Free Tracking Bodhidharma by Andy Ferguson

Mountain. I can imagine him thinking “Who is this strange-looking lay foreigner, and why is he taking up my time?”
    I try to explain that I organize tours of foreigners to come to China and visit famous historical temples. Perhaps, I think, that is a worthy-enough activity to merit his using part of a Sunday to meet with me. Another thing I know might engage his interest is the question of how Buddhism is evolving in the West. I sense that that question is secretly a hot topic, though no one will admit to this openly.
    After an exchange of some pleasantries, the topic does indeed turn to the situation in the West. The abbot is interested to know if the Platform Sutra, a pivotal work said to have been expounded by the Sixth Ancestor Huineng, has been well-translated and widely disseminated in the
West. I tell him that my friend Red Pine (Bill Porter) and others have provided excellent translations of this “sutra,” (a term normally reserved for words of the Buddha but in China also applied to this work).
    The “Platform” mentioned in this scripture’s name refers to an ordination platform where Huineng conveyed his Signless Precepts to monks and lay Buddhists. Because these precepts were sufficiently unique and central to Chinese Buddhist thought, this “sutra” is considered a sacred text, unique to Chinese Buddhism. More on this later.
    We talk about the Signless Precepts of the sutra. I ask the abbot if he is aware that some Japanese and Western scholars have claimed that the Platform Sutra was not composed by Huineng but by someone perhaps far removed from that famous figure of Chinese religious history. The well-known Japanese Zen scholar Yanagida has claimed, for example, that the Platform Sutra was composed as a forgery many decades after Huineng died.
    The abbot’s face looks annoyed at my question. He says that he doesn’t care what scholars have to say about the subject. The important thing, he says, is the sutra’s content. Of course he’s right about that, and I tell him so.
    Anyway, there’s one thing that scholars of Zen history do agree about, and that is that virtually all the old records of Zen are at least partly suspect. At best, scholars in the field cannot do much more than make educated guesses about much of the lives of Huineng, Bodhidharma, and other early Zen figures.
    I don’t want to keep the abbot from his weekend rest, so before long I beg off and say I should leave the abbot to his important duties. After a group photo in front of the Bowl Washing Well, Yaozhi happily returns me to my hotel.
    The next morning before noon, I follow directions Jimmy Lin gave me in order to meet him at the Buddha World vegetarian restaurant, located about a hundred yards from the International Red Cross building in Guangzhou. I find Jimmy sitting at a large table on the fourth floor. The place is a typical Chinese-style restaurant, and everyone is talking at once. People at the tables around us are talking so loud that Jimmy and I have to lean close and nearly yell in order to hear one another. After living in Hong Kong, I’m pretty used to restaurants of
this type, but this one is particularly bad, and I strain to hear details of Jimmy’s life.
    Elderly Chinese always have stories from the war, and Jimmy is no exception. But while many stories from the war are tinged with regret and bitterness, Jimmy seems happy that his difficulties gave him a deeper insight into how he should live his life.
    He tells me that his father worked for a British firm during the 1930s and worked his way up to became a branch manager for the company in Tianjin, a big port city on the coast not far from Beijing. In 1931, renegade Japanese officers faked an attack on a Japanese mining railroad in Manchuria (The Mukden Incident) and used this as an excuse to invade Manchuria without authorization from the government in Tokyo. Six years after occupying Manchuria under