Although Bodhidharma clearly was an historical figure, he made no personal claims to patriarchy and indeed was distinguished more by individuality than by attempts to promulgate an orthodoxy. Arriving from India to teach meditation, he was greeted by an emperor's boasts of traditional Buddhism's stature in China. Bodhidharma scoffed and marched away, reportedly crossing the Yangtze on a reed to reach the Shao-lin monastery, where he sat in solitary meditation facing a cliff for the next nine years. This famous interview and Bodhidharma's response were the real foundation of Zen. Bodhidharma seems to have gone essentially unnoticed by his contemporaries, and in the first record of his life--Biographies of the High Priests, compiled in 645--he is included simply as one of a number of devout Buddhists. He is next mentioned in _The Transmission of the Lamp_, a sourcebook of Zen writings and records assembled in the year 1004. In point of fact, Bodhidharma, like the Buddha, seems not to have left a written account of his teachings, although two essays are extant which are variously attributed to him and which probably maintain the spirit if not necessarily the letter of his views on meditation. The most quoted passage from these works, and one which encapsulates the particular originality of Bodhidharma, is his praise of meditation, or _pi-kuan_, literally "wall gazing." This term supposedly refers to the legendary nine years of gazing at a cliff which has become part of the Bodhidharma story, but it also may be taken as a metaphor for staring at the impediment that reason places in the path of enlightenment until at last the mind hurdles the rational faculties. His words are reported as follows: _When one, abandoning the false and embracing the true, and in simpleness of thought abides in _pi-kuan_, one finds that there is neither selfhood nor otherness. . . . He will not then be guided by any literary instructions, for he is in silent communication with the principle itself, free from conceptual discrimination, for he is serene and not-acting.1 _