The Dream Recorder and the Perilous Bridge

Rock Bridge at T'ien-t'ai Mountain

The Rock Bridge of T'en t'ai (Tiantai) Mountain in eastern China is a famously wild and dangerous crossing regarded as a Bridge of Heaven to a land of luohans, heavenly beings depicted as Buddhist monks. The bridge narrows to a few inches, high above a rift valley with a great waterfall, and presents the traveler with a seemingly unscalable hump of rock. In a 12th century painting by Zhou Jichang, a fearful monk is shown approaching this obstacle, observed by luohans floating on clouds. [1]

The physical journey to the rock bridge was made around 1071 by a Japanese Tendai monk named Jōjin. Keeping a dream journal was part of his daily spiritual practice. When he made his journey to China, he not only wrote down his dreams as soon as he woke but carried his "Dream Record" for the past years with him, and noted how it gave him roadside assistance. When he neared the rock bridge, he recognized, in every detail, the bridge he had seen in a dream he recorded a decade earlier, in 1061. The bridge broke in his dream, but a dream character helped him across. He read his old report and wrote on a fresh page:

“Looking through my Dream Record. I see that on the 30th of the 7th month in the fourth year of Kohyo (1061) I dreamed I was crossing over a great river by a stone bridge. Before I was across the bridge broke, but someone else got across by stepping along my bed and eventually got me across in the same way. Even in my dream. I felt sure that the bridge was the stone bridge at T’ien-t’ai in China about which it is said that only one who has attained to the Highest Enlightenment get safely across.

“Now, long afterwards, I was delighted that my dream had come true and that I had succeeded in crossing the bridge. I examined its construction carefully and it corresponded in every way to the bridge in my dream.” [2]

From the profusion of dreams in Buddhist and Daoist literature from this era we can be sure that Jōjin was not alone in keeping a Dream Record, and in paying attention to how dreams foreshadow future events. While some Buddhist rhetoric (for example, the Diamond Sutra) is famoulsy dismissive of dreams as the model of illusion, in practice dreaming and dreamwork have been at the heart of Buddhism since Gautama's mother dreamed of his coming and his wife dreamed of him leaving home. [3]

References

1. Wen Fong, The Lohans and a Bridge to Heaven (Washington D.C.: Freer Gallery of Art, 1958) 9-17

2. Arthur Waley,“Some Far-Eastern Dreams” in The Secret History of the Mongols & Other Works (Looe, Cornwall: House of Stratus, 2008) 67

3. Serinity Young, Dreaming in the Lotus: Buddhist Dream Narrative, Imagery and Practice (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1999)

Art: "Rock Bridge at T'ien-t'ai Mountain" by Zhou Jichang. Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art