History, Legend, and the Emblem of a Lineage

Modern scholarship treats the biography of Bodhidharma cautiously, since the fullest accounts were composed generations later, as the Chan school defined its own descent back to India, and the historical figure behind them is hard to recover with certainty. What is clear is his function within the tradition: he stands as the emblem of Chan's claim to a direct transmission of awakening outside the scriptures, passed mind to mind from the Buddha through the patriarchs. Later legend also made him the founder of the Shaolin martial arts, a popular association without early support. In East Asian art he is a favourite subject, a fierce, bearded, wide-eyed figure, and in Japan his image became Daruma, the round-bottomed doll that rights itself when pushed over, an everyday emblem of perseverance.

The legend that Bodhidharma crossed the Yangtze River balanced on a single reed became one of the most enduringly popular subjects in East Asian ink painting, taken up by generations of Chan and Zen monk-painters in China and Japan, including the celebrated Japanese painter Sesshu Toyo in the fifteenth century, who used the loose, spontaneous brushwork associated with Zen aesthetics to capture the wandering monk's legendary journey in just a few economical strokes. The image, alongside the wide-eyed, fierce-browed portrait type used for his wall-gazing meditation, made Bodhidharma one of the most frequently painted individual figures in the entire history of East Asian religious art, a visual legacy far exceeding what is known of him historically.