Zen Buddhism, Bodhi dharma, Kung Fu and me

Staring at the magnificent temple at the foot of the Songshan Mountain range in Henan province southeast of Luoyang, I had at last arrived at a place that I had longed to visit for many years. I stood mesmerized at the legendary Shaolin temple, home of the famous Indian monk Bodhidharma, founder of Zen Buddhism and the martial arts of Kung Fu. The Temple's historical architectural complex, standing out for its great aesthetic value and its profound cultural connotations, is on the UNESCO world heritage list.
After my usual photographic survey of the temple, I sat in front of a statue of Bodhi dharma and went into deep meditation. As a practitioner of transcendental meditation, it was easy for me to slip into dhyana despite the occasional tourists noisily walking around the temple mostly known to the common public as the foundational seat of Kung Fu martial arts.
My personal connection with this temple including many of my brethren from my home state of Tamil Nadu, India is through the great Bodhidharma who arrived here from our city of Kanchipuram in the year 520 AD to spread Mahayana Buddhism to China. He lived in the Shaolin temple for nine years and I will tell his story through the lens of Tsutomu Kambe (Former Physics Professor of University of Tokyo) extracted from his book 'Bodhi Dharma and Oceanic Silk Road'. I have been wanting to write about the great Bodhidharma to my clutch of blog readers for a long time since I traveled to these parts in 2003. Safety is always important to me when traveling to remote parts.

Buddhism came to China 2,000 years ago. As early as A.D. 65, a community of Buddhist monks was reported living under royal patronage in the northern part of Kiangsu Province, near to the birthplace of Confucius. Since then, thousands of Indian and Central Asian monks have journeyed to China by land and sea, but among those who brought the teachings of the Buddha to China, none has had an impact comparable to that of Bodhidharma. Bodhidharma was born around the year 440 in Kanchi, the capital of the Southern Indian kingdom of Pallava. He was the third son of King Simhavarman. Pallavas were followers of Hinduism and In line with the prevalent customs, some of the rulers performed the Aswamedha and other Vedic sacrifices. They were, however, tolerant of other faiths, especially Buddhism.
Tsutomu Kambe in his book has done amazing research to establish Kanchipuram to be the birthplace of Bodhidharma. In 2007, his search revealed that documents published just after Tang dynasty (ending in 907) describe that the name of the Kingdom is expressed with two Chinese characters ‟香至‟. The Chinese name 香至 means “fragrance extreme” and is pronounced as Kang-Zhi. By examining various documents, Tstomu Kambe happened to come across the identification of 香至 to be Kanchipuram, an old capital town in the state Tamil-Nadu. The Chinese monk Xuanzang who visited Kanchipuram during the reign of Narasimha Varman I( 630-688 AD) reported that there were one hundred Buddhist monasteries, and 80 Hindu temples in Kanchipuram. When Bodhidharma ( born Bodhi Tara) was young, he received instruction in the Dharma philosophy from the Buddhist scholar Prajnatara, whom his father had invited from the ancient Buddhist heartland of Magadha. It was Prajnatara who also told Bodhidharma to go to China. Since the traditional overland route was blocked by the Huns, and also since the Pallavas had commercial ties throughout Southeast Asia, Bodhidharma left by ship from the nearby port of Mamallapuram ( current day Mahabalipuram). After skirting the Indian coast and the Malay Peninsula for three years and using the directional winds of the monsoon seasons, he finally arrived in Southern China around 475.

At that time, China was divided into the Northern Wei and Liu Sung dynasties. This division of China into a series of northern and southern dynasties had begun in the early third century and continued until the country was reunited under the Sui dynasty in the late sixth century. It was during this period of division and strife that Indian Buddhism developed into Chinese Buddhism, with the more military-minded northerners emphasizing meditation and magic and the more intellectual southerners preferring philosophical discussion and the intuitive grasp of principles.

Following his arrival in the port of Nanhai in the Pearl river delta ( Guangdong province) Bodhidharma visited Buddhist centers in the South and had begun learning Chinese. Bodhidharma later crossed the Yangtze River and lived near the Northern Wei capital of Pingcheng ( now famous for the Datong caves which I visited earlier). In 494, when Emperor Hsiao-wen moved his capital south to Luoyang on the northern bank of the Lo River, most of the monks living in the Pingcheng area moved too, and Bodhidharma was among them.

Later, in 496, the emperor ordered the construction of Shaolin Temple on Mount Song, in Hunan Province southeast of Luoyang. The temple, which still exists (although as a tourist attraction), was built for another meditation master from India Buddhabadra who was its first abbot. But while Zen masters have come and gone at the temple for the past 1,500 years, Bodhidharma is the only monk Buddhist historians associate with Shaolin. It was here, on Mount Songshan that Bodhidharma is said to have spent nine years in meditation, facing the rock wall of a cave about a mile from the temple. Shaolin later became famous for training monks in kung-fu, and Bodhidharma is honored as the founder of this art as well. Bodhidharma noticed the Shaolin monks were physically weak due to their sedentary lifestyle. Their practice after all involved sitting for many hours a day and, aside from drawing water and walking for alms, their physical state was totally neglected. Bodhidharma’s vision of awakening, however, was radically different. His idea of Zen was one of complete integration of mind and body, inner and outer. Coming from India, he undoubtedly instructed his disciples in yoga and a form of Tamil martial arts to the monks at Shaolin as an early form of kung Fu. This martial known as Kalarippayattu, strongly associated with the Nadars of Travancore. The similarities between Shaolin kung fu and the form of Kalarippayattu known as Varma kali once widely practiced among the Nadars, with its emphasis on sparring with a variety of weapons ranging from swords-and-shields to unarmed grappling with blows aimed at pressure points are mentioned in writings from that era. A note of clarity is needed here. Nadars are a community in Tirunelveli district of Tamil country who moved to Travancore, a royal state in today's Kerala state during local warfare.


Bodhidharma taught the Shaolin monks a series of physical exercises to increase strength, flexibility, and vitality. These movements—known as Yi Jin Jing and Xi Sui Jing—were not just for external strength but also tools for building mindful awareness and concentration. These techniques were meditation.

Over time, Bodhidharma’s physical exercises evolved into more structured and sophisticated forms of martial arts. The monks at Shaolin Monastery used this basis to develop techniques for self-defense, combat, and physical conditioning, drawing inspiration from various sources, including Indian martial arts and Indigenous Chinese fighting styles. The unique style of the Shaolin Monastery became known as Kung Fu.

In his literary work 'Transmission of the Lamp', Taoyuan writes that soon after Bodhidharma had transmitted the patriarchy of his lineage to his disciple Hui-k’o, he died in 528 AD.

Bodhidharma’s approach to Buddhism tended to reject devotional rituals, doctrinal debates, and verbal formalizations, in favor of an intuitive grasp of the “Buddha mind” within everyone, through meditation. In contrast with other Buddhist schools, Bodhidharma emphasized personal enlightenment, rather than the promise of heaven.
Bodhidharma also considered spiritual, intellectual, and physical excellence as an indivisible whole necessary for enlightenment. Bodhidharma’s mind-and-body approach to enlightenment proved highly attractive to the Samurai class in Japan, who made Zen their way of life, following their encounter with the martial-arts-oriented Zen Rinzai School introduced to Japan by Eisai in the 12th century.
Currently, a project is being planned to build a memorial structure at the land (in Kanchipuram) owned by the Institute of Asian Studies (Chennai, India) to remember this great master who spread Mahayana Buddhism to China.

This trip to China in 2003 fulfilled many spiritual quests on my part. Especially visiting the Temple of the White Horse, also in Luoyang, where tombs of the great Indian scholars Kashyapa Matanga and Gobagarana who traveled from India overland to China in the First century AD and are credited with bringing Buddhism to China are buried. Buddhist manuscripts including the Diamond sutra were translated by these scholars which they brought atop a white horse from India, which is also buried in a large tomb there.
The End
How to protect oneself from travel calamities