Place · Buddhist monastery · China
Shaolin Temple, China
Shaolin is traditionally associated with Bodhidharma, an Indian monk said to have transmitted teachings to China. The identification of Bodhidharma’s birthplace with Kanchipuram is traditional and should be treated as a claim rather than a settled biographical fact.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered
- Location
- 34.509, 112.936
The Kanchipuram origin is a long-standing South Indian tradition, but Bodhidharma’s biography is layered with later legends and the evidence does not establish every detail.
Connections (3)
- Bodhidharma traditionKānchī / Kānchīpuram / Kanchipuram
Chinese Chan tradition makes Bodhidharma a south Indian prince, and several accounts place his origin in the Pallava country around Kanchipuram, from where he is said to have sailed to China in the fifth or sixth century and settled at Shaolin. The earliest Chinese source calls him Persian, the later ones Indian, and the martial-arts connection appears only a thousand years after the fact — so what is being transmitted here is a founding legend whose Indian end is Kanchipuram.
- Chinese Buddhist networkChang’an / Xi’an, China
Shaolin in Henan and the translation bureaus at Chang'an are the two ends of what Indian Buddhism became in China: an institution that turned meditation practice into a monastic discipline with a founding legend about an Indian monk, and a state office that turned Sanskrit into literary Chinese. Chan's claim to a transmission outside the scriptures is made in Chinese, about an Indian, by people who had the scriptures in Chinese because of Chang'an.
- Teaching lineageBodhidharma
The Chan lineage runs from Bodhidharma at Shaolin through Huike and four more patriarchs to Huineng, and from there into every Zen school in Japan, Korea and Vietnam. That transmission is documented from the eighth century. The martial arts attribution appears in a seventeenth-century manual and is a separate and much later claim on the same figure.
On these journeys
Sources
Traditional Bodhidharma biographies; modern scholarship on Bodhidharma
Open Shaolin Temple, China in the repository →