turn away from textual erudition is only a significant act for the educated;
the uneducated have no choice.
Heinrich Dumoulin points out that the legendary Bodhidharma cannot
be distilled into a historicalfigure with afixed background and biogra-
phy.^18 According to Bernard Faure:
The legend connecting Bodhidharma to Shaolin took shape after thefirst Chan
monks, Faru ( 638 – 89 ) and Huian (d. 709 ), moved from the East Mountain
community of Daoxin ( 580 – 651 ) and Hongren ( 601 – 74 ) to Song Shan. Thus, it
is during the last decades of the seventh century that the legends of Bodhidharma’s
nine years of“wall contemplation”in a cave near Shaolin and of his disciple Huike
( 487 – 593 ) standing all night in the snow and eventually cutting off his arm to show
his religious zeal seem to have taken shape.^19
Sectarian divisions within Buddhism, not to mention conflicts with Daoists
and Confucians, bounded and shaped the biographies of monks.^20 Yet in all
of this, Bodhidharma and his“wall contemplation”hadnoconnectionwhat-
soever with martial arts. These disparate strands–Chan, meditation, martial
arts, and Shaolin–were twisted together into a single thread nearly a millen-
nium later, transforming Bodhidharma into a foundational martial artist.
The signal event that provided the historical kernel of this mythological
narrative was the participation of a group of Shaolin monks in the wars
that took place after the Sui dynasty fell. When a warlord seized some of
the Shaolin lands in 621 , the monks raised a force and struck back, directly
contributing to the efforts of Li Shimin, the future emperor Tang Taizong,
in his efforts to secure the city of Luoyang. The monastery was rewarded
with confirmation of its rights to the land and water mill in question and
later with a certain measure of imperial protection from official harass-
ment. The monks involved were rewarded with military titles.^21
No further mention of combat or martial arts at Shaolin Monastery
appears for nearly nine hundred years following this event, though the
monastery was frequently visited and written about. Shaolin’s prominence
was the result of its importance as a center of Chan Buddhism. The
spurious connection of a distinct tradition of martial arts at Shaolin to
these monks was created in the Ming dynasty. The real connection
between the monks and their military activities was land. As an institution
whose wealth was based upon the lands and water mill granted to it by an
earlier emperor, Shaolin had to defend its property from seizure. There was
no religious connection to the martial arts.
In addition to the need for a large landowning institution to defend itself
in a period of upheaval, there is also the possibility that the monastic leaders
108 The Sui and Tang Dynasties