The First Patriarch of Chan

Bodhidharma is revered as the First Patriarch of Chan (Zen) Buddhism in China, the Indian or Central Asian monk who, by tradition, brought the meditation-centred teaching from India to China in the late fifth or early sixth century. The traditions about him are as much legend as history: he is said to have met the pious Emperor Wu of Liang and told him bluntly that his temple-building and almsgiving had earned no merit at all, then to have crossed the Yangtze and settled at the Shaolin monastery, where he sat facing a wall in silent meditation for nine years.

The earliest surviving reference to Bodhidharma is far more modest than the later legends built around him. Yang Xuanzhi's Record of the Buddhist Monasteries of Luoyang, composed around 547 CE, only a few decades after Bodhidharma is traditionally supposed to have lived, mentions a monk of this name, described there as Persian or Central Asian rather than straightforwardly Indian, who visited and admired the splendour of a specific Luoyang temple; the text says nothing of Chan patriarchy, wall-gazing or Shaolin, all of which appear only in considerably later sources composed as the Chan school constructed its own foundation narrative, making this brief sixth-century mention the closest thing available to a contemporary historical trace of the man.