The Untold Origins of Zen Buddhism, Part 1....

Ta-Mo didn’t quite understand his own reasons for his three year long walk to “The East.” This was before he had been recognized as the first patriarch of Chan/Zen Buddhism. This was also back in the 6th century, you see, so there wasn’t much to distract one’s self with back then, and this was particularly true for an enlightened dharma heir who didn’t actually have a self, or a real job, or a family to otherwise occupy his time with.

So he headed East. And he just kept heading East. He carried nothing with him except the robe on his back, and a copy of the Lankavatara Sutra, which he had transcribed by hand as part of his intermediate Buddhist studies, and he encountered mountains and desert and bandits, and, as long as he survived whatever attempted to interrupt his passage, he continued East.

The mystic poet Rumi, about 700 years after Ta-Mo died, and in Ta-Mo’s homeland, once wrote that the true mystic is lazy because she sees The Universe doing all the work, all over the place. And so while taking a three year long walk may seem to be a rather egregious example of an act that is decidedly “not lazy,” in Ta-Mo’s case, it was simply a case of letting The Universe do some kind of seemingly inexplicable work through him. Except there was no “him” because Ta-Mo, in his enlightened state, had no self. And when one has no self, one makes room for the entirety of The Cosmos to fill the void and to work its miracles.

Officially, traditionally, the story is that Ta-Mo headed to the East to spread the Dharma. But spreading the Dharma is a lot of work. There’s a lot of talking, a lot of explaining, a lot of teaching and a lot of correcting of people’s incorrect judgements with your own incorrect judgements, and trying to get them to understand that you’re correcting their incorrect judgments with your own incorrect judgements, and that they have to see through all of that to have any hope. They gotta get out of the trap of language, but the only way out of language is through language. And so, when you attempt to spread the Dharma, you spend your life answering endless questions with no real answers, and, if you’re lucky, maybe like a dozen other people will eventually understand when you say that what you’re saying is really nothing at all.

It’s all just so much work, when, preferably, you can just stay at home and tend to a small garden during the day, drink cheap wine at night, and meditate and read the Buddhist classics in between.

So, no, Ta-Mo wasn’t particularly interested in heading East, by foot. But Nature abhors a vacuum, and, as he had divested his self of the self, Nature rushed to fill the void with itself, and it was Nature, The Universe, The Cosmos, The Dao, that decided that the Dharma needed to be spread. Ta-Mo just went along for the ride.

As expected, when he first got to “The East,” nobody understood what the hell he was or wasn’t blathering on about. Buddhism was starting to become something of a fad among the learned gentlefolk of 6th century China, but very few had any real insight into what it really meant or what it really was. The Chinese Buddhists, as a monolithic abstraction, seemed to understand the basics well-enough. They understood, intellectually, the Four Noble Truths, and the Eightfold Path, sure. They also had a solid grasp on the basics of karma — commit righteous actions and righteous actions will, in turn, be committed to you.

These are child’s play, however. Buddhist elementary school. The 4 Noble Truths, The Eightfold Path, Karma — these are the bedtime tales Buddhists tell you to get you to stop misbehaving, to start acting like something resembling a Buddha, instead of a gnarled, cramping knot of fear, anxiety and unquenchable desires — also known as a “human being.”

Ta-Mo, though, was trying to get them beyond that, to the core of True Experience, and…no one was listening. Or they were listening but not understanding. The Chinese Buddhist intelligentsia were initially ecstatic at the presence of Ta-Mo, of this true Buddhist from the West, where the Buddhist way of life originated. But they couldn’t grasp what he was casting, and Ta-Mo soon earned a reputation for being a grump and a grouch, as he soon lost patience attempting to communicate that the Buddhist basics were all well and good, but there was more...and less…to it than that, and to see as much, one had to move beyond mere language. True Buddhism was an experience, not something you read about in the sutras or argue about in the monasteries.

The old Chinese mystic, Zhuangzi wrote long before Ta-Mo entered China, that language was like a fishing net. Once the fish are caught, the fisherman can forget the net. Once ideas are caught, the listener can forget the words. But Ta-Mo found no one amongst Zhuangzi’s Chinese brethren who could forget the words.

Having gotten word of the presence of this irascible barbarian Buddhist, the Emperor Wu of Liang demanded a parley with the monk in his largest palace, with the entire court present.

“You talk a big game, Ta-Mo, criticizing Chinese Buddhists,” said Emperor Wu, sitting from his throne, in a courtyard at the entrance of his castle. “But I suspect you’re something of a know-it-all who really knows nothing.”

Ta-Mo shrugged. “Indeed,” he said.

“For example,” said Emperor Wu, eyes bursting with pride and arrogance. “I have built the largest monastery in all the land. I have had cast the most numerous Buddha images and busts. I have patronized the copying and the translation of more sutras than any one person. Surely, my karma must be colossal indeed. Surely I must be primed for Nirvana, now, or in the next life.”

“Your Karma is empty,” declared Ta-Mo.

Emperor Wu’s eyes smoldered, and turned the color of hot embers, and the court gentry gasped in unison.

“You mean to tell me all of my efforts to promote Buddhism and the Dharma are irrelevant?” the emperor asked.

“Well…yeah,” said Ta-Mo, and, knowing it would be futile, regardless, he began to try to proffer something of an effective explanation, but Emperor Wu interrupted.

“Off with you, barbarian!’ Yelled the emperor. “Remove yourself from my lands while I still maintain a fraction of mercy, and before I have you flayed alive and your remains pickled and jarred like that of that of Zilu.”

Zilu had been a disciple of the scholar Confucius, who was killed while trying to interrupt a coup attempt, and his remains were minced, jarred and pickled, and the jar was displayed publicly as a warning to other such civic-minded men.

With that said, it doesn’t take an enlightened Buddha to know the basics of self-preservation, and so Ta-Mo hightailed it at once, with such speed his long, red beard flowed in the wind, struggling to keep up.

Once again, Ta-Mo walked for too long a time, over too-long a distance. And once again he would encounter bandits and scoundrels and thieves and the various furies of mother nature, and once again he would survive them all. And when he was done walking, he found himself at the foot of Mount Song, in the north of China. There he found a burgeoning Buddhist temple, and Ta-Mo believed he may be welcomed and find some like-minded spirits there. Perhaps somebody who understood the limits of words, and how real understanding can only exist beyond them, but all he found were a bunch of bald-headed Buddhist dorks, sitting around reading bad translations of the sutras, and arguing over interpretations of the intricacies of the poorly translated sutras, such as whether rocks had Buddha-nature, or if the Buddhist Nirvana was the same thing as Taoist Immortality.

“You’re wasting your time,” the red-bearded barbarian snarled nastily. “The Gateless Gate into the Buddhaland is not to be found in such linguistic trifles, you goons.”

However, the other monastics would simply shake their heads and progressively distance themselves from, and interact very little with, the foreign oaf.

Saturated with the instinctual sensitivity that comes with being selfless, it didn’t take long before Ta-Mo realized he and his insights weren’t welcome, and so he exited the temple, and for the next nine years did nothing but sleep and meditate in a cave nearby. Occasionally the temple monks would sneak over the cave to catch a look at Ta-Mo, seated in full-lotus, gazing selflessly at a wall within the small cave. Over time, indentations could be seen in the wall, where Ta-Mo had rested his gaze, and from whence the qi that had emanated from his vision had slowly pierced into the wall, day by day, for nearly a decade.

While vaguely disquieted by such a strange phenomenon, the temple monks mostly spent much of their free time gossiping and making fun of Ta-Mo, his red beard, his brutish disposition, and his strange superpower.