After leaving the court of Lian, he crossed the Yangtse on a reed,—­a theme in sacred art for thousands ever since,—­and because of this miraculous crossing, is worshiped still by Yangtse boatman as their patron saint,—­on the 28th of February in each year.—­Once, as he sat in meditation, sleep overcame him; and on waking, that it might never happen again, he cut off his eyelids.  But they fell on the earth, took root and sprouted; and the plant that grew from them was the first of all tea plants,—­the symbol (and cause!) of eternal wakefulness.  He is represented in the pictures as being footless; in his missionary travels, it is said, he wore away his feet.  Thus where there is no known life-story, but all hidden away beneath a veil of esotericism and a Master’s seclusion, myths have grown, and a story has been made.—­He sat there in his cave silent through the years, they say; his face to the wall.  Chih Kuang came to him, asking to be taught the doctrine; and for seven days stood in the snow at the cave-mouth, pleading and unnoticed.  Then, to show that he was in earnest, he drew his sword and sliced off his left arm; and the Master called him in, and taught him.—­Legend again, no doubt.

I imagine we can only judge of the man and of his astounding greatness by the greatness of the ages he illumined.  It was as if he gave, in East Asia, the signal for nation after nation to leap into brilliant being.  As for China, she became something new.  The Age of Han had been golden, strong, manly, splendid.  But Han was like other empires here and there about the world.  Henceforth during her cycle China was to be as a light-giving body, a luminary wondrous in the firmament with a shining array of satellite kingdoms circling about her.  Her own Teachers of a thousand years before had prepared the way for it:  Confucius when he gave her stability; Laotse when he dropped the Blue Pearl into her fields.  That Pearl had shone, heaven knows.  Now Ta-mo, this Bodhidharma, breathed on it; and it glowed, and flame shot up from it, and grew, and foamed up beautiful, till it was a steady fountain of wonder-fire spraying the far stars.  Heretofore we have had a background of Taoist wizardry:  in its highest aspects, Natural Magic,—­the Keatsism of the waters and the wild, the wood, the field, and the mountain; henceforth there was to be a sacred something shining through and inmingled with this:  the urge of the Divine Soul, the holy purposes of evolution.  We may say this in Art, to take that one field alone, the most perfect, the fullest, the divinest, expression of Natural Magic

     “whereof this world holds record”

was to come in the school of the Successors of Bodhidharma, directly the result of his ‘Doctrine of the Heart.’