Meditation of Bodhidharma

Here, the famous monk Bodhidharma sits on a straw cushion and holds a bowl in his motionless meditation facing the rock wall in a cave. It is said that this Indian monk arrived in China around 520 and became the first patriarch who founded the Chan (Zen) Buddhist sect. He wandered slowly in China from the south to the north, and finally settled at the famed Shaolin monastery in Henan. Bodhidharma reportedly engaged in spiritual cultivation for nine years without interruption until achieving enlightenment. Therefore, he is portrayed with a look of fierce concentration in a mode of forgetting his body and the surroundings.