In Chinese Hand Analysis, Terry Dukes informs us that this man is the Esoteric Master Ching Kang Szu, the Head of the Chinese Wu Hsing traditions, the Grand Patriarch and founding-father of Mushindo. According to what he has written, Dukes tells us that 'Master Ching' has been photographed in front of his temple in circa 1912 by DC Graham. We are also told that the photograph resides in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC, USA. Only this last sentence is actually true.

The Smithsonian Institute confirmed that this is indeed a photograph from their collection of DC Graham's papers. In fact, this is not the only photograph of the Buddhist Abbot - altogether there are five. However, there is absolutely no information about this abbot in the DC Graham archives; no name, no age, no sect, no exact location. As Terry Dukes discovered, this man can be whoever you want him to be.

This is what the Archivists at the Smithsonian Institute had to say:

The five photographs are numbered #445-449 in the DC Graham collection and are all marked as having been taken in 1930. All five photographs are different and each of them is titled as follows:

#445 - Buddhist Abbot in Ceremonial Gown
#446 - Buddhist Abbot in Ceremonial Gown
#447 - Buddhist Abbot in Ordinary Gown holding Rosary
#448 - Buddhist Abbot in Ordinary Gown holding Rosary
#449 - Buddhist Abbot in Ordinary Gown

All five photographs are taken on the same path with the same forked tree on the right hand side of the picture. The abbot appears to look younger than he does in the same photograph in Chinese Hand Analysis.

Of the hundreds of photographs that DC Graham took in his missionary travels, there are only six others of (different) Buddhist Abbots and Priests. Curiously, of these eleven photographs, the only one to have been published in an accessible book is also the one to be found within Chinese Hand Analysis and the Source of Shingon Buddhism.

David Crockett Graham (1884-1961) was born in Arkansas USA gaining a BA degree in 1908 and, after studying Theology in New York, was awarded a BD in 1916. In 1928, he published his PhD thesis 'Religion in Szechuan Province, China' after many years of fieldwork within China itself. He also studied archaeology, ethnology and anthropology at Chicago and Harvard Universities. Graham was ordained into the Baptist Ministry in 1911 and later that year went to China with the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society. He stayed briefly in Shanghai before travelling to the city of Suifu (now Ipin) in Szechuan Province. This was to be his post for over twenty years. In the years between 1919 and 1939 - during his summer vacations and free time from missionary work - he made various expeditions in the Szechuan Province, collecting natural history specimens, anthropological relics and recording the culture, religions, language and song of the aboriginal peoples of these regions. In 1932, he was transferred to Chengtu, the capital of Szechuan Province, where he was stationed until his retirement in 1948. His written works on the songs, stories and folk religions of the Ch'uan Miao and the Ch'iangs were published by the Smithsonian Institute and his seminal paper "Folk Religion in South-West China" was published in the Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collection vol 142 no. 2 (November 1961).

DC Graham took many photographs during his travels in China. However, as we can see from this short extract from his biography, the photograph of the 'Buddhist Abbot' was not taken in c1912, as Terry Dukes asserts. The Smithsonian records date the photograph at 1930 - with the likelihood that it was taken during the summer of that year. However, Graham's own notes suggest that he may have taken them in 1928 in his survey of the temples of Suifu conducted in that year. Whichever, either way, they were definitely not taken in 1912!

The Smithsonian holds over 600 photographs taken by DC Graham of many different aspects of Chinese cultural life at that time. Graham was, in fact, one of the last to describe and record the religious and cultural life of the indigenous Chinese peoples before they were swept away forever by the cultural, technological and political changes of the twentieth century. His insight into the religious practices within China at that time is unique.

Because of the uniqueness of Graham's insight into Chinese culture during the first half of the twentieth century, it seems worth the while to spend a little time considering his findings. After all, if we are to find out anything about the person alleged to be 'Master Ching', it might be useful to know what kind of religion he practiced. Graham's anthropological, cultural and ethnical studies of life in Szechuan province - at the time that 'Master Ching' was supposedly alive - should therefore give us some strong indications about the origins and nature of Terry Dukes' Mushindo. According to Terry's legend, it was Master Ching who founded Mushindo; so if we want to know what it was really all about, then we need to know what he was all about. Fortunately, DC Graham is very helpful to us in this regard. Some of his observations are very telling indeed...

As is clear from these observations, Buddhist priests in this part of China knew very little about the teachings of Buddha! Rather, what Graham found was that the priests of the Suifu/Chengtu regions acted more like soothsayers than bikkhus. The important functions of the local Buddhist priest concerned ancestor worship, idolatry, feng-shui, divination and astrology, the printing and selling of paper charms and talismans - and the exorcising of demons.

In some ways then, it can be seen that Terry Dukes' sect did conform to the religious practices of Old China. The various festivals in the BSBA calendar - and various chants and practices within the services were, after all, dedicated to the exorcism of spirits and demons. There is also the fact of Terry's fascination with divination, prediction and fortune-telling. Most of all, we note that ever since the BSBA was first founded in 1977, Terry Dukes repeatedly made public offers of paper charms and talismans in the form of his homemade omamori. If it was an archaic, irrational and un-Buddhist religion that you wanted, then you certainly got it.

So where did Terry get all of this from? Well, undoubtedly a great deal of the soothsaying animism that turned up in the BSBA was derived from his reading of books about Okinawan religious life. Even Kerr's Okinawa: History of an Island People (Tuttle 1958) contains enough within it to produce the hotch-potch religion at the heart of Mushindokai. However, it is clear that Dukes also obtained a copy - or read - DC Graham's Folk Religion in South-West China for the simple reason of the following fact: the picture of 'Master Ching' that Terry has used is a copy of the one to be found in this book.

There are only two places where this photograph occurs - on the slide held in the Smithsonian and in the print reproduced within Graham's 1961 book. If you compare these two photographs carefully, it is apparent that there is a mark to be found in the original photograph which is not there in the print in the book. Dukes did not get the photograph from the Smithsonian - he got the picture from Folk Religion in South-West China. The same picture, without this mark and, incidentally, cropped in the same places at the top, bottom and through the forked tree, also features within Sourcebook of Shingon Buddhism in the Kongoraiden ha sect and within Chinese Hand Analysis. Terry just photocopied the picture out of Graham's monograph and stuck it into the front of his books!

Could he have read this book - even if he does not own a copy of it? Well, as a matter of fact, a copy of this text can be found within Cambridge University Library. As George Andrews said, the trouble in Mushindo all began when Dukes "started hanging out with all those anthropologists" in Cambridge. How true those words appear to be! For this (c1972) was when 'Master Ching' came into being. The unknown abbot of Suifu suddenly became the 'founding-father' and patriarch of Mushindo.

It was, of course, also around this time that the unknown Terry Dukes from Kennington, South London became the 'Shonen Nagaboshi Tomio no Otomo the Sixth'. Curiously, DC Graham comments on the meaning of 'Nagaboshi' in his monograph. He writes:

"It is said that each person has a star in the sky - great persons have large stars and little people have small stars. When a 'falling star' is seen, the people believe that some person has died." (p202)