Dhritaka

Dhṛtaka, fifth patriarch in the Chan list of twenty-eight Indians, is described in the *Jǐngdé Chuándēng Lù* as the disciple of Upagupta and teacher of Mīcaka. Almost no material independent of the Chan transmission-of-the-lamp literature survives concerning him; he belongs to the legendary stratum of figures whose function in the lineage is structural rather than biographical^[1]. The traditional accounts describe him as a brahmin youth from Magadha who recognized in Upagupta his teacher and, after a brief encounter, received the wordless transmission.

Dumoulin observes that the Chan compilers, in extending the lineage backward to the Buddha, drew on a stock of names available in northwestern Buddhist scholastic and devotional literature and arranged them into a numerologically elegant sequence ending with Bodhidharma^[2]. Dhṛtaka is one of the names whose role is precisely this—holding a place in the chain rather than carrying an independently attested life-story.