't drive.

[66:52]

And I think it's because when they had to go back and make it up later and say what happened, they weren't clear. They weren't exactly clear. But they said, well, Bodhidharma King, he meant Emperor Wu. We have a record of that. We'll put it on a staly now and put it up so you can see it Part of my research is about the steles they put up that Emperor Wu wrote when Bodhidharma died and said, oh, he was so great. There's three steles that say that. They were supposed to be written by him, but scholars say they weren't written by Emperor Wu because they came 200 years later. But I think that they were written by him because I did a philological analysis of the handwriting and found that the metaphors used in that were the same as the metaphors that Emperor Wu's son used in his poetry. And that's going to be part of... my greater argument about all this because I found this evidence and nobody else has brought that out before so there's a whole lot of facets to this I've only given you the tip of the iceberg today but yeah it well now this guy was a a perceptual monk you like into the precepts so he didn't he said

[68:00]

It's wonderful. What Bodhidharma did was deep and mysterious, and it was the samadhi, the practice of samadhi, like this sitting meditation. And everywhere he went, he woke people up, and everybody thought he was fantastic, teaching about this. And the other texts say that he taught about the nature of the mind, like he pointed a tree and say, this is a little later text, about 50 years later, said he would point to a tree and say, is that branch up there your mind? He'd say things like that. It all seems to pretty much support the idea we have of Bodhidharma as being this really strong meditator who focused on the nature of the mind. How old did this scenario make Bodhidharma? Well, yeah, I mean, according to tradition, he lived to be 150. But what I'm proposing here doesn't require us to believe that. He could have... He could have been quite old, yeah.

[69:03]

There's a lot more to this, like plotting the timeline for Hui Ka, his other disciple, the one we know of. That's really problematic. And nobody can figure out how to plot his lifeline because it's so far removed from Sun Fu, the oldest type. He's so much younger because he lives to another 60 years after that. Was he only 14 when they left Loyang? What's going on? The only way you can understand it is to go into the story that I put out. And then the timelines make sense. He might have started teaching Hueco when he went back to Shaolin the second time. And then he could have died 60 years later, which is what the records say. Otherwise, you've got these two disciples so far apart, how could he have done it? It doesn't make any sense. One reason the scholars would deny the whole thing. But if you take my story and put them together, he could have started teaching Hueco after he went back to Shaolin the second time. There's all kinds of facets to this. Like I said, this is the tip of the iceberg. But, you know. Yes.

[70:08]

We're filing this place. You're relying on yourself, your own effort, and following Bodhidharma, not the emperor. I mean, these guys were pretty smart that set up the separation of church and state, right? I mean, because it gets nasty. Even something as wonderful as Buddhism can be completely corrupted when the emperor gets involved. You can have martial monks and imperial armies that practice Zen and samurai killers that do Zazen. All this goofy stuff can happen. So it's better to stick with the real thing. Leave home. Leave the world. Practice the way. Become the model for everyone. Practice peace in the face of war. Do it. Do it really. I mean, that's the people that Bodhidharma represents to me in that practice that he did. as opposed to the people who are opportunists that run off. As soon as the emperor says he'll give him some money and make him the official priest, they go do it. Okay, anyway, that's enough. Oh, that's fantastic, Michael.

[71:09]

Those are really great. Thank you so much. It's really beautiful. I really appreciate it. I could have done better with the emperor. Did you do both of these? Yeah. Oh, they're fantastic. This is really amazing. I'm going to frame this and put it up in my house for sure. And this one, I'll put it right next to it. This will be a set. Good job. Thank you. Thank you.

[71:37]

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