Within the early Chan tradition, Bodhidharma is remembered as closely linked with the Lankavatara Sutra, treating it as a central scriptural expression of his teaching. Traditional accounts describe him transmitting this sutra to his disciple Huike and regarding it as containing the essential dharma needed to awaken the mind. Because of this, early Chan circles even came to be associated with the “Lankavatara school,” suggesting that this text functioned as a primary doctrinal backbone for the nascent movement. Yet this reliance on a scripture did not contradict the later Chan emphasis on a “special transmission outside the scriptures”; rather, the sutra itself was used to point beyond mere words.

The Lankavatara Sutra’s Yogacara analysis of consciousness provided a conceptual frame for Bodhidharma’s characteristic focus on mind. Its teachings on consciousness-only and the transformation of the storehouse consciousness into wisdom resonated with the Chan ideal of “mind-to-mind transmission,” understood as a direct realization of awakened awareness. Early Chan used this sutra to legitimize deep meditation and introspection into the nature of mind as the heart of the path, not as abstract theory but as something to be verified in lived experience. In this way, the text served less as a scholastic object of debate and more as a guidebook to inner transformation.

Equally important was the sutra’s articulation of tathagatagarbha, or Buddha-nature, which early Chan read alongside the slogan of “seeing one’s nature and becoming Buddha.” The Lankavatara Sutra links Buddha-nature with the purified mind, and Bodhidharma’s teaching style echoed this by stressing that awakening is a matter of directly recognizing the mind’s inherent purity rather than accumulating conceptual knowledge. The sutra’s insistence that ultimate reality cannot be grasped by discursive thought supported Chan’s insistence on going beyond conceptualization, even while still honoring a text as a skillful means. Thus, Bodhidharma’s use of the Lankavatara Sutra can be seen as a way of rooting Chan’s radical experiential emphasis in an established Mahayana scripture, allowing practice and doctrine to illuminate one another without becoming trapped in words.