Talk:Bodhidharma
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[edit] Yet again
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establishment of shaolin
That was batuo. Wong Kiew Kit the authority on Shaolin arts does refer to him in similar terms regarding his role in martial arts.
Meaning: The man credited for the establishment of the Shaolin is Batuo (now turn to Ta Mo). Ta Mo is referred in similar terms (terms like father) as Batuo regarding his role in shaolin martial arts.
You misunderstood.
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Take a look at the Foreign influence on Chinese martial arts. The quote JFD so gleefully went to is not mentioned in the NYT citations.
again, the NYT citations mentioned are this and this.
Read them, arrive at your own conclusions.
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For falsely citing the material. The material stayed and I bought the citations for it following a conversation with Subhash Kak, with him directing me to Stanley Wolpert.
Take a look at the article in it's finished form, the only thing my contribution has done is provide sources.
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I could go at length about the past when JFD tried to stop the Shaolin from being menioned at all, a part of his compromise. JFD tried to erase Batuo from the very history of the Shaolin, an act I did not allow him and such but I'll refrain from going into the details for now.
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Take a look at Indian martial arts and Foreign influence on Chinese martial arts in their final forms.
Take another close look at Yi Jin Jing and Disputed Indian origins of East Asian martial arts, articles which the cabal created.
Judge the finished articles. Arrive at your own conclusions.
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- third-party publication
- peer-review
- academic journals or university presses
The most prestigious martial arts institutions on the planet, views from the Shaolin, the Discovery Channel. Arrive at your own conclusions.
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IMO, None of the conversations on this Talk page since the article was unprotected have contributed to anything except inflamed passions.
I cannot stand it when someone of the cabal's agenda and standards of morality talks back. I will go on a wikibreak as soon as this is finished though.
If insult would not have been inflicted on Bakaman, this would already have been finished.
As far as I'm concerned this is finished now, time for a break. Unless the cabal feels otherwise.
Freedom skies (send a message to Freedom skies) 23:48, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
- I'm neutral in this edit war. I just want to ask that you cut down on the amount of space that you take up with your comments. I've noticed that yours are several times larger than most editors. It will only be a short time before this page needs to be archived yet again. (Ghostexorcist 23:53, 28 November 2006 (UTC))
- establishment of Shaolin
- Bakaman mentioned the establishment of Shaolin in reference to Bodhidharma[1] which, with all due respect to him, is incorrect.
Take a look at the Foreign influence on Chinese martial arts. The quote JFD so gleefully went to is not mentioned in the NYT citations.
Actually, it is.
Ctrl-F for "Pete Hessler".
It's currently footnote 50.
The quote I went to can be found there.
JFD tried to erase Batuo from the very history of the Shaolin, an act I did not allow him and such but I'll refrain from going into the details for now.
See for yourself the early edits I made to the Batuo article.[2]
I added sources, detail, even a sourced quotation which a subsequent editor deleted for some reason.
If insult would not have been inflicted on Bakaman, this would already have been finished.
Would this be the same Bakaman whose request for assistance[3] I fulfilled by standing up for him against those who would have him banned?[4]
I cannot stand it when someone of the cabal's agenda and standards of morality talks back.
If someone's going to make accusations against me that are demonstrably incorrect, then I feel I have no choice but to "talk back".
JFD 02:13, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Two entrances
any thoughts on my proposal about a second intro paragraph outlining the significance of Bodhidharma to Chan/Zen practitioners (i.e. a paragraph incorporating the basic concepts underlying the legendary material)?
The consensus among both Eastern and Western scholars is that the Two Entrances can be attributed to Bodhidharma.
The challenge is how to convey the significance of the Two Entrances to Zen without
- retreading the articles on the Two Entrances and Zen
- getting unnecessarily weighed down with "specialist crap"
The two entrances are the entrance of principle and the entrance of practice, but outlining their significance without getting bogged down in arcana is beyond me.
One could try to concisely distinguish Zen from other schools of Buddhism. Within the historical context of the times in which it arose, Zen was distinguished by its lack of emphasis on textual scholarship. Zen stories arose out of the need to explain practices and traditions and we can see this in the elements which first appear in the "Anthology of the Patriarchal Hall," such as the encounter with the Liang emperor. Bodhidharma pretty much tells the Liang emperor that his construction of monasteries and funding of translation are all for naught because they lack principle and practice, the elements of the Two Entrances.
An analogy could be drawn between Bodhidharma's emphasis on principle and practice and the Christian Protestant doctrine of "justification by faith alone" (as opposed to works).
JFD 03:26, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
- I agree that trying to explicate (ouch! Bodhidharma and a whole slew of other eminent Zennists would kill me if they heard that word being bandied about) the Two Entrances without, as you eloquently put it, "getting bogged down in arcana" is a rather impossible endeavor.
- However, for a second introductory paragraph, I wasn't thinking of putting anything so precise in. Rather, I was thinking more along the lines of broad concepts that are often viewed (from within the Chan/Zen tradition) as somewhat bound up with and/or largely initiated by Bodhidharma, such as the "lack of emphasis on textual scholarship" that you mention. In other words, things that Bodhidharma was (at least later) seen as having done and that eventually came to be considered especially "characteristic" of Chan/Zen: seated meditation or "wall-gazing" (the former of which, of course, was by no means exclusive to Bodhidharma at the time in China, though it was eventually co-opted by Chan/Zen, as it were); the emphasis on "special transmission" and "pointing directly to mind" (which is connected with the lack of emphasis on scriptures that you mention—though Bodhidharma himself, of course, seems to have had a real thing for the Lankavatara Sutra); and, connected with the "special transmission" schtick, the lineage of Bodhidharma going back to Gautama Buddha (fabricated as that probably is).
- All this sort of stuff is, admittedly, largely just made up in later eras—except for the meditational emphasis, which is probably the most important part—but when we're dealing with religious figures who, to one extent or another, founded distinct traditions and whose actual lives are essentially unknown, then the legends and myths and all that brouhaha actually form an extremely important element, I think, in what there is to be said about that figure (e.g. Jesus, Gautama Buddha, Laozi—to move backwards in time and into increasing unknowability).
- Anyhow ... let me know whatcha think. Cheers. —Saposcat 19:29, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Again
I was in the process of collecting citations to reply for JFD's little "If someone's going to make accusations against me that are demonstrably incorrect, then I feel I have no choice but to "talk back"." line.
I came across this:-
I'm neutral in this edit war. I just want to ask that you cut down on the amount of space that you take up with your comments. I've noticed that yours are several times larger than most editors. It will only be a short time before this page needs to be archived yet again.
Y'know. What I came here to do has been done.
In response to "IMO, None of the conversations on this Talk page since the article was unprotected have contributed to anything except inflamed passions.":
I'm going to save myself the trouble of writing another very lengthy post with citations about the cabal in response to a flamebait post which "will take up space" and "get the article archived again" and "will contribute to nothing except inflamed passions."
This thing is over. The lines pointing Bodhidharma non-existent in the very second para are gone.
No use squabbling when it's done. Time to live with it.
Freedom skies (send a message to Freedom skies) 09:36, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Reference
Does anyone know the actual name for the reference source called "Ibid"? The reason I ask is because I created a page on the Great Anti-Buddhist Persecution a while ago and the source "Ibid" is also used in an online transcription of a book that I got the info from. However, only part of the book was transcribed and the bibliography was never listed. (Ghostexorcist 18:26, 29 November 2006 (UTC))
- Ibid. is an abbreviation for the Latin term ibidem, meaning "the same place". In practice, it means the reference in question is the same as the previous reference; that is, if note 20 was "Johnson 1992, p. 27" and note 21 is "Ibid.", it means that note 21 is also referring the reader to "Johnson 1992, p. 27". —Saposcat 19:06, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
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- Thanks. You learn something new everyday. (Ghostexorcist 19:30, 29 November 2006 (UTC))
[edit] The reed? ...
Hey all. I removed the bit about crossing the Yangtze on a reed from the Daoxuan bio section, inasmuch as it directly mentions neither reeds nor the Yangtze—the latter being Broughton's sensible and correct inference from Daoxuan's text—and I wore my eyes out checking the original text here. Anyone have any idea when the reed bit—surely an important part of the bio/legend—first entered the story? I have a feeling it's in the Anthology of the Patriarchal Hall, but I haven't found that text yet. Cheers, and thanks in advance for any assistance. —Saposcat 22:53, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
- Ha! Found it (secondarily, that is). According to Latter Days of the Law: Images of Chinese Buddhism, 850–1850, p. 395–396, the reed business first came up when someone in the 13th century altered the verse accompanying case 1 of the Blue Cliff Record, changing "Thus he escapes secretly across the river" to, effectively, "Thus he escapes by breaking off a reed and crossing the river". (If anyone's interested ... ) —Saposcat 05:22, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
[edit] kanchipuram
If anyone wants to know, I really care less about Bodhidharma, Buddhabhadra, etc. What piqued my interest was the gesture of goodwill made by the Chinese government in 2002 to invite Jayendra Saraswati (Kanchi Shankaracharya) to China where the Chinese govt really treated Shankaracharyaji very well. This same shankaracharya was jailed by the Indian govt on a large sheet of political lies and anti-Hindu nonsense. Shankaracharya in the rediff interview noted bodhi and the times of india (a mainsream paper in India, very mainstream) was discussing a movie on him. JSTOR is academic. Also the category Buddhists and then Zen patriarchs is redundant. Zen patriarch implies buddhism, but I kept the cat in my last edit.Bakaman 03:43, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
- The problem is not (necessarily) with the sources; it's with what they say (I can't speak about Zvelebil's article, however, since I can't access JSTOR). The rediff article has Saraswati hinting at one thing (Bodhidharma "went from Kanchipuram to China") and the interviewer, Srinivasan, saying another ("Bodhidharma was originally from Kodungalloor, Kerala"); that's not entirely a contradiction, since Srinivasan also notes that Bodhidharma "was ... a monk at Kanchipuram", but it also undermines the article's authority as a definitive source, because the ultimate conclusion could be that he was not from Kanchipuram but Kodungalloor, insofar as Saraswati only says Bodhidharma "went from Kanchipuram". As for the Times of India source, all we have here is a brief introduction to a play, with the authority thus being vested in an imaginative work (i.e., the play has to be set somewhere, as imaginative narratives must). I admit that "imaginative" is not "imaginary" ... however, it's also not reliable.
- Moreover, the introductory paragraph as it originally stood does not entirely deny origins in Kanchipuram; it simply states that there is doubt as to the issue, which there most certainly is. In fact, the paragraph as it originally stood—which was accepted after a long battle of sorts on this very issue—is saying effectively the same thing that Bakasuprman's revision is, but without introducing fairly unreliable sources. For all of the above reasons, I'm going to change it back. Cheers. —Saposcat 05:28, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
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- Actually, I think it's best and cleanest to just remove the highly speculative "Kanchipuram" from the intro entirely ... and I've done so. Cheers. —Saposcat 11:57, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
