Chan traces its origins to a radical break from this scholastic approach—an explicit rejection of the ultimate authority of writing combined with an insistence that authentic Buddhist teachings are not to be found in books or memorized liturgies but only in the immediate, face-to-face encounters of Buddhist masters and their students. The iconic precedent for this break is the moment of transmission said to have occurred when, in the middle of preaching to a gathering of some 10,000 people on Vulture Peak, the Buddha held up a single flower and elicited a smile of shared realization from his disciple, Mahākāśyapa. Nearly a thousand years later, the purported 28th lineage holder in this line of direct transmission—an Indian monk named Bodhidharma—is said to have arrived in southeast China by sea, made his way to north China, and eventually offered the “skin”, “flesh”, “bone” and “marrow” of his teaching to his four closest disciples, one of whom, Huike (487–593), came to be regarded as the second Chan Patriarch in China.