The Monastery 15
China and told his story, Bodhidharma’s grave was promptly opened. It was
found to be empty except for the other shoe.^28
The shoe-holding Bodhidharma became a standard motif in Chan art.
Another thirteenth-century image that became ubiquitous showed him rid-
ing a fragile stalk across the Yangtze River’s mighty waves (figure 2).^29 Icons
of the Reed-Floating Bodhidharma tend to portray the saint quite humor-
ously. He sports a beard and an earring, and the artist has taken care to
highlight his foreign features: the large nose and bushy eyebrows. This image
betrays a common Chinese perception of the saint as eccentric. The pot-bel-
lied Maitreya Buddha, the divine clown Daoji, and the idiosyncratic arhats
(luohan) are all depicted in Chinese art and literature as holy fools, whose di-
vinity is masked behind an eccentric facade.^30
Fig. 1. The Shoe-Holding
Bodhidharma on his way to the
West (1209 Shaolin stele).