Harmonia watches --- for what tradition tells us was nine years --- as a foreign monk from the Western regions sits down in front of a stone wall in a cave on Song Mountain and refuses to move. His name was Bodhidharma, and his blunt dismissal of an emperor's piety, his paradoxical teaching to a student standing in the snow, and his absolute stillness in the face of a featureless wall would plant a seed that grew into Chan Buddhism in China, Zen in Japan, and an enduring challenge to every age that measures human worth by accumulation and effort.

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