A Handful of Words Against Words: Bodhidharma, Red Pine, and a Book That Points Past Itself

Early in the sixth century, a foreign monk in patched robes is brought before the emperor of southern China. The emperor is a devout man, and a proud one. He has raised temples, endowed monasteries, paid for sutras to be copied by the thousand and monks to be ordained by the hundred—a reign poured out, brick by brick and page by page, into the faith. So he asks the traveler the question that has surely been waiting in his mouth: how much merit have I earned? The monk looks at him and says he has earned no merit at all. Pressed for the highest truth of that holy teaching, he answers that there is nothing holy in it anywhere, only a vast emptiness. And when the baffled emperor demands to know who, then, is standing in front of him, the monk says he does not know—turns, crosses the river, and goes north to sit down facing a wall.

The monk is Bodhidharma, and this scene—half history, half legend, impossible to date with any confidence—is where the story of Zen in China is usually said to begin. Fifteen centuries later an American named Bill Porter, who translates under the name Red Pine, gathered the earliest words attributed to this man into a slim bilingual book: The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, first printed in 1987. Four short sermons, the Chinese set on the left-hand pages and the English facing it on the right, so a reader is never more than a glance from the characters themselves. The Outline of Practice, the Bloodstream Sermon, the Wake-up Sermon, the Breakthrough Sermon. They are among the oldest surviving texts of the tradition, and every one of them is trying to talk you out of needing it.

Nine Years Facing a Wall

Almost nothing about him is certain, and the tradition seems oddly content with that. He came out of the west—a South Indian prince, some accounts say, or a monk from further off still, who gave up whatever he had—and carried to China the beginnings of what would become Chan, from the Sanskrit dhyana, meaning meditation, the word that would travel on to Japan and soften into Zen. By the tradition’s own count he is the twenty-eighth patriarch in a line of teachers reaching back to the Buddha, and the first on Chinese soil. The stories cluster and contradict. The one that stuck is the wall. At the Shaolin temple, they say, he sat down facing blank stone and stayed there, in silence, for nine years—a practice the texts call biguan, wall-gazing, the mind turned to face something with nothing on it.

Nine years staring at masonry is not a miracle story, and that is the whole point of it. There is no flight, no radiant vision, no dragon subdued—only a man and a wall and an enormous quantity of time. It is almost an anti-legend, a refusal of the very spectacle that religions usually run on. And the haziness around Bodhidharma himself—the uncertain dates, the contested birthplace, the biography that dissolves the harder you squeeze it—turns out to suit a teaching whose center is that there is no fixed self to pin down in the first place. A man who taught that the person is empty has, fittingly, left us barely a person. What he left instead was a method and a handful of words.

No flight, no vision, no miracle—only a man, a wall, and a great deal of time.

A Special Transmission Outside the Words

Only one exchange really survives of what passed between that wall and his first true student, and it is pure Bodhidharma. A man named Huike, who would become his heir and the second patriarch, is said to have stood in the snow until the master would see him, and at last to have cut off his own arm to prove he meant it. He asks Bodhidharma to pacify his mind, which will not stop churning. Bring me this mind of yours, comes the answer, and I will pacify it for you. So Huike turns his attention inward to find the anxious thing and hand it over—and comes back empty: he has searched everywhere and can locate no mind to produce. Then, says Bodhidharma, it is already at peace. That is the whole method, dramatized in a handful of lines. The self you are so desperate to fix cannot be found the instant you turn to look for it.

The heart of the teaching is usually compressed into four lines that tradition hangs on Bodhidharma’s name—though scholars now think the formula was tightened into shape generations later, by a lineage that needed a founder to have said it. A special transmission, the lines run, outside the scriptures; not founded on words and letters; pointing straight at the human mind; see your own nature and become a buddha. Read them slowly. Whatever the truth is, the verse insists, it does not live in the sutras, cannot be caught in language, and is not waiting at the end of any ladder of study or ritual. It is already here, in the mind reading this sentence. This very mind is the buddha—not a mind you must first scour clean for forty years, not a buddha off in some western paradise, but the plain awareness looking out of your eyes right now.

“Vast emptiness, nothing holy.”—Bodhidharma, by tradition

Now the throne room makes sense. When the emperor tallied up his temples and asked what they had earned him, he was doing spiritual accounting—treating merit as a currency you pile up and redeem. Bodhidharma’s flat refusal was not rudeness; it was the whole doctrine in a single word. There is no ledger. Awakening is not bought with good works or built out of donated stone, because it is not a thing you acquire at all—it is a seeing, a turning-around of attention to notice what was never once absent. The emperor wanted a reward for the distance he had come. The monk was telling him there is no distance to travel, and that the wanting is exactly what hides the goal. It is a genuinely shocking idea, and a democratic one: no temple, no text, no priest stands between you and your own nature.

The Plainest Possible English

A teaching this bare needs a translator willing to get out of its way, and Red Pine’s great gift is restraint. His English is plain to the edge of severity—short words, blunt declaratives, no incense-smoke of the mystical, none of the fake-antique solemnity that makes so much translated scripture unreadable. The effect is bracing, like cold water. Porter has said that Bodhidharma was the book where he first found his own voice as a translator, where the sentences finally moved to a cadence that was his rather than a borrowed one. You can feel it on the page: prose with the flat, patient confidence of someone who has stopped performing wisdom and is simply telling you the thing.

“the rhythms of my language”—Red Pine, on translating Bodhidharma

That honesty runs deeper than style. Red Pine does not pretend to a certainty the record cannot support. In his own introduction he is candid that only the first sermon, the Outline of Practice, is widely credited to Bodhidharma himself; the other three may well be the work of later disciples, writing in his spirit and under his name. A lesser edition would have smoothed this over to protect the relic. This one tells you plainly what is known and what is only guessed—and there is something almost perfect in a book about Bodhidharma admitting, on its opening pages, that it does not entirely know who Bodhidharma was. The monk’s answer to the emperor turns out to be the honest scholar’s answer too: I don’t know. The not-knowing is not a gap in the teaching; it is the teaching.

The Finger and the Moon

Here is the paradox at the dead center of the book, the thing that makes it stranger than any novel. It is a text—words, sentences, a made object you hold in two hands—devoted entirely to the claim that the truth cannot be delivered in words. Every page spends language arguing against language. The tradition keeps an old image for the predicament. A teacher points at the moon so a student will look up and see it; the pointing finger is necessary, and the pointing finger is not the moon, and the one unforgivable mistake is to study the finger. Bodhidharma’s sermons are all finger, and they know it. They are built, sentence by sentence, to turn your face upward and then be forgotten—to use words to get you past words, the way a raft is used to cross a river and then, sensibly, left on the bank rather than carried gratefully on your back for the rest of the road.

So what is it like to read such a book? Unlike almost anything else on the shelf, in that finishing it is not the goal—being done with it is. Most books want to be remembered; these want to be enacted and then set down. It would be easy to mistake this for the ordinary virtue of spare prose, the plain style that trusts a reader to supply what has been left out. But Bodhidharma is doing something more radical than economy. He is not withholding words so you will lean in closer; he is warning you that the whole apparatus of words, his own included, is a boat and not a shore. The bareness here is not thrift but doctrine—minimalism as the message itself. A book that argued at length for the insufficiency of language would refute itself with its own girth. This one keeps faith with its claim by staying short, staying bare, and pointing the whole time away from itself.

The pointing finger is necessary. The moon is the point.

What the Words Are For

None of this makes the words disposable in the way that trash is disposable. A raft you never build is a river you never cross. Bodhidharma did not fall silent; he talked, and argued, and let four sermons be written down, because the finger, though it is not the moon, is how most of us ever find where to look. The words are not the awakening and they are not nothing. They are the rumor of it—a rumor precise enough to make you turn your head. And Red Pine’s plain English is the ideal carrier for a rumor like that, precisely because it never lets you fall in love with the vehicle. There is no gorgeous phrase to underline and mistake for the thing itself. The prose keeps stepping out of the way, keeps saying, in effect: not here, not in me, look up.

Close the book and the paradox settles into something quieter than a paradox. You are holding a few dozen pages that took an afternoon to read and a lifetime to stop needing, printed with their own Chinese shadow on every facing leaf, insisting from the first line to the last that what matters was never on the page. The emperor never understood; he sailed home with his temples intact and his merit imaginary. The monk sat down and looked at a wall until the wall stopped being the point. Somewhere past the final sentence—past Red Pine, past Bodhidharma, past the whole patient machinery of the words—there is supposed to be a moon. The book will not show it to you. It was never trying to. It only turns your face toward the dark above the finger, and lets go.