by Rob Schmitz
Xi Jinping may have grown up on a healthy diet of Marxist ideology in Yan’an, the birthplace of the Communist Revolution, but China’s new leader was also steeped in the Chinese classics, and from the moment the Party elected him to rule, he had vowed to return the nation to its traditional values and glory.
If you drew a timeline of China’s rulers across a piece of paper, the Communists would represent a tiny red sliver less than an inch long at the end of a five-foot-long line filled with emperors, but that minuscule red segment had a lot more in common with the rest of the line than outsiders thought.
It was refreshing to chat with Xu. From my work as a teacher and later as a journalist, I had always felt more comfortable with Chinese who were in touch with their own cultural traditions than those who had shed those traditions for Western beliefs, including Communism.
“I’d say most Chinese traditions are being revived by laobaixing,” Xu said, referring to China’s masses from the countryside; “they’re not being revived by intellectuals at the top. China’s intelligentsia and the upper echelon of society are more Westernized and have been heavily influenced by the Soviet Union. But the needs of the laobaixing will someday awaken their memories.”
This grassroots revival would take time. But in China, old traditions and beliefs had a way of reappearing after periods of neglect, like a seed patiently sitting out a drought, waiting for rain. It reminded me of something Henry had said about Confucius’s core philosophy; something I applied to people like CK and Zhao, who, in order to achieve their goals, had learned to be patient for the right moment to head into the storm of the system.
“The Chinese value the lotus flower. Why? Because it grows from the mud but it is pure and beautiful itself,” Henry told me. “Confucius tells us that even though you are not living in an ideal world, you can still search for ways to find meaning in your life, whether from political pursuits or individual pursuits or spiritual pursuits. There is always a way.”
THE PILGRIMAGE BEGAN when I arrived outside CK’s apartment at six in the morning. CK waited for me on the sidewalk beside two boxes and a backpack. On any other early Saturday morning, he could be found lurching home along the winding streets of the French Concession to sleep off a night of clubbing. But on this sunny, sweltering May morning, a temple was waiting.
We heaved the boxes into the trunk of a cab and slumped into the backseat. I handed him a coffee and asked what was in the boxes. “Fruit and grain alcohol,” CK said. “Offerings for the temple.”
He yawned and rubbed his eyes underneath a pair of aviators, wooden Buddha beads around his wrists swaying with each twist. He wore a tan shirt left unbuttoned to his stomach, revealing a red beaded necklace that rested atop his hairless concave chest. He looked like an Asian Jim Morrison. The bright green leaves of the plane trees rushed by for a few minutes and then disappeared underneath us as we climbed onto an empty elevated highway toward the edge of the city.
A few dozen people waited for us outside the bus. A group of men helped us with our bags and boxes and loaded them in the bus’s cargo hold. CK thanked them, addressing them as “Shixiong,” “brother-in-learning.” I had wrongly assumed the bus would be full of people CK’s age—there were just a handful of them. The rest was a smattering of everyday Chinese society: families with children, single middle-aged professionals, the elderly; there were engineers, white-collar office employees, retired factory workers, construction laborers, teachers, and a Buddhist nun. It was about as accurate a microcosm of urban China as you could find, all on their way to explore the mysteries of life together.
CK waited outside as a shixiong performed roll call. He leaned against the bus and lit a cigarette, completing his look. A girl in a black muscle shirt and ripped jeans disembarked and came to rest her elbow on CK’s shoulder. Without looking at her, he removed a pack of Marlboro Reds from his pocket, flipped it open, and held it up in the air. She removed one, he closed the pack, and with his other hand he opened a lighter, holding its flame to her cigarette. She took a drag and exhaled before nuzzling his neck.
“This is Jackie,” he announced.
Jackie had long, jet-black hair, a thin oval face with a slender nose and high-set eyes, giving her the look of a northern Chinese from the border of Mongolia. She wore beads, too, but her black fingernails and mascara added a goth element. If CK was Jim Morrison, she was Avril Lavigne—a pair of rock ’n’ roll lovers on a pilgrimage to find Buddha. CK mentioned in the cab he had been dating her for a month, “but I’m not sure it’s going to work out,” he admitted. “I’m just having fun.”
Jackie looked to be a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, but was actually a twenty-five-year-old secretary. She had met CK at his sandwich shop. She wasn’t religious, but CK had turned her on to Buddhism and she had come along to learn more. Her parents, shop owners in a northern district of Shanghai, had assigned her older brother and his best friend to go along and keep watch over her.
The trip hadn’t even started yet and the two chaperones already had their hands full. Jackie’s brother nervously watched his sister slip her arm around CK’s waist. Her brother was tall, lanky, and had a long face that was devoid of any symmetry: one eye was bigger than the other, his nose bent slightly to the left, even his smile was crooked. His friend was big and round with eyes that seemed to disappear into his fleshy face. He wore an extra-large Baltimore Ravens T-shirt that failed to contain his expansive belly. Wherever CK and Jackie would roam that weekend, the bumbling pair of men trailed them, like Laurel and Hardy chasing a crook, wondering how they had gotten themselves into this mess.
The bus soared out of the city thanks to an absence of early-morning traffic on the elevated expressway, the height of the high-rises crowding Shanghai’s suburbs gradually shrinking with each kilometer. We were headed five hours west, following the muddy Yangtze River and crossing its many tributaries into the fertile delta countryside the Chinese call yu mi zhi xiang, the “homeland of fish and rice.” I sat next to a friend of CK’s named Sun. He had moved to Shanghai from the northern Chinese city of Xi’an. “Have you been?” he asked me.
I had, and I responded the way many Chinese were expected to respond, by praising his hometown’s food and tourist sites. Xi’an was home to one of China’s most important cultural treasures: the Terracotta Warriors, an army of statues found in an underground catacomb thought to be guarding the still-unexcavated tomb of China’s first emperor, Qin Shihuang. “Jiade,” Sun spat, using the Chinese term for “fake.” “He’s not buried there. They haven’t discovered a thing there.”
I thought it better to ask Sun about his attraction to Buddhism. “I was looking for something to believe in,” he said. “I started by reading books and anthologies, and then I visited the temple for the first time this past Winter Solstice. I asked the master many questions, and he told me I should study the Buddhist scriptures. He seemed smart, so I’ve done that for months now.”
Sun was thirty years old. He had studied industrial design in Xi’an and accepted a position with a Shanghai firm after attending a local job fair in his hometown. But after he arrived, the job was not what it seemed. “Wo bei pian le,” he told me—I was cheated.
The firm had lied to him about the position and the salary in order to lure him to Shanghai to help sell foreign-looking villas in Jiading, a sparsely populated district on the outskirts of the city. “Business is terrible,” he complained.
This was hardly surprising. China’s property market was oversaturated, a bubble waiting to pop, and places like Jiading had become ghost towns filled with vacant neighborhoods of luxury villas. Sun admitted occasional pilgrimages to his temple were the only bright spots in his life at the moment.
I turned to CK and asked him about the temple. He told me his shifu, or master, helped manage it with funding from dozens of worshippers in Shanghai. “Only Shanghai?” I asked.
“Yeah, all of the worshippers are from Shanghai,” he said.
It seemed odd that a
temple so far away from Shanghai would exclusively serve the city’s population. I said so and asked CK why. “The government is strict with religion,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “My master teaches us a lot of different Buddhist practices, and he wants to do that somewhere quiet where he won’t receive any government interference.”
“What kind of practices?” I asked.
“Secret ones,” CK said softly, making sure the others didn’t hear us.
I rolled my eyes and CK grinned. “Okay,” he whispered, surrendering. “He teaches us about Tibetan Buddhist practices and religion.”
There was nothing illegal about teaching Tibetan Buddhism in China. It’s a state-sanctioned religion and Tibetan Buddhists are, by law, free to worship. However, Chinese authorities keep a close eye on the religion and its practices. Many Tibetans have long sought independence from China, and their sect of Buddhism follows the teachings of their spiritual and political leader, the Dalai Lama, whom the Chinese leadership considers a separatist and a threat to national sovereignty.
CK told me his master was interested in Tibetan Buddhism for religious reasons, not political ones. “The purpose of our studies is to find a way out of Lunhui—the reincarnation cycle,” explained CK. “Our master believes the best way to do this is through Tibetan Buddhism.”
CK said his master had neglected to inform local officials about the Tibetan Buddhist practices at the temple, and they didn’t seem interested because it paid its taxes and few locals worshipped there. The “secret” method of instruction helped explain why CK’s master exclusively catered to worshippers from a faraway city rather than to locals—if locals were involved, nearby authorities would inevitably hear about the goings-on at the temple. This way, CK’s master could freely teach his students a path to enlightenment in peace.
THE BUS CAME TO A STOP along the main street of a village lined with farming supply shops. We disembarked and carried boxes of supplies and offerings down a long alleyway to the entrance of the temple. Everyone pitched in except for Jackie, whose black-tipped fingers were too busy texting her friends back in Shanghai. She wandered down the middle of the alley as if in a trance.
“Isn’t the sky here so blue?” asked CK. “You can actually see the clouds!”
I looked up. The sun was directly above us, heating up the countryside through a pale blue sky dappled with clouds whose outlines were blurred by a veil of brownish smog. It was still polluted out here, but less so than Shanghai, where a sharp azure hue was unusual. Jackie took a break from her phone to point her head up, smiling. I looked behind me and noticed Laurel and Hardy squinting their eyes and pointing their phones toward the sky, immortalizing nature’s rare appearance.
There was more of the natural world inside the temple. A pair of red tubs filled with two dozen soft-shelled turtles lay in the shade next to the kitchen. The animals scrambled on top of one another, clawing those underneath them to escape. The last time I had seen this many turtles in one place, they were ready to be boiled alive for a wedding dinner in Zhao Shiling’s hometown. Laurel and Hardy poked at them, picking them up by their tails, grinning at their helplessness.
“We’re going to set them free later,” CK told them, motioning to the river behind the temple.
This was common practice among Chinese Buddhists—buying live animals at the market to set them free later—but the ancient ritual in compassion sometimes backfired. “800 Carp Ceremoniously Set Free in China Netted by Fishermen Moments Later” was one of dozens of headlines from years’ worth of local stories capturing the rising tension between spirituality and self-interest in China. “We’re quiet about where we release them,” CK assured me when I mentioned this modern contradiction. “We usually do it at night so that the locals won’t snatch them downstream.”
The temple was a work in progress. The master had overseen the construction of five interconnected red-tile-roofed buildings. There were meeting rooms, living quarters, a canteen, and two large worship halls that rose high above the rest of the surrounding village. The project had proceeded in fits and starts—contingent on a seasonal cycle of donations—over the span of ten years, and it would probably take another ten before it was completed. Atop the roof of the main temple hall—named “The Brightest Hall” in Chinese—sat a pair of golden deer facing a dharma wheel, a symbol of Tibetan Buddhism, with flowing golden Tibetan script written underneath them. In the middle of a square in front of the temple stood a two-story-tall golden statue of a monk dressed in robes holding a staff in his right hand. “That’s Dizang pusa,” CK told me as we backed up to get a better look. “He’s the only pusa who chose to remain in hell.”
A pusa, or bodhisattva, is an enlightened being who has dedicated his or her life to helping others attain enlightenment. The most popular bodhisattva in China is Guanyin, a female pusa associated with mercy and compassion who is typically worshipped as a deity. Dizang, known as Ksitigarbha in Sanskrit, is a lesser-known bodhisattva who, according to Buddhist tradition, chose to go to hell to help save those who suffered there.
I shielded my face from the sun and squinted upward at Dizang. He was bald with long earlobes that nearly grazed his shoulders. His half-shut eyes gazing past the rice paddies in the distance looked detached and confident. Dizang seemed like a good fit for CK. As a hell dweller, he was easily the most rock ’n’ roll of the bodhisattvas.
We spent most of the day waiting for the master to appear. He hadn’t met the bus when it arrived—he was inside his living quarters meditating, CK explained—and worshippers slowed down as they walked past his two-story home to catch a glimpse of him through a window. After it was clear it would take some time for him to finish meditating, CK and a few others laid yoga mats in front of Dizang pusa and began to prostrate. They held their hands together in prayer, lifted their arms above their heads, squatted to their knees, and dropped their bodies to the ground, pushing forward to stretch out, briefly lying on their stomachs before reversing the motion and standing back up again. They were supposed to do this 108 times while contemplating their sins. In the sweltering, sweaty forty-five minutes it took CK to complete this, Jackie, Laurel, and Hardy sat in the shade of a temple eave, contemplating their smartphones.
At three in the afternoon, we filed into a conference room filled with dozens of chairs surrounding a long wooden table. A wall of windows looked out onto a bend in a river flowing through lush green rice paddies. After we sat down, the master appeared, seating himself at the head of the table in a black leather chair. He looked around the hushed room with a frown, slowly taking inventory of who had come, unconsciously pulling a string of gray beads through the bloated fingers of his left hand, holding each bead between his middle finger and thumb before moving on to the next. Though only in his thirties, the master commanded a room like a seasoned military leader, narrow eyes darting from one person to the next. This aura was aided by his burly physique, like that of an offensive lineman draped in a bright yellow robe. His large head was shaved, accentuating an asymmetrical face dominated by fat, protruding lips stuck in a permanent pout, revealing a pair of buckteeth whenever they parted.
After a minute of silence, he spoke. “What did you call me in here for? I forgot what you wanted to know,” he said, slightly irritated.
A young girl sitting on her mother’s lap ignored the master, asking another child to hand her a toy. Her mother shushed her. The master reserved a smug smile for the children, the only ones here who weren’t under his influence. CK, who sat beside him, spoke: “Master, can I put a thangka near a fireplace?” he asked.
“That wasn’t the question I was told you would ask,” the master snapped. “What was your original question?”
CK shifted his weight to the edge of his seat, nervous. He turned to Jackie, slouched into her chair. “Ask the master to interpret your dream,” he stammered.
“What dream?” the master barked.
“She dreamed of a pusa,” said CK.
“Ah? Whic
h pusa?” the master asked, looking mildly interested, fingering his beads.
CK turned to Jackie, who looked too scared to speak. “Just tell him!” he shouted nervously.
“Ah, I don’t remember exactly,” Jackie murmured. “I dreamed I was in a small town, and I saw a very large statue of a pusa with beautiful lights in the background. I thought the pusa said something to me, but I couldn’t remember.”
“Do you know which pusa it was?” asked the master.
Jackie shook her head.
“Fine. I’ll go find a pusa brochure and you can page through it,” he said sarcastically, eliciting snorts of laughter from CK and the others.
“Master, how about my previous question?” interrupted CK. “I live in an apartment with an old fireplace that we don’t use anymore. Can I hang a thangka over it?”
The master pursed his lips at what seemed like another silly question. A thangka was a Buddhist painting on fabric. What did it matter where you hung it? “So you’re using a thangka as a decoration inside your home?” asked the master, his eyebrows curved, his fingers stroking his chin.
“Not really,” answered CK. “We’re supposed to worship Buddha at home, and my thangka is part of my shrine. I was just wondering if the fireplace was a respectful place for it.”
The master forced a perplexed look from his face. “As long as you don’t hang it in the bathroom,” he said to more laughter.
The master took a sip of his tea and grimaced. “Who made this tea for me?” he shouted.
The room fell quiet; the only sounds were the hushed voices of children who continued to play, oblivious to the master. “I did,” a young man in glasses answered, raising his hand.
“What a prodigal son! Why fill my cup with so many tea leaves?” the master yelled. “What a waste of money! I could drink for two days with this many leaves. Is this tea or soy sauce?”
