Tracking Bodhidharma by Andy Ferguson Page A

that I didn’t really understand the whole Zen picture, at least as I had learned it from teachers in the United States. I had already begun studying early Zen texts from China and was becoming aware that the Zen story was far more complicated and nuanced than I had theretofore understood.
    How is it that in modern times a religion that proclaims such noble bodhisattva-style rhetoric, and is often described not just as one sect of Buddhism but as the “crown jewel” of the religion itself, could have developed such strong ties to militarism and violence? Most important, could anything that had embraced the evident fascism described in Victoria’s books be considered part of genuine Buddhism or even understood as rational?
    My doubts peaked when I participated in a three-week intensive meditation session at San Francisco Zen Center in 2001. At that time I had already read Victoria’s book. I rationalized that even if the Japanese tradition had for a certain period strayed from Buddhist ideals, the U.S. branch of the tradition had the good sense to remain true to ideals of nonviolence and antimilitarism. The United States, after all, has no emperor to be exalted, so how can Chinese or Japanese emperor worship enter the picture there?
    Yet there was a tension around the whole issue, and this tension bubbled up on the last day of the meditation period when I had visions of Japanese Buddhist monks being transformed into soldiers and doing banzai charges against the American and Chinese armies. I decided to start doing a lot more personal research into Zen, its origins, and its real meaning.

FROM GUANGZHOU TO SHAOGUAN
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    The bus is full of people. Most of the passengers are young, perhaps workers from the many factories in Southern China that have closed due to the recent economic recession. Perhaps they are returning to visit their relatives or are simply traveling to someplace new to try to make a new start during tough economic times.
    For the first hour or so north of Guangzhou, we pass through flatlands of semitropical rice paddy culture, farmlands interspersed with hills and vegetable gardens surrounded by banana palms. Then we enter the hilly terrain typical of much of South China, with steep bluffs of greenery surrounded by low-lying terraced fields. In ancient times this area was called Ling Nan, meaning “south of the mountain range,” and the residents in this region, populations not far removed from Vietnam and other Southeast Asian areas, are a little shorter and darker than northerners. Northerners once dismissively called them “barbarians” and exiled disgraced court officials to this area as punishment.
    It was one such “barbarian,” a spiritual successor of Bodhidharma six generations removed from him, who should be examined to understand what Bodhidharma’s Zen came to mean in China. I first mentioned him during my visit to Guangxiao Temple, and now we’ll stop at his teaching seat to look at his life in a little more detail.

10. The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Ancestor
    THE PLATFORM SUTRA of the Sixth Ancestor is the text that records a famous sermon and ordination ceremony performed by Huineng, Zen’s famous “Sixth Ancestor.” It tells a story about how this sixth teacher in Bodhidharma’s teaching lineage, as an illiterate and impoverished young man on the outskirts of society, understood and then came to represent Zen’s most essential insights. His famous story served to solidly shoehorn Zen into the Chinese mindset. As an illiterate, Huineng had no way to read Buddhist scriptures, and thus his knowledge is connected to the idea of a Zen “outside the scriptural teaching.” Buddhism came to China from India along with a mountain of scriptural works. One way to view the Zen sect is that it was a practical Chinese reaction to the mountain of literature that Buddhism developed over preceding centuries. Zen was