Bodhidharma
Indian-Chinese philosopher and Buddhist Monk · Academics · Lived 483 to 540 · aged 57
Bodhidharma is read about 1,446 times a day, in 60 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 27 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 400 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?A monk whose face everyone knows and whose life almost no one can verify. Bodhidharma brought meditation practice from somewhere west into 5th or 6th century China, became the first patriarch of Chan Buddhism, and later - centuries after his death - got retrofitted as the founder of Shaolin kung fu.
Also in Deutsch
Photos 6
In their own words 7
, Many roads lead to the Path, but basically there are only two: reason and practice.
Neither gods nor men can forsee when an evil deed will bear its fruit.
Trying to find a buddha or enlightenment is like trying to grab space. Space has a name but no form. It's not something you can pick up or put down.
About this person
The sources can't agree where he came from (Central Asia? South India? Third son of a king?) or when he arrived (420s? 500s?). What's consistent: he showed up from the Western Regions during the age of the Northern Wei, taught meditation rooted in the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, and became the figure through whom Chan Buddhism entered China. Later traditions drew a lineage stretching back 28 generations to the Buddha himself. The kung fu origin story came much later - 17th century texts tied him to martial exercises, and the 20th century made it canonical. In art he's rendered as the bearded, wide-eyed outsider, ill-tempered and unmistakably foreign, a figure more icon than biography.
Academics born in the 480s 4
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