Hope its not too late to contribute
The first thing I would really like to address and that is the discrepancy of Bodhidharma being from Persia.
By no account, historical or otherwise, is this factual. The historical account linking Damo to Persia (as quoted on Wikipedia) says that he was a “Persian Central Asian”.
This is not a description of a Persian individual. Take a look at maps of the Persian Empire during the time Damo is believed to have arrived at Shaolin and you will see that Persia was in no way central Asia.
However, the Persian Empire strongly shaped and influenced the Brahman civilization. Hinduism as we know it today is, in part, the descendant of a broad family of religions that included that of the Tibetans as well as that of the Persians. Just as there is this notion “Indo-Tibetan”, there is a notion “Indo-Persian”. I strongly recommend reading into this. These cultures all interacted and overlapped in deities, classical religious and cultural texts and at some point even language.
The term “Persian Central Asian” refers to a man from Central Asia. More detailed accounts describe him as a “South Indian of the Western regions”. Interpreted at its most basic, this means that he was from south India and that the source considered India to be a region in the west.
The most specific tradition regarding Damo’s origin refers to the Tamilnadu state in India which, aside from being consistent with other accounts, places him in the family of a Brahman king.
Basically all of the historical accounts and much of the “legendary” ones make perfect cultural, historical and geographical sense when scrutinized. In fact, barring physical unlikelihood such as floating down a river on a single reed, it is not that difficult to reconcile Damo’s history and legend.
Consider this person for a moment, not in terms of what is believed to be true but instead what is probably true, under the assumption that the historical accounts are reliable (which, I believe, they are due to their consistency with one another).
It is probably true that Bodhidharma was a Brahman, most likely being the son of a Brahman king.
It is probably true, then, Damo was a convert to Buddhism.
Buddhism and Hinduism have a very interesting relationship. They share a great many beliefs and differ on equally as many.
The South of India is known for its staggering numbers of temples and monuments. If you have not seen some of the palaces, temples, pagodas and other mind-bending monuments in the Tamil region, I strongly recommend that you hop on Google and check them out.
When one considers Damo’s most likely place of origin, his interaction with Emperor Wu becomes understandable, whether out of Brahman pride (which placed deep emphasis on devoted work) or as a result of deep Buddhist detachment (which rejects materialism).
Damo’s conversion to Buddhism probably did not go over very well with his Brahman family. It is conceivable that Damo decided to distance himself from either them or his culture as a whole and travel to China, which by then was readily absorbing Buddhism. This is not unlike the mentality which drives many spiritual people alive today.
That said, Damo was not born or raised in a vacuum. Whoever the accounts are actually talking about, the person that they piece together is someone who was probably well cultured and highly literate. This brings us to the “yogic practices” that are attributed to Damo’s tenure at Shaolin Temple.
But what was this yoga? There is virtually no evidence whatsoever that ancient yogis handed down systems of yoga postures to their followers. This is because the highest Vedic teachings about yoga make unambiguously clear the futility of clinging onto constructs such as systems of material expressions. One should keep in mind that what we see today as yoga actually consists of postures and transitions just two centuries old. This places historians at a disadvantage as they look back in search of "martial arts" or even simply "yoga" that may have roots with Damo.
So, what yoga did Damo teach the monks? To understand this one must understand yoga as the “art of all practice”, as the Bhagavad Gita puts it. This writing might seem arbitrarily assigned to the evolution Shaolin martial arts but I assure you it is not and highly recommend it for reading. Yoga, as taught by Krishna in this Hindu text, is the renunciation of all material pursuits in favor of devoted meditation on an absolute. This is also yoga in the context of work without the desire for fruitive results, as no single goal can measure up to the liberation of the soul through knowing the absolute. Krishna represents this absolute to Hindus. This is the equivalent of Christ to Christians. The Buddha can be said to have attained knowledge of this absolute.
In my mind, Damo found this absolute in the cave. What he ended up handing down through HuiKe and the original disciples was the essence of what later came to be called “Chan”.
Although it appeared in China relatively soon, Buddhism had a hard time finding fancy in the eyes of the Chinese, particularly the elites. What you see as you trace Buddhism into China is that is becomes more and more political. That is because the Chinese royalty could accept Buddhism’s about-face to the establishments of India, but not so much to the Emperor of China and his culture. The Chinese were (and still are) very proud and selective of what they consider theirs. They already had their own version of spiritual energy, meditative practices and specialized breathing in distinctly Chinese roots such as Taoism.
Nevertheless, Damo could see that whatever the monks at Shaolin knew, they still lacked a true understanding of the meditative path which leads to liberation. Their intentions may have been good but they lacked the tools with which to hone their mind. This is the missing piece that we now call Chan. And in this sense, Chan is Chinese Buddhist yoga.
From there, it was up to the monks. History does not show Damo sticking around very long and it would have been counterproductive for him to have done so. All he needed to know was that at least one of the monks truly understood what he was trying to teach. It is for this reason that I believe the 9-year cave story culminating with HuiKe’s amputation to be at least largely true.
If you ask me, it is possible that Damo did not teach the monks a single motion but rather, through devoted meditation, helped them find within themselves the capacity to work in ways that transcends their personal, perishable needs and drives. I find it possible that he did expose them to certain examples of how meditation can be practiced as medicinal kinesiology.
But isn’t this what qigong is? No. And that is why this practice is not called qigong. It is called gongfu.
Qigong and gongfu are different in one defining way: renunciation of fruitive work. Put aside all the “conditioning” and “applications” and all this stuff and simply consider the meditative practice of form. It is not for health, nor is it for martial prowess. Qigong is practiced very much as a fruitive action. The beautiful thing about Buddhism (particularly the Buddhism of the time) is that gongfu could evolve within it, strictly as a devoted practice. The martial arts and all that stuff came later as a result of outside pressures (war, politics, proximity to Chen village, etc.) molding and influencing the gongfu to become what it needed to in order to survive.