The film starts with Bodhidharma (Suriya), the third son of a great Tamil king of the Pallava Dynasty, who excels at martial arts and at creating medical remedies. He is sent to China by his guru, who requests him to stop the spread of a pandemic disease existing there from spreading to India. Initially the people in China treated him as an inferior but later when he cures a little girl from the deadly disease and fights against some people who ill treated villagers there, the people of China began to respect and worship him. He begins to teach them how to cure many diseases, the skills of hypnotism and the physical training of the Shaolin monks that led to the creation of Shaolinquan. However after few years, when he expresses his desire to return to India, the villagers plot to poison him and bury him near the temple, believing that their place would be disease free if he's buried there. Bodhidharma agrees to die and subsequently becomes a fundamental figure in Chinese history, affectionately being dubbed as Damo.
The film switches to modern day China, where Dong Lee (Johnny Tri Nguyen) is given the task of starting a government planned biowar against India, known as Operation Red. Dong Lee starts this operation by injecting a virus into a street dog. This disease was the one which occurred during the time of Bodhidharma in China. Meanwhile Subha Srinivasan (Shruti Haasan) researched that Bodhidharma can be brought back to life if his sample of DNA is matched with another sample of DNA which she finds in Aravind (Suriya) a descendant of Bodhidharma. Shuba tries to give life to Bodhidharma to end the menace of Dong Lee. But Dong Lee, who is capable of doing anything, does all impossibly bad things, mastered in 'Nokku Varmam' (Hypnotism), a martial art which was actually taught to the Chinese by Bodhidharma.
