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Supermidget  · Public domain

Guided journey

Teachers, not ancestors

Chan and Zen trace their teachers back to Bodhidharma, patriarch by patriarch. A line of transmission is a claim about teaching — and this route shows why it is never drawn as a family.

  • 6 steps
  • Figures, Places, Texts, Traditions
  • A note at each step
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Not yet reviewed · written . The notes follow the records; no editor has signed them.

  1. Yoshitoshi · Public domain

    Step 1 of 6: Figure

    Bodhidharma

    Indian-Chinese philosopher and Buddhist Monk

    Bodhidharma, remembered as the monk who brought Chan from India to China and its first patriarch there. His dates are hedged in the records, and most of what is told about him comes from sources written generations later. His page lists whom he taught and has no family canvas, because a student is not a son.

    Open the profile Continue to Dazu Huike Continue Plus

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Still to come

  1. Dazu Huike Figure
  2. Shaolin Monastery On the atlas
  3. Platform Sutra Text
  4. Zen Tradition
  5. Dōgen Figure
  1. Shi Ke (石恪) (attributed) · Public domain

    Step 2 of 6: Figure

    Dazu Huike

    Chan practitioner

    Huike, the second patriarch of the Chan line, recorded as Bodhidharma’s student. The relation is “studied under”, and it prints its limits beneath it: not biological ancestry, not institutional succession, not even agreement between teacher and student. Merge those and a school’s lineage reads like a pedigree.

    Open the profile Continue to Shaolin Monastery
  2. User:Yaoleilei · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Step 3 of 6: Place · On the atlas

    Shaolin Monastery

    Chan Buddhist temple in Dengfeng county, Henan, China

    The Shaolin Monastery, on the atlas with its founding date. The record names an emperor as its founder and says nothing of Bodhidharma; the stories that seat him in a cave above it, facing a wall for nine years, are later tradition. The site dates a building. It does not date a legend attached to it.

    See it on the atlas Continue to Platform Sutra
  3. 문화재청 · KOGL Type 1

    Step 4 of 6: Text

    Platform Sutra

    Chan Buddhist scripture

    The Platform Sutra, the text that tells how the sixth patriarch received the robe and the teaching. Historians read the six-patriarch line as largely assembled in the eighth century, when rival Chan groups argued over whose teacher was the true heir. The text is evidence that the claim was being made, not a register of what happened.

    Open the profile Continue to Zen
  4. Supermidget · Public domain

    Step 5 of 6: Tradition

    Zen

    School of Mahāyāna Buddhist Tradition

    Zen, the tradition as a whole. Its page counts its branches, and a branch is drawn as a branch: traditions split, overlap and re-merge, and “is a branch of” says beneath it that it does not imply a single clean origin. A lineage chart that looks like a family tree borrows the authority of descent for something that works differently.

    Open the profile Continue to Dōgen
  5. Shii · Public domain

    Step 6 of 6: Figure

    Dōgen

    Japanese Zen Buddhist teacher (1200-1253)

    Dōgen, who studied Chan in China and brought one line of it home to Japan as Sōtō. His teacher in China is in the records without a page of his own here. A teacher abroad, a student at home and a school founded are three separate claims, each its own row.

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