Emperor Wu of Liang

Xiao Yan took the throne in 502 as a competent general and administrator, and within a few years had issued a public declaration renouncing Daoism and committing himself to Buddhism. What followed was not private devotion but a programme. He took the bodhisattva precepts in a public ceremony, adopted the style of a bodhisattva emperor, lectured on scripture himself, wrote commentaries, and convened assemblies at which hundreds of thousands were said to have gathered. Monasteries were built and endowed across the south on a scale that later critics blamed for the exhaustion of the treasury.

Four times, in 527, 529, 546 and 547, he went to the Tongtai monastery and gave himself to it as a servant of the community. On each occasion the court had to buy him back, at a price fixed in the hundreds of millions of cash. The gesture had a precise theological point: the emperor made himself property of the sangha, and the state then redeemed him, which converted the imperial treasury into merit and dramatized the subordination of the throne to the order. It also, unavoidably, converted the imperial treasury into cash for a particular monastery.

The end was grim. A defecting northern general, Hou Jing, was accepted at the Liang court, rebelled, and besieged the capital. The city fell in 549 and the emperor, in his mid-eighties, died of starvation and neglect while the rebel held his palace. Chinese historiography of the following centuries treated him as the standing example of a ruler whose piety cost him his state, and hostile commentators cited him for generations as the argument against imperial patronage of Buddhism.

The story is the first case of the classic Chan collections. Bodhidharma comes from the west and is received by the emperor. The emperor lists what he has done, the monasteries built, the scriptures copied, the monks supported, and asks what merit he has earned. None whatsoever, says the monk. Asked what the highest meaning of the holy truths is, he answers that there is only vast emptiness and nothing holy in it. Asked who then is standing before the throne, he says he does not know, and leaves for the north.

As a piece of teaching the exchange is superb, and it does exactly what Chan needed it to do: it sets a tradition of direct insight against a tradition of accumulated merit, and it uses the most lavish royal patron in Chinese Buddhist history as the foil. As history it does not hold. The earliest biography of Bodhidharma, in the collection of eminent monks compiled in the seventh century, knows nothing of any meeting with the emperor. The dialogue appears only in Chan lineage texts of the eighth century and later, in a period when the school was constructing its own genealogy and its own founding scenes, and it grows in the telling across successive collections until it reaches its familiar form in the eleventh century.

The atlas records the meeting as debunked rather than debated, because there is no camp arguing for it: the historical study of Chan treats it as a retrospective composition, and the interest has long since moved from whether it happened to what its invention tells us about the eighth century school that needed it. That is not a diminishment of the story. It is one of the most effective pieces of religious literature ever written, and it was written about a real emperor whose real generosity made him the perfect target.