Buddhamitra

Buddhamitra, the ninth Indian patriarch, received the transmission from Buddhanandi and passed it to Parshva. His name combines "Buddha" with "friend," evoking the Dharma friendship that is considered essential to genuine practice. The Chan tradition honors him as one who kept the direct transmission alive during a period when Buddhism in India was developing elaborate philosophical systems.

The Indian lineage as preserved in Chan is not primarily a scholastic lineage but a lineage of direct experience—of minds meeting in the recognition of the nature of awareness itself. Buddhamitra represents this principle: not the accumulation of doctrine but the direct pointing that dissolves the confusion between concepts about experience and experience itself.