Chan Buddhism, often known in the West as Chinese Zen, looks back to Bodhidharma as its founding figure. He is remembered as an Indian Buddhist monk who journeyed to China and became recognized as the First Patriarch of this tradition. Within the Chan lineage, his role is not merely historical but paradigmatic: he stands as the one who transmitted a distinctive way of practicing the Buddha’s teaching, centered on meditative insight rather than on scholastic analysis or ritual elaboration. To speak of Bodhidharma, therefore, is to speak of the symbolic beginning of a particular style of awakening in the Chinese Buddhist world.

Tradition portrays Bodhidharma as bringing a teaching that emphasizes direct engagement with the mind itself. Rather than relying primarily on scriptures or conceptual formulations, this approach points straight to the mind and to the possibility of seeing one’s original nature. Such an orientation would later come to define the Chan school as a path that privileges immediate, experiential realization. In this sense, Bodhidharma is not only honored as a historical monk from India, but also as the archetypal teacher of a path that seeks to uncover what has always been present within one’s own heart-mind.

Because of this, the figure of Bodhidharma functions as a kind of spiritual mirror for practitioners. To contemplate his legacy is to be reminded that the essence of the path does not lie somewhere outside, but in the living act of turning awareness back upon itself. The stories that surround him, whether taken literally or symbolically, point again and again to a single theme: that awakening is found through a direct, unadorned encounter with mind. In this way, the founding of Chan is less an event fixed in time and more an ever-renewed invitation to realize the same insight that Bodhidharma is said to have embodied.