Alright, all you clever bodhisattvas out there who figured out various means to get the cat out of the jar, riddle me this - if it were the year 524 A.D. and you lived in southern India, and you were intending to travel to China, how would you get there? The Himalayas present a virtually impassable barrier on one side, and the dense jungles of southeast Asia, with their dengue fever and malaria, not to mention tigers and various venomous beasts, obstruct the other side.

The answer, in the case of the 28th Patriarch Bodhidharma, surprised me - you travel by boat. Across the Bay of Bengal, through the Straights of Malacca, around what is now Singapore, up past the coast of present-day Vietnam, and across the South China Sea until you can enter the port of Koshu (now Guangzhou, one of the most active parts of China in terms of contact with foreign countries).

It took Bodhidharma three arduous years to complete this journey. Commenting on this trip, Zen Master Dogen says, "For the three years of frosts and springs during that ocean voyage, how could the wind and snow have been the only miseries? Through how many formations of cloud and sea-mist might the steep waves have surged? He was going to an unknown country: ordinary beings who value their body and life could never conceive of such a journey."

Bodhidharma was the third son of the King of Koshi in southern India. Yet the crown prince left his father's kingdom forever, made ready a great ship, and crossed the southern seas, bravely traveling without alarm or doubt. Dogen surmises that there would have been a large crew and many monks to serve the Master with towel and jug, but historians fail to record this.

Picture the trip if you can: there is no way they could have packed three years of provisions, so they must have had to stop at various foreign lands on the way to barter for food and water, to hunt, to forage for food. They would have encountered all sorts of beasts, hostile natives, and inhospitable lands. At sea, there would have been pirates and navies with which to contend. But in the end, they made it, completing the trip and arriving at Koshu on August 3, 527.

One could make an epic motion picture of that trip - I've seen treatments made of far lesser adventures.