Bodhidharma & the Courtesan

There's a genre of Japanese Zen painting that always depicts the same scene: Daruma succumbing to charms of a courtesan. Daruma is the Japanese name for Bodhidharma, the Indian Buddhist who came to China and founded the Chan school of Buddhism, which the Japanese call Zen. In the paintings, Bodhidharma represents Zen liberation, capable of playing with the fire of sexual pleasure represented by the courtesan without getting burned by delusion. That's how everyone reads the symbolism, and of course everyone wants to be the great Bodhidharma. No one wants to be the anonymous whore.

The whore symbolism is two-edged. At the time that the Daruma/Courtesan paintings were being painted, there was a saying among the Japanese lower classes that prostitutes were guaranteed to go to one or another of the Buddhist heavens when they died, because their life on earth was hell. They were typically daughters of poor families sold into prostitution at a young age. They were indentured to the businesses that bought them. They had no control over which clients they saw, or how much time they spent with them. The lucky ones were bought out of servitude by wealthy patrons. I'm not sure what happened to the remainder; possibly they worked until they were no longer attractive, and then eked out a meager living as servants.

So the whore symbol represents both pleasure and suffering, not merely the ordinary suffering of sickness and disappointment in life that everyone experiences, but the suffering of being other people's toy, of being despised and low status, of being worth only what you can earn for someone else. Anyone who has experienced contempt knows that there's nothing ennobling about it. It warps both the people giving it and the people receiving it. Bodhidharma represents, not the enlightenment that guards against the delusions of pleasure and glamour, but the enlightenment that protects from the poison of bitterness and hardship.

But there's a further problem. Bodhidharma is a separate figure from the courtesan; enlightenment is separate from suffering. And that makes Bodhidharma an empty, pointless, religious figure. Unless enlightenment is united with suffering and contempt, it isn't going to help anyone.

Zen teachers are certified. They literally have a piece of paper that says, in effect, "I am a Zen master." The abbots of Japanese Renzai Zen monasteries earn small fortunes performing funeral services for wealthy Japanese. Bodhidharma is the guy who books a whore and then spends the first half hour talking about how important he is and how much money he makes.

The real symbol of enlightenment is the anonymous whore. Abandoned as a child, growing up despised and used, owning nothing except the immediate use of her body, she's hired to give a Zen master a blow job. Undressing her client, facing yet another turkey-neck penis hanging below a monk's pot belly, and asking herself how she's going to bring herself to do this, she suddenly realizes that she has everything she needs. No certification, no important job titles, no worshipful Zen students hanging on her every word, no special Zen philosophy or spiritual abilities, just this mind and this body at this moment.