- Lived:
- unknowable — tradition says south India (later specified as Kāñci, modern Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu) → by sea to southern China → north across the Yangtze to Luoyang and Mount Song; the earliest datable sighting is a Chinese book of 547
- Field:
- Buddhist monk — by tradition the twenty-eighth patriarch of Indian Buddhism and the first patriarch of Chan, the school of meditation that Korea calls Seon and Japan calls Zen
- The Big Idea:
- Enlightenment cannot be purchased, accumulated or read. No temple you fund and no scripture you memorize will do it; it is seen directly, in your own mind, the way you see a wall in front of your face. Sit down and look.
- In their words:
- "Vast emptiness, nothing holy." — his answer to an emperor who asked for the supreme sacred truth, as the Blue Cliff Record (1125) tells it; the rendering is ours
- If you remember one thing:
- Every famous thing about Bodhidharma can be dated, layer by layer, to centuries after his lifetime — and the school he founded, following its own teaching to the end, would tell you that this changes nothing that matters.