Daruma Eyes: The Sixth Century Founder of Zen Buddhism and Kung Fu Had the Earliest Recorded Graves' Ophthalmopathy

389 IWAS RECENTLY at a meeting of the Japan Society for the Study of Obesity in Maebashi, located 100 miles northwest of Tokyo next to Takasaki, famous for the production of the most beautiful Daruma dolls in Japan. These dolls are everywhere in Japan: in department stores, bazaars, factories, personal offices, and homes. They are also common in oriental stores in America—rounded, lightweight, hollow, papiermache, or plastic effigies with a massive, scowling, blackbearded head cloaked in a bright-red cowl, the most striking feature being the oversized symmetrically round blank white eyes (Fig. 1). Darumas are given on a great variety of occasions to bring good luck in a forthcoming endeavor— athletics, business, professional, passing an examination— whatever. The custom is to paint a solid black circle in the center of one eye when the Daruma is received. The painted eye is always open and focused on the goal; when it is reached, the other eye is painted in. “Both eyes open” is thus an expression for success in Japan. At the end of each year, all Darumas are brought to the temple for ritual burning in a big bonfire (Fig. 2). The origin of this ancient Japanese custom is obscured in hoary conflicting legends. I had been aware of the use of these dolls before my most recent trip to Japan, but I had never before been given one. Each registrant at the meeting received a beautiful Daruma as a gift from the Obesity Society and the city of Maebashi, so I had a chance to examine the brilliant red talisman in unaccustomed detail and set its features in my mind. After the meeting in Maebashi, my wife and I toured Kyoto with our Japanese friends, Professors Masami Murakami, Kiyoshi Tanaka, and Isao Kobayashi. We visited several Zen Buddhist temples, including the famous Ryoan-ji with its exquisite tranquil arrangement of 15 large rocks in a carefully manicured, rectangular white gravel bed. Because we were with different hosts on each of the 3 days we were in Kyoto, we went to Ryoan-ji on 2 different days. Each of our hosts on those days had not seen Ryoan-ji for many years and each had a burning desire to see it on their current trip to Kyoto. Both of the Ryoan-ji visits were delightful for us as well, but because we had had full contemplation (from our Western point of view) on the initial visit to the temple, on the second round I took a little time to look into the temple kiosk, where I was surprised to find several paintings of Daruma, presumably copied from likenesses made while he was alive and not the grotesque caricature of the Daruma doll. I was struck by the apparent relatively severe Graves’ ophthalmopathy exhibited in Daruma’s portraits (Fig. 3). In other Zen temples in Kyoto, I saw other, different pictures of Daruma clearly showing this affliction. I asked my Japanese friends, who are endocrinologists, whether Daruma had Graves’ disease. They did not know, so I decided to look more deeply into the story of Daruma. Bodhidarma (Daruma in Japanese, Da Mo in Chinese) was the third son of King Sugandha of the kshatriya warrior caste in southern India. He became a priest and in 527 A.D. brought a new aspect of Buddhism featuring a grueling regimen of meditation and self-deprivation to China. Emperor Wu allowed him to travel to Hunan province to take up residence at the Shaolin (Young Forest) Monastery (Fig. 4). Bodhidarma found the Shaolin monks to be in poor physical condition and easily overcome by thugs and footpads. Because the monks were prohibited from bearing arms, Bodhidarma developed for them a system of fighting exercises and conditioning based on movements of the tiger, crane, snake, leopard, and other animals, which was devoid of the use of weapons. These exercises were known as the “Eighteen Hands of the Lo-Han” (Lo-Han designating the disciples of Buddha). Over the centuries, this system developed into Kung Fu in China, currently popularized by Bruce Lee and Jet Li action movies, and into karate and related martial arts derived from the migration of Chinese missionaries into Okinawa and Japan. The religious system initiated by Daruma at Shaolin involved long periods of meditation to free the mind of the illusions of this world so that one might attain enlightenment. This became the foundation of Zen Buddhism. Daruma is