by Bill Porter
Our guide poured us each a glass of the winery’s amber brew and explained how it’s made. First, there’s the water. Only the mineral-rich water of nearby Chienhu Lake is used. This is then combined with glutinous rice from neighboring Kiangsu province and millet from North China. The resulting mixture goes through two fermentations, the first lasting a week and the second more than a month. The mash is then pressed, and the resulting wine is pasteurized and aged in pottery jars for as long as ten or even twenty years. Our guide poured us another glass and explained that Shaohsing wine is also good for the health. It contains, she said, twenty-one amino acids. She didn’t explain how those amino acids survived the pasteurization process, but we didn’t care.
The winery, she said, produced 43,000 tons per year, 60 percent of which was exported to Japan, home of Asia’s other famous rice wine, sake. But unlike sake’s lighter shades that contain maybe a hint of yellow, Shaohsing wine ranges from amber to red to dark brown, with its color and taste depending on the relationship of glutinous rice to millet. The variation results in four categories of wine, ranging from dry to sweet. After pouring us glasses of each kind, our guide explained that the fame of Shaohsing wine rested not only on its taste but also on its medicinal value: it whet the appetite, it relaxed the muscles, it stimulated the circulation, it extended one’s life, it did everything except the laundry. But we had to drink it, she said, every day. That sounded like a prescription we could follow, and we bought enough on the way out to extend our lives at least a few days.
After thanking our guide, we floated to our next destination: a small garden at the south edge of town. It was called Shen Garden, and it was once a favorite place for local poets to meet. Among them was one of the most famous poets of the twelfth century. His name was Lu You (1125–1210), and everyone in Shaohsing, if not all of China, knows the story of how Lu You married his cousin, T’ang Wan, and how he was forced to divorce her because his mother didn’t like her distracting him from his studies. Lu and his cousin then remarried other people, but years later they met by chance one day in Shen Garden. Before parting, they both wrote poems to each other on the garden wall. T’ang Wan died the following year, of grief, people say, and visitors can still read the couple’s poems in the garden’s small memorial hall. I read Lu You’s, which was composed to the tune Chaitoufeng:
Your plain pink hands
this fragrant yellow wine
the city in spring the willows by the temple walls
the cruelty of the east wind
the fading of our joy
the constant thoughts of sorrow
all the years apart
and yet and yet and yet again
spring is still the same
though you’re thinner now
the tear-streaked red eyes behind silken sleeves
the peach petals falling
the deserted pond pavilion
the vows that remain
the letters we can’t send
no and no and no again
It was always hard visiting such beautiful places that were home to so much sadness. We left the garden and walked a few more blocks to a place associated with a more recent author. It was the home of Lu Hsun. Lu Hsun was born here in 1881, and he also grew up here. The part of the house in which he lived was preserved as if he were expected back. The furniture was the same. Even the garden where he wrote some of his most memorable essays was still here. Next door, there was a memorial hall, where people came to pay their respects. Mao called Lu China’s greatest revolutionary writer. The displays certainly emphasized his left-wing sympathies, but Lu was hardly a revolutionary. Still, he inspired revolutionaries. We also visited the small private school he attended as a boy. It was about a block from his house and was called the Sanweiyuan, or Three Flavor Academy. We could still see Lu Hsun’s old desk and the place on it where he carved the character for “early” to remind himself not to be late.
Former quarry of East Lake
One final stop on the Lu Hsun pilgrimage was the old Prosperity Tavern that was once managed by one of his relatives and also appeared in his stories. It was just down the street from the Lu Hsun Memorial Museum, and it was as good a place as any to sit down and enjoy a late lunch. We ordered all the specialties: roast beans in anise, soy sauce duck, drunken shrimp and mushrooms, and, of course, some lao-chiu. Before we knew it the afternoon was half over, and so were we. But we weren’t quite done with Shaohsing.
We staggered out onto the street and flagged down yet another three-wheeler, and went to see one of Shaohsing’s newest sights. It was called East Lake. The lake was the new part. Over 2,000 years ago, the site was used as a quarry and connected with the Grand Canal. Then, about 200 years ago, the local authorities built a dike separating the quarry from the canal, but they continued to allow the canal’s water to flow through the quarry by means of a series of locks. The lake they created wasn’t more than two meters deep, if that, but it was a stunning setting.
It would have been perfect for a picnic. Unfortunately, we arrived a little late in the day. In fact, we arrived just before closing. But there was still enough time for a boatman to pole us around in one of the long, narrow boats Shaohsing is famous for. He poled us into a series of gorges that snaked into the quarry a hundred meters or so. It was a strange sensation, sort of like floating through a cave that’s open at the top. We should have come earlier, or the place should have stayed open later. We had to leave after only an hour, when it finally got too dark to tell the water from the sky. We returned to our hotel and had another memorable dinner at the Yuanlin and went to sleep. Shaohsing was one of the ugliest, most chaotic towns we had been in. But thanks to its wine, we were entranced and wished we could have stayed longer, much longer.
20. Tientai
We didn’t feel a thing when we went to bed, but we did the next morning. Despite its reputed health-giving benefits, Shaohsing wine was still wine. We got up slowly. But at least we got up. And at least we made it to the bus station. We had one more mountain to see, and we were there in three hours—or at least near enough. We were still a three-wheeler ride away.
Fengkan Bridge and Sui dynasty wall
As far as mountains in China go, the fame of Tientaishan is fairly recent. It didn’t become known to China’s literati until Sun Ch’o visited in the middle of the fourth century and wrote a long poetic exposition in praise of its scenic beauty in his “Ode to Visiting Tientaishan.” But its real fame didn’t begin until the monk Chih-yi moved here near the end of the sixth century.
We met Chih-yi briefly at the beginning of our journey when we visited Hengshan. Chih-yi studied there with the monk Hui-ssu. It was Hui-ssu who established Hengshan as a center of Buddhist practice. Before that, it was a Taoist mountain. His disciple Chih-yi did the same with Tientai. Among the many temples Chih-yi built on the mountain, the most famous was Kuoching. It was located at the foot of the mountain, and we asked our driver to take us there. Kuoching was also the monastery where Han-shan, or Cold Mountain, lived when he wasn’t living in his cave. We were there in five minutes. It was that close. The temple had been rebuilt many times, but its original front wall—built to keep out ghosts—was still standing. It was the same wall Cold Mountain covered with poems 1,200 years ago. The graffiti was gone, but the wall was still there. So was the bridge named for Feng-kan, a monk who rode into the temple one day in the eighth century on the back of a tiger. Feng-kan was also known for his abrupt manner. The only thing he would tell anyone who asked for instruction was: “Whatever works .” He also left behind four poems, the first of which is this one:
I’ve been to Tientai
maybe a million times
like a cloud or river
drifting back and forth
roaming free of trouble
trusting the Buddha’s spacious path
meanwhile the world’s forked mind
only brings people pain
Tientaishan pagoda
One
day when Feng-kan was walking on a nearby slope, he found a child who had been abandoned on the side of the trail. He picked the boy up and brought him back to the monastery. Because of how he was found, people called the boy Shih-te, meaning Pickup, and the monks put him to work in the monastery kitchen. Some years later, the third member of Chinese Buddhism’s famous trio showed up. Apparently, he was on the wrong side of the An Lu-shan Rebellion and preferred anonymity. No one ever learned his real name. He called himself Hanshan, or Cold Mountain, after the cave where he lived when he wasn’t staying at Kuoching.
Feng-kan, Shih-te, and Han-shan marched to a different drummer. At Kuoching they harassed the monks as well as the pilgrims. Their harassment was harmless enough and was limited to the odd poem they wrote on walls or trees or wherever a passerby would notice. Among Pickup’s was #33:
We slip into Tientai caves
we visit people unseen
me and my friend Cold Mountain
eat magic mushrooms under the pines
we talk about the past and present
and sigh at the world gone mad
everyone going to Hell
and going for a long long time
We were hoping to meet this trio of bodhisattvas ourselves, or at least pay our respects. And we hoped to use Kuoching as our base. After crossing Fengkan Bridge and maneuvering past the temple’s Sui dynasty wall, we walked through the entrance and asked directions to the guest hall. A few minutes later, we were there. So was the guest manager. This time, I didn’t have to roll up my sleeves. We said we wanted to spend a couple of nights, and the guest manager asked his assistant to lead us to the guest wing. That was easy. The guest manager’s assistant turned us over to the laywoman in charge of guest quarters, and she showed us to the loveliest of rooms at the back of the temple. All the furniture was rosewood, or at least it looked like rosewood. We were expecting something more rustic, but we weren’t complaining. We dropped off our bags, then went to explore the temple.
Kuoching was one of the oldest and best-preserved monasteries in China. The courtyards were vast, and the shrine halls were ancient. The trees were even more ancient. They included thousand-year-old gingkos and locusts and a plum tree that was even older. The laywoman in charge of guest quarters wanted to make sure we saw the plum tree, and took us there first. It was planted by Chih-yi 1,400 years ago. She said it still flowered every spring.
Chih-yi did more than build temples and plant trees. He also established a variety of Buddhism that was much more eclectic than other schools. It admitted the truth of seemingly contradictory teachings by assigning them to different periods of the Buddha’s life and by relating them to the different needs of the Buddha’s audiences. As far as his own doctrine, Chih-yi and his successors emphasized that every thought of every being was no different from the mind of the Buddha, that our everyday life was the necessary foundation of the religious life. Two hundred years after Chih-yi died, the ninth patriarch of the Tientai sect went even further. He proclaimed that the buddha nature, the ability to become enlightened, was not only shared by all beings, it was shared by mountains and rivers. He could have added plum trees.
Despite the openness of such an approach, the Tientai sect never attracted many adherents in China, and it probably would have disappeared as a distinct teaching if Japanese and Korean monks hadn’t been impressed with its equal emphasis on faith and meditation and hadn’t taken it back to their lands in the T’ang and Sung dynasties.
After walking through the temple’s courtyards, we went back out the front gate and past the Sui dynasty wall and back across Fengkan Bridge and followed a path on the other side of the road that took us through the woods to the stupa containing the remains of the eighth-century monk Yi-hsing. As the result of his writings, Yi-hsing was considered a patriarch of Tantric Buddhism in both China and Japan. He was even more famous as a mathematician, and he was commissioned by the emperor to prepare a new calendar—which he did by setting up celestial observation posts as far south as Vietnam and as far north as Siberia. Being an open-minded scholar he traveled throughout the realm seeking advice. At one point, he visited Kuoching Temple and through an open doorway heard a monk working the beads of an abacus. Yi-hsing was so impressed with the monk’s mathematical abilities that he studied with him for several years before finally completing the new calendar. He later died at Kuoching, and was buried on the hill across from the temple.
After paying our respects, we walked farther up the slope to the Sui dynasty pagoda. It was the first thing people saw when they arrived at the foot of the mountain. At sixty meters, it was hard to miss. It was constructed at the beginning of the seventh century shortly after Kuoching was built. We never did find out whose remains it contained. The sun was beginning to set, and we hurried back to the temple. It was a good thing we did. We arrived just in time for dinner. Afterwards we talked to a layman who lived at the temple and who helped take care of guests. His name was Layman Fang, and we asked him if he could help us arrange a three-wheeler for the next day. We wanted to see the sights, both on the mountain and beyond. He said he would take care of it, and he did.
The next morning our three-wheeler was waiting for us in the temple parking lot, and we climbed aboard. We had a big day planned and began with the mountain and Chih-yi. From Kuoching, we followed the main road up the mountain about fifteen minutes, then turned off and zigzagged up the slope on the right until we came to Chenchueh Temple. It was a small temple, but it was an important stop on the pilgrim trail. It contained Chih-yi’s mummified remains. We went inside and lit some incense in the shrine hall where his body was kept. We were surprised to find ourselves alone, except for an old monk who served as the caretaker. While the incense burned down, we walked outside to a balcony behind the temple where we had a clear view of the mountain. Tientai was the kind of mountain where a person could get lost. There were so many peaks and ridges and deep valleys. We were glad someone built a road. And we made good use of it. We returned to our three-wheeler, and fifteen minutes later we arrived at the last stop on our mountain pilgrimage. It was one of China’s most famous waterfalls and was called Stone Bridge Cascade.
Transport to Cold Mountain Cave
We got out and walked over to see it for ourselves. Two streams came together just above the waterfall, then flowed under a natural rock bridge before dropping nearly fifty meters into a pool below. There was a restraining barricade near the bridge, but in ancient times some visitors tested their karma by walking across. The great Ming dynasty travel-diarist Hsu Hsia-k’o, whose home and grave we’d visited near Wuhsi, walked out onto the bridge, looked down, and lived to write about it. We decided to limit ourselves to a more distant view. The rock bridge that Hsu and others walked across was a meter wide at its widest point and a half-meter wide at its narrowest. And it was ten meters across and wet with mist from the waterfall. We were happy to turn down the thrill of adventure. Standing there watching the water crash onto the rocks below was enough. We returned to our three-wheeler and went back down the mountain. This time we passed Kuoching Temple by. Our next stop was Cold Mountain’s cave.
Cold Mountain Cave
Unlike others who wrote poems on paper or silk and made copies for friends, Cold Mountain wrote his poems on walls or rocks or trees and left them for the wind and rain to sort out. Not long after he disappeared in the early ninth century, a local magistrate collected more than 300 of his poems, and in 1983, I published an English translation of the whole collection. Ever since then, I had wanted to visit the place that inspired the poems.
Our three-wheeler took us back through Tientai, then north on the highway that led toward Shaohsing. After two or three kilometers, we turned west at the Koshan bus stop and followed a dirt road into the countryside. After about twenty minutes, we passed through the village of Pingchiao, and after another twenty, we entered the village of Chiehtou. Halfway through the village, we turned south and followed a stream through a gap in the mountains. On
the other side of the mountains, we came to a bridge lined with cormorants drying their wings. We crossed the bridge and followed the road to the left. A few bumpy minutes later, we parked next to a plank bridge that spanned a small stream. We got out and crossed the bridge, and walked into a narrow ravine. This was Mingyen, or Bright Cliff, where Pickup reportedly lived after leaving Kuoching. We followed the ravine until it ended in a series of huge caverns. A crack between two of them was where Cold Mountain and Pickup reportedly disappeared. At least that was the story.
View from inside Cold Mountain Cave
The first time Cold Mountain tried to visit this same place, he wrote poem #9:
I longed to visit the eastern cliff
countless years until today
I finally grabbed a vine and climbed
but met mist and wind halfway
the trail was too narrow for my clothes
the moss too slick for my shoes
I stopped beneath this cinnamon tree
and slept with a cloud for a pillow
View from outside Cold Mountain Cave
We were glad we had an easier time and lit some incense at the small shrine below the crack where the two eccentric bodhisattvas disappeared. Since there wasn’t much else to see, we returned to our three-wheeler and headed for our final destination, the cave where Cold Mountain lived in inspired seclusion. We re-crossed the bridge where the cormorants were still sunning themselves, but instead of heading back to Chiehtou, we turned left and followed the road that followed the river upstream. A sign on the bridge called it the Shihfeng River. We drove for several kilometers along its shore until we came to a village of maybe a dozen houses. It was called Houyen, or Rear Cliff. Our driver turned off the main road and drove through the village. The houses were so close together, our three-wheeler barely fit. It was slow going, but we made it. Once beyond the village, we re-crossed the river and continued on a road that was no more than a pair of ruts. After a kilometer or so, we came to a huge cliff with a huge cave at its base. The cliff was called Hanyen, or Cold Cliff, and the cave was Cold Mountain Cave.
