Did Bodhidharma invent kung fu? The idea is barely a century old
Bodhidharma, the bearded foreign monk credited with bringing Chan Buddhism to China, is famous today as the father of Shaolin kung fu. That link was popularised only in the twentieth century, resting on a seventeenth-century text. Even his homeland, dates and death are tangled in competing legends.
Just two accounts come from his contemporaries, and they disagree. Yang Xuanzhi, compiling a record of Luoyang's monasteries in 547, calls him a Persian Central Asian who marvelled at a pagoda and claimed to be 150 years old. Tanlin's preface to a treatise on the Two Entrances and Four Practices makes him instead the third son of a great South Indian king. Both use the vague term Western Regions, which could mean Xinjiang, Central Asia or India. Yang's version shows a wonder-worker rather than a meditator, which may help explain the later martial-arts associations.
Each retelling added detail. The seventh-century monk Daoxuan made him of South Indian Brahmin stock, had him arrive by sea under the Song dynasty before 479, and put his death beside the Luo River, buried by his disciple Huike. By the Anthology of the Patriarchal Hall in 952, the story had grown: he landed in 527 under the Liang, met Emperor Wu, sat facing a wall at Shaolin for nine silent years, and died at 150. Three years after his burial, an official supposedly met him in the Pamirs carrying one sandal; his tomb, when opened, held only the other.
Rival lineages disputed his status too. One Chan chronicle placed the sutra translator Gunabhadra first and Bodhidharma second. The 952 anthology, by contrast, made him the 28th patriarch in an unbroken chain reaching back to the Buddha. Modern historians date him to about the early fifth century and see his teaching as centred on meditation and the Lankavatara Sutra.
National traditions each claim him. In India he is a Pallava prince from Kanchipuram, in Southeast Asia a Tamil royal, while Japan imagines a red-haired Persian. His name means dharma of awakening; shortened in Japanese to Daruma, it gave its name to the round daruma dolls modelled on him. Art usually shows him glaring, heavy-bearded and wide-eyed.
Source: Bodhidharma
