Damo
Damo is the name the
Chinese have given to the
Indian Buddhist monk,
Bodhidharma. He was a 26th or 28th (reports vary) generation down the line of teachers from
Buddha. The
Chinese consider him to be a
bodhisatva.
His unique outlook on the Buddha's teachings came to integrate several Taoist notions and evolved into
Chan Buddhism in
China and
Zen in
Japan. Legend holds that he eventually made it to Japan, where he was called
Daruma and became the subject of several fine brush paintings. However, this legend would place him at as much as
250 years old.
Upon arriving in China sometime near 542 AD (again, exact dates are impossible)
Damo went before the Emperor (I don't remember which, I think a
Wu emperor) and told him that all the temples he had paid for still didn't earn him any
karma. The emperor sent him away, and after crossing the
Yangtze on a reed, he arrived at
Shaolin temple.
At the time, the monks spent their days translating traditional
Buddhist texts into
Chinese. The fat, lazy monks were incapable of the physical and mental stamina required by
Damo's innovative sitting meditation (you know, the
Zen thing where you sit with your legs crossed and don't say anything?
Damo's shtick.) Anyway, he got mad at them for being lazy and went to sit in a near-by cave.
Legends abound as to his activities in the cave. At the most extreme, he
sat there for 9 years, and his gaze was so intense that he
burned a whole in the wall. One of the
Shaolin monks wanted to learn from him, and went so far as to
cut off his own arm to prove it. After that,
Damo returned to
Shaolin. Watching the movements of animals around the temple, he devised several sets of exercises based on these movements. He taught them to the monks to get them into good enough shape to attain enlightenment.
Now, organized systems of combat do, in fact, pre-data Damo's visit to Shaolin by centuries, and men have been wrestling ever since they met each other, especially when you include military training. But the martial arts, as we think of them today, were born of
Damo at
Shaolin, perhaps in the 550s.