The Sutra Bodhidharma Is Said to Have Carried

Later Chan tradition holds that Bodhidharma, the semi-legendary Indian or Central Asian monk credited with bringing Chan Buddhism to China, handed the Lankavatara Sutra to his successor Huike as a mark of authoritative transmission, a story recorded only well after the fact rather than contemporaneously with the events it describes. Early Chan communities, sometimes called the Lankavatara school by later historians on the strength of this association, appear to have given the text real prominence in their teaching for several generations.

Later Chan and Zen lineages moved away from grounding authority in any single scripture, favoring instead accounts of direct mind-to-mind transmission from teacher to student outside of texts altogether, a shift that reduced the Lankavatara's formal centrality even as its cittamatra teaching remained influential. Modern scholarship treats the Bodhidharma transmission story as a later legitimizing tradition constructed to anchor Chan's authority in a datable event, rather than as settled historical record of what Bodhidharma himself taught or carried. Regardless of how the transmission story is judged historically, the Lankavatara's mind only teaching continued to circulate independently through the broader Yogacara philosophical tradition across India, Tibet and East Asia, giving the text an influence that never depended solely on its contested place in Chan lineage narratives.