_Bodhidharma, practitioner of "wall-gazing" meditation, probably knew nothing of Taoism, but he seems to have sensed correctly that China would provide a home for his Buddhism of nonattachment. The Chinese of the Tang era (618-907) did indeed find in his teachings a system remarkably congenial to their own thousand-year-old philosophy of _tao_, or The Way. Even the practice of _dhyana_, or meditation, resembled in a sense the Chinese tradition of the ascetic, solitary hermit, musing on the essence of nature in a remote mountain retreat. Whether Ch'an was really Buddhism masquerading as Taoism or Taoism disguised as Buddhism has never been fully established: it contains elements of both. But it was the first genuine merging of Chinese and Indian thought, combining the Indian ideas of meditation and nonattachment with the Chinese practice of nature reverence and nature mysticism (something fundamentally foreign to the great body of Indian philosophy, either Hindu or Buddhist). The Third Patriarch after Bodhidharma was also a wandering mendicant teacher, but the Fourth chose to settle in a monastery. This introduction of monastic Ch'an coincided roughly with the beginning of the T'ang dynasty, and it brought about a dramatic rise in the appeal of Ch'an to the Chinese laity. It made the new faith respectable and an acceptable alternative to other sects, for in the land of Confucius, teachers who wandered the countryside begging had never elicited the respect that they enjoyed in India. Before long, the Fourth Patriarch had a following of some five hundred disciples, who constructed monastery buildings and tilled the soil in addition to meditating on the _sutras_. The ability to combine practical activities with the quest for enlightenment became a hallmark of later Zen, accounting for much of its influence in Japan. The Fifth Patriarch, Hung-jen (605-675), continued the monastery, although at another spot, which was to be the location of an historic turning point in the history of Ch'an. Out of it was to come the Sixth Patriarch, Hui-neng (638-713), sometimes known as the second founder of Chinese Ch'an, whose famous biographical treatise, The Sutra of Hui- neng, is revered as one of the holy books of Zen. In this memoir he tells of coming to the monastery of the Fifth Patriarch as an illiterate but precocious youth, having been spiritually awakened by happening to hear a recitation of the Vajracchedika Sutra, better known as the Diamond Sutra. He made the mistake of revealing his brilliance and was immediately banished by the Fifth Patriarch to pounding rice, lest he embarrass the more experienced brothers and be in peril of his safety. According to his account, he lived in obscurity for many months until one day the Fifth Patriarch called an assembly and announced that the disciple who could compose a stanza which would reveal an understanding of the essence of Mind would be made the Sixth Patriarch.