This is an interesting tangent to discuss, because he hails from the Proto-Chan period, Bodhidharma’s true origins are unknown to this day. He could have been Indian, Persian, or something else entirely. Somewhere, he picked up and plated the seeds of Chan and created one of the neatest legendariums in world history along with it.
That said, he was the first patriarch of Chan, but also certainly not the only major contributor to Shaolin princples. Batuo, the First Abbot, Huike and the other five patriarchs, etc. But it definitely changed Buddhism in dramatic ways, specifically with how things were recorded and the language utilized. Empty handed forms are only a few centuries old, because they developed late in the Shaolin timeline…early on in the first millennium AD, the monks trained mostly in weapons and gymnastics which is what led to the tales of their martial prowess (as Imperial military support).
I like to think of Chan as a very down to earth, practical form that transcends religion (similar to all forms of meditation). Chan’s role in the development of both Chinese and Japanese Buddhism as well as the later evolutions in Daoism are quite clear.
I doubt they even know the specifics, when you go that far back you have very little to go on. You have to look at different artifacts, similar representations that existed later. I mean it’s archaeology, i’m sure they have to fill in a gap or two. I also don’t think you’ll find those ideas in most modern religions, maybe some of the pagan / wiccan / druid type practices.
You can’t retrospectively criticize people for not having science. We use the tools we have when we have it, and each step along the way paves the way forward. People developing religion was not a shortcoming, i feel like you missed everything in my original post. The forming of society around religious principles was one of the stepping stones which eventually lead to things like developing science. It’s in the development chain.
… and people being angry after having religion shoved down their throat in childhood is a common story. It’s not a gigantic assumption to make, i bet it would have good odds at a betting house is all i’m saying.
I am angry at people who use religion as a tool of exploitation and oppression as a means of generating authority.
I’m not angry at religion. It’s highly illuminating about man’s nature as long as people remember it’s based on a guessing game and often makes untrue claims with absolute authority to justify it’s own existence.
The story i always read was he was an Indian monk. I guess a fundamental idea in shaolin was an openness to other ideas, so i’m sure there are multiple influences. Problem is history is very unreliable when you go that far back, but in part it also makes them enjoyable in some ways. I like the idea of him staring a hole in the wall through his intense meditation. It’s stories like that which motivated me when i was younger. Or the story of how lao tzu decided to leave one day, and sat down and wrote the tao te ching on request of the guard while he was passing through the gates, and then vanish.
I guess chan does allow itself open to a much broader range of application. Things like tai chi and meditation are mainstream topics when it comes to wellness and mindfulness.
Eh, I think that’s a broad over-generalization about religion, because not all religions are about worshiping deities, there are more nuances. Judaism is a great example, they do mention god a lot and have about 10 names for god, but the vast majority of their writings (over the centuries, not necessary during Biblical times) have led to the development of conservative and reformed sects that value family and community over, say slaughtering the Hittites.
Basic human values and ethics came from the major religions, not separate. The history of science starts in Islamic cities, Christian monasteries, etc.
Most Buddhists don’t believe Buddha was a god, in fact practically all Buddhist patriarchs explicitly said the same.
Bodhidharma was an overweight and temperamental, but also very muscular “barbarian” according the ancient records. This is the guy who came up with Zen.
It only took him seven years of starting at a cave wall, according to the accounts. It took me about the same time staring at Bullshido before I truly, finally understood the root of all suffering in the world.
I just hadn’t ever looked at it that way before, and that’s why they call it enlightenment.
Politics, political structures, corporations, school, books, law, many things can be used as tools of oppression and authority. It’s all in the application.
Everything is a guessing game to some degree … there are millions of things we don’t understand just in our own bodies. We just hope we are right about the things we think we are right about today. There is a lot of faith on both sides of the fence …
According to scholars, he was probably central Asian, but there is no definitive record of his country of origin (same can almost be said about Batuo, the first Abbot, though it’s likely he was in fact from south India, which may have later been assigned to Bodhidharma ). Later on it gets easier to track, because all the lineage is Chinese until Chan spreads to SE Asia and eventually to Japan to become Zen, and so on, which is technically how the West learned of all this.
As far as Shaolin history (as verified by historians) and being able to differentiate what we know vs what we’ve been told, this is the best book available in the world on the subject. I’ve read this book half a dozen times (a lot of history there) because I often come across claims from ku fools about details, and I am a proudly pedantic bastard.
The truth is the history of the Shaoshi temple is pretty well documented. Contrary to popular opinion, the Chinese developed writing systems thousands of years ago were big into record keeping. Dynastic changes sometimes destroyed records, or even ret-conned things. Shaolin went through several periods where they fell out of favor with various Emperors, military leaders etc.
Then there’s the myth that Bodhidharma created the CMA at Shaolin. He most definitely did not, that was the result of almost 1,200 years of warfare and philosophical evolution (not to mention, disarming by the Ching). In fact, he was retroactively made the patriarch of CMA by the Shaolin centuries after his death.
I’m not saying that are right about everything, but we do use the scientific method a lot more all the time.
I think one of the worst problems is that applied science has outstripped our understanding of how these innovations will affect us.
One area of concern is unfettered marketing and mass manipulation resources and the encroachment of the police state.
This is science at it’s worst. The fears of Big Brother are the tip of the iceberg. In Orwell’s day the early iron curtain tyrants and fascists were very clumsy and unsophisticated by modern standards.
Comparatively the effectiveness of internal Chinese mass manipulation is stunning. Ridiculously so. They make Goebbels look like a bratty kid writing filthy rumors in a men’s room stall.
Political belief feels a more and more like it’s own religion. I think religion is a result of biology in that once people decide what their common beliefs are, it is easy for leaders to insert new beliefs and people will accept them more and more easily by decades of aggregated early programming. Mark Twain often wrote that the best way for an idea to take root was to get to the children while they were young. That’s why he wrote Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. If you haven’t read these books as an adult, I highly recommend it. You will see things that you never saw in grade school.
People reshape the world into what they want to see by their nature. It allows them to ignore truths about our fellow man and the plight of our existence that would otherwise be soul crushing. Instead of living under a murderous tyrant, we live under a man chosen by God to rule. Instead of the burden of guilt we should feel for murdering our fellow civilians for insignificant differences in culture and to get their stuff, we are following God’s command. The Nazi death squads used to have a party while they mass murdered jew and slav women and children so that the drunkeness and sex they were getting would blind them to their own remaining biological impulses to feel compassion while they generated horror.
I was not angry at the person that indoctrinated me. He was and is my favorite person out of everyone I ever met in the whole wide world.
You think I’m upset because I got used or exploited in some way. Not ever. Not even once. My grandpa was a good man that only did what he thought was right for his entire life. He never swore. he never drank. he never ran anybody down. He genuinely loved everyone around him to the best of his ability even if they were a bad person that had cheated or robbed him. His rifle collection was stolen once (some very expensive and valuable collector’s items and a civil war cavalry saber that belonged to his great grandfather; none of them were retrieved in functional state; the saber disappeared in a Shreveport pawn shop. Edit: they even fucking stole his WWII medals. I. Shit. You. Not.
I think a person that does something like that should be fucking shot or hung from the nearest tree).
He told the police not to prosecute the boys that took them. He waited in the lobby until their parents showed up and told their parents that he forgave them.
He lived by example. It was the other Christians that were so god damned disappointing.
Religion encompasses all of those things and more. Literally, every financial and political pursuit from hawking cheap fake jewelry to appeals to genocide and neverending dominionist quests for supreme governing power. Just Christianity encompasses all of those things. Modern evangelical churches are in the entertainment business. They never study scripture. They seize on individual passages to justify biases to increase their mass market appeal. They use mass mailers and send their prayer request mail directly to their accountant or book keepers. Their accountants take the money, scan in the form letter included to create a contact point profile for future “fund raising” and then they shred everything.
They rob the congregation at every turn. They learned from Jim Bakker’s filing mistakes and now they just ensure embezzlement charges are impossible to prosecute through creative structuring.
A lot of them open real estate businesses on the side to sell the property they get when they manage to get their hooks into some desperate old woman’s will.
I was living in a house that a mega church “inherited”, their goons stole the money out of my dresser and hauled all of the renters’ stuff to the dump with no notice while everyone was at class after thoroughly looting it when the person was paying rent to died. The guys they hired to do it said they do it every couple of weeks. No eviction notice. I swear to shit, one of them was even wearing my fucking jacket when I asked what the fuck they were doing. The associate pastor of the church practically told me to fuck myself when I called about my missing computer, my clothes and my deposit. Local police wouldn’t do anything claiming it was a civil matter, knowing god damned good and well that none of the students living there could afford to file a lawsuit against a church with a 15 or 20 acre parking lot.
Moral of the story, Religion is bullshit.
The same bitch telling everyone “Namaste” at the door is running half a dozen cons on every student that walks through the door from hawking 5000 dollar “ionized water” machines (which is just fucking diluted hydrogen peroxide) to organizing “spiritual retreats” for the highrollers to be worked over for even more lucrative grift.
I saw a brand new V8 Audi just a few days ago with clergy plates at the liquor store when I got this here bottle of Skrewball on my desk.
To paraphrase the late great Pvt Leonard Lawrence, “We are all in a world of shit.”
Religion is just another kind of shit. Best to scrape it off our shoe and be done with it.
those responses are intense, not going to respond to everything. I’d say you should separate a text from how certain people apply it. You can look at people implementing an idea in a shit way and throw the rest away just based on their actions. There is an idea or an ideology and then there are people. People are going to do shit things with anything they do. It’s like an idiot being an idiot with a gun and then the knee jerk reaction of banning guns. Same shit different day.
My only point was religion wasn’t just shit and bad, it was fairly instrumental to society. I’m not a religious person. But religious text was the corner stone of ethical development for a very long time. It gave a common set of principles that allowed us to contract with each other / understand each other at a very early stage of our development. There is also a lot of good ethical content found in the pages of various religious text.
I’ll start a new thread on this topic if you want, but basically Damo was retroactively assigned the honor of creating the Shaolin version of Sup Ba Luohanquan, which is just one of many yogic-like exercises (martial and other) associated with Buddhist patriarchs.
I don’t know if you want to start a new thread, I won’t be able to add much from my side . I’ll check out that book you linked and start doing some research. If you have any links you can point me at, always appreciated.
Some say Greek wrestlers inspired Kung Fu. I read that somewhere. Alexander the Great. Windex. Boom.
I’m Greek so I can make that Windex joke.
I was raised Pentecostal so I feel like I have to comment here. I was devout. Knew the Bible inside out and backwards. My dad was the best man I ever met. Didn’t leave that cult till my late thirties. People talk about Pascal’s Wager. Pascal was wrong. I missed out on tons by growing up religious. Religion is only healthy if you don’t take it seriously. Your “hypochristians” did it right. Have your cake and eat it too. Actually try to live according to the Bible and it will mess you up. I know from experience.
I spent my high school years in the Philippines and that country basically has its head wrapped around religion. In that country, they think that atheists are satan’s children. lol. I mean not exactly like that but you get the gist of it.
Thing is, people forgot despite the fact that it’s in their history books that Christianity (especially Catholicism) started in PH as a way to conquer the pagan natives. Spaniards wanted Filipinos to forget their culture including the 2 biggest factors - language and religion.
Another reason why I don’t believe in religions is that if you read various texts of different religions, you’ll find a lot of similarities in them. They’re just like a grander version of nursery rhymes.
Greek wrestling doesn’t use this last I checked. Chinese wrestling is about 6,000 years old going back to its pre-civiization. Egyptian and Sumerian about 4000 years, making Greek wrestling relatively young (1st millenium BC).
All these civilizations use the same basic wrestling holds, because we’re all human.
. I’ll check out that book you linked and start doing some research. If you have any links you can point me at, always appreciated.