Zen Style Painting of Bodhidharma

In Zen paintings, Bodhidharma is depicted as a foreigner with dark skin, round, bulging eyes, black curly hair, a long, hooked nose, and rings in his ears. He is barefoot, wearing a simple robe, and carrying a stick over one shoulder with one sandal hanging from its end. The images of Bodhidharma by his devotees are created to match the legends told of him. His bulging eyes come from the story that as well as Zen and Kung Fu, he also introduced tea to China. The tale goes that Bodhidharma drank tea to stay awake during his long hours of meditation. After falling asleep during one session, he was so angry with himself that he cut off his own eyelids and threw them away—and where the eyelids fell, tea bushes grew. The message here is not meant to be taken literally; it simply shows how Bodhidharma brought ‘wakefulness’ to China, the idea of constantly being in touch with reality and living in the moment. It also shows the master’s determination to remain ‘awakened,’ and how far he is prepared to go to achieve this goal. Of all the many paintings of Bodhidharma, ‘Daruma’ by the Japanese master Hakuin, captures his ‘fierce gaze’ perfectly in typical Zen style, with just a few bold strokes of the brush.

The robe and the bowl signify making do with the essentials of life, just enough to keep warm and stay fed, and nothing more. The single sandal symbolizes ‘non-duality’, the concept in Zen that ultimately, we are all part of a single whole. There is a famous Zen koan that asks ‘what is the sound of one hand clapping?’ The purpose of this koan is to discourage thinking in terms of things ‘existing’ or ‘not-existing’, but rather to see the big picture: the universe in its entirety. In Taoist terms, this would be seeing beyond the duality of Yin and Yang, to looking directly into the Tao itself, where all differentiation is meaningless.