Bodhidharma, Superstar

Courtesy Giovanni Boccardi (https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58155778)

There's a Zen koan that asks, "Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?"  As most Buddhists know, certainly Mahayana Buddhists and even more specifically Chan and Zen Buddhists, the monk Bodhidharma traveled from India to China sometime around 500 A.D. and is credited with introducing the "authentic" teachings of the Buddha to the Far East.

But to ask "why" is to try and interpret motive or intention, which can only be known to the one taking an action, any action, including travelling from India to China.  As we understand the koan, there is no "correct" answer and the monk passes the koan when he convinces the teacher that he understands that some things are unknowable and therefore not of value for further inquiry (we could be wrong, though).  Some things are just the way they are.

Our favorite story concerning this koan involves Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder and the other beat poets asking the question to various patrons of the bar in which they were hanging out.  When they asked the dishwasher and he immediately retorted, "I don't care," they decided that was the best answer.

But regardless of his intention, legend has it that Bodhidharma travelled from India to China, and one small detail of the story, really not much more than a footnote, states that he travelled by sea, not the overland Silk Road route, and that the journey took him three years to complete.

We're not sure what the sea-speed velocity of Indian boats was in 500 A.D. (we don't even know what Indian boats looked like in 500 A.D.), but three years seems like a long time.  Did they get lost?  Were they shipwrecked?  Kidnapped by pirates?  Or did they just have fun adventures exploring the Southeast Asia shoreline and took their own sweet time travelling, with occasional forays onto islands and the mainline to hunt, obtain provisions, interact with natives, and so on.  The legends don't tell us anything about the voyage, other than it was by sea and that it took three years.

We think there's a great, epic novel in there - The Adventures of Bodhidharma On the Indian Ocean or something. It's fun to think of it as a graphic novel, or an HBO mini-series.  It could also make a great video game - Bodhidharma, in addition to bringing the dharma to China, is also credited with inventing kung fu during his stay at Shaolin Monastery, and the game could allow one to acquire different kung fu skills and levels of mastery by completing different tasks during the journey.  You can also write it such that you can also develop a parallel set of spiritual skills, we'll call them the Six Paramitas, by doing good deeds and helping others and by refraining from violence at times.  That could set up some interesting strategic choices for the player - do you kill the tiger and complete a kung fu level, or do you free it and finally master the Paramita of Not Killing?

But other than those broad-brushstroke ideas, we're really hampered on how to write the book (much less the other spin-offs) by our complete and utter lack of any idea of what sea travel was like in the Sixth Century.  What were the boats like?  How long could they be at sea before they'd have to land for provisions?  Did they collect rain for drinking water?  Would a single ship travel alone, or did they travel in convoys?  We couldn't find many resources online to answer our questions.

So imagine our delight when yesterday we came across a rather obscure, 1896 manuscript titled Buddhist Practices In India.  The manuscript is a scholarly translation of a Seventh Century manuscript written by a Chinese monk named I-tsing, who, enthused about the buddhadharma, decided to make a pilgrimage from China to India to visit the holy sites in person and experience the teachings from the source itself.  Most of the book, as the title implies, contains I-tsing's notes on just how Buddhism was practiced in India (and therefore how it should be practiced in China),  There are instructions on ceremonies and clothing, meals and the duties of officers, chants and mantras, and even a chapter on how to maintain personal hygiene and how to properly use the lavatory.  In many regards, it resembles portions of Zen Master Dogen's Shobogenzo, and it's worth noting that in the 14th Century, like I-tsing, Dogen was also motivated to make a westward journey, this time from Japan to China, to learn about Buddhism from an "authentic"  source.

But what really interests us in I-tsing's manuscript is that it includes a detailed description of his voyages, including details on the ship in which he traveled, the route, the number of days between stops, meetings with people in what is now called Sumatra and Malaysia, and encounters with aboriginal people on remote Indian Ocean islands (including the Insulae Nudorum, or Land of the Naked People) and with bandits on mainland India. It's hardly a swashbuckler, but it's not hard to imagine it as one.  And even though I-tsing's journey was a century after Bodhidharma's and in the opposite direction (for the most part - I-tsing not only also describes his return voyage back home from India, but he apparently had to leave Sumatra in haste on his return and he describes a second voyage back to Sumatra to retrieve the manuscripts he had left behind), it seems reasonable to assume that Bodhidharma's voyage was probably very similar.

The account of the journey is a relatively short portion of the overall book, just a half-dozen or so pages in the introduction, but it's very detailed and precise.  For example, to answer our earlier questions, we now know that the ship was a Persian merchant boat, it had two masts (either with five sails each or one sail per mast each stitched from five sheets), and over 100 fathoms of rope and rigging.  Based on all that, it seems most likely that the ship was a baghlah (Arabic for "mule"), which were roughly 100 feet long and required a crew of 30 to 40 sailors to sail.  That not only fills in a lot of the data gaps, but also can fuel a lot of speculative fiction right there.

We think we have enough to go on now to start a novel, if not The Adventures of Bodhidharma On the Indian Ocean, then Bodhidharma's Voyage From the West, or maybe simply just Bodhi.  And with our retirement imminent, we actually for once, maybe for the first time in our adult life, have the time to actually write it.  

Please don't steal our idea and publish the story before we can write it - we know we can trust everyone on the internet to keep quiet about this and keep it our little secret. Besides, we've already laid out the premise here, so this post would serve as evidence of plagiarism were someone to come along and try to beat us to the punch.