What Is in A Name? the Possibility of Identifying the Monk Damo as the Mentor of the First Known Self-Claimed Reincarnation of Maitreya in Medieval China
Damo; Song Toutuo; Bodidharma; Chan Buddhism; Sengfu,; Mahasattva Fu
摘要
On the basis of a memorial inscription dedicated to an obscure foreign monk known to us only by a rather ordinary word, Damo 達摩 (Dharma), which was obviously a part of his name, this study attempts to reconstruct some traces of his life, and several key aspects of his image as was perceived by his contemporaries. Partly due to his obscurities and popularities, starting from a certain point of time this Damo started to be conflated with the famous Bodhidharma. The research presented in this article shows that it is difficult to identify this Damo to be Bodhidharma. However, several major aspects of Damo’s image seems to have played a noticeable role in informing the image of Bodhidharma and the Chan ideologies related to him. This case study underscores the complexity of the process through which the life and image of a religious paragon in medieval China, like elsewhere in the world of any time, were made and remade.
目次
Damo: An obscure foreign monk 5 Damo, an avid temple-builder 5 Damo’s supernatural power 5 Damo as the only known mentor to Mahāsattva Fu 6 Sengfu: Another disciple of Damo 8 Esteem from the imperial family 8 Sengfu’s expertise on the Huiyin Sanmei Jing 9 This dharma and that dharma: Different but not unrelated 10 Concluding remarks 12 Acknowledgements 13 Disclosure statement 13 Notes 13 Bibliography15 Appendix 1. “Song Toutuo fashi” 嵩頭陀法師(Dharma Master Dhūta Song): An English Translation (Shanhui dashi yulu, X no. 1335, 69: 4.126b18–128c11) 15
