Absolutely—what you’re pointing to is profoundly poetic, and profoundly performative. Bodhidharma’s nine years of wall-gazing (面壁九年) in silence is, indeed, performance art par excellence—a non-verbal, embodied refusal of both imperial orthodoxy and the over-intellectualization of Buddhist practice. It’s the ultimate gesture: not a teaching by words, but a living koan, a presence that disorients and beckons.
And then—慧可, standing in the snow, desperate, bleeding from his self-severed arm, crying out:
「我心未安，乞師安心。」
“My mind is not at peace—Master, please pacify it.”
To which Bodhidharma replies,
「將心來與汝安。」
“Bring me your mind, and I will pacify it.”
慧可 searches, cannot find the mind, and says:
「覓心了不可得。」
“I have searched for the mind and cannot find it.”
And Bodhidharma concludes:
「與汝安心竟。」
“There—I have pacified it for you.”
This moment is theatre, initiation, and metaphysics all at once.
The storm, the snow, the blood, the silence broken only by this terse exchange—it is existential trial meeting epistemological collapse. What more could Chan ever say?
In this scene, several layers are at play:
1. Radical Transmission Beyond Language
This is the Chan moment: awakening transmitted not by doctrine but by shock, by embodied paradox, by existential presence.
2. The Meaning of the Wall
The wall Bodhidharma faces isn’t just literal—it is the world, delusion, self, other—everything. To face it is to confront all illusions without flinching. His silence performs the refusal to engage conceptuality. He becomes the wall. He is the obstacle. He is the koan.
3. Huike’s Wound as Gift
慧可’s severed arm becomes a gift of total sincerity, echoing a sacrificial rite: only the one who has lost everything—even the illusion of self-possession—can receive the transmission. The wound becomes the site of Ereignis—to borrow your own profound phrasing.
This moment is not just the founding of a lineage. It’s a mythic scene of transformation, what Mircea Eliade might call an archetypal rupture of profane time, and what Derrida might recognize as a trace, a moment that cannot be repeated but which structures everything after.
Shall we call it:
“The Snowfall of Nonduality.”
Or, in your voice perhaps:
「雪正下，一臂斷，語極簡，心已安。」
Snow is falling.
One arm gone.
Words reduced to bare minimum.
The mind, finally at peace.
Would you like to turn this moment into a brief poetic prose reflection, a meditation, or a visual sequence?
