Once on a Moonless Night

by Dai Sijie

  Still this phase was punctuated by various achievements and broken up by bouts of enthusiasm, but the depression was always latent and reared back up from time to time, as regular as the breathing of the unknown demon that inhabited me, paralysing me for days on end. I was pinned to my bed, shut away in my “glass menagerie,” as I called my modest one-bedroom apartment, whose walls I had entirely covered with gilt-framed mirrors. (Buying a flat would have dispelled my constant anxiety about eventually dying on the street, but property ownership was far beyond my means and I had to make do with renting.) My own diagnosis was that my depressive state was due just as much to my unfortunate experiences, one in China and one in Mali, as to my obtaining the highly competitive agrégation teaching qualification and being given a job at a lycée in Nice, two events I felt, more or less consciously, were betrayals of Tumchooq.

  By now I was thirty-two and could already see what I would be like at sixty, or even on the eve of my death: shrivelled, fragile, toothless, almost bald, surrounded by shoe boxes full of payment slips from social security, tax invoices, pension statements, insurance certificates, bills for the phone, electricity, plumbers and travel agencies, rent receipts, bank statements, warranties and guarantees, all neatly sorted and filed in chronological order. My ossified life was set to the rhythm of weekly phone calls from my family, disastrous Christmases, unsuccessful presents, weekly shopping, constantly postponed pay rises, arguments with colleagues or neighbours, in a word all the complications of human relationships. My glass menagerie was on the Rue des Terres au Curé (a bleak name evoking an impecunious curates measly plot of land), and I saw its apparently anodyne number, 77, as a premonition of the venerable age I would reach before breathing my last.

  My windows overlooked a fish market and every morning the rumble of delivery lorries, the vendors’ cries and above all the fetid stench of the sea infiltrated my bedroom, where the countless mirrors in their gold filigreed frames flashed and shone in silent competition, bouncing back multiple images of me, huddled in my bed, small and inanimate as the puppets hanging on the walls: puppets on strings representing Chinese emperors and empresses, courtiers, scholars and concubines, their long sleeves wafting in the air, swaying slightly on the end of strings connecting their shoulders and hands to two crossed rods; two or three Indonesian glove puppets, their wooden heads attached to golden costumes with hands also made of wood at the ends of the sleeves; a few traditional French guignol puppets, a policeman, a baker and the like. I felt like them, connected to the world by a few invisible threads, my morning cup of coffee, my work and most of all the two volumes of my Hebrew dictionary, which I had had specially bound: a silk cover lined with moiré, decorated with a clasp and corners in gold. Ever since my return to France I experienced voluptuous pleasure in touching them, handling them, turning them over, opening them and closing them. Giving in to my natural tendencies, I had set my heart on these volumes which, for a couple of hours each day, helped me in my semi-autodidactic quest to conquer those unfamiliar words, to step over the sacred threshold into the temple, to embark on a new journey of indeterminate length and to an unknown destination. The peculiar need—that I experienced several times a day and sometimes even at night—to touch the dictionary, the need I had already felt several times in my life to cling to a foreign language, proved the most effective anti-depressant. I felt genuine love for the Hebrew language. Its right-to-left writing, its words written only in consonants, the vowels staying buried inside the readers head like a family secret … it all inevitably reminded me of the manuscript on the Tumchooq sutra, whose opening sentence, “Once on a moonless night,” still occasionally echoed around inside my head.

  Time passed. In 1988 I published Being a Jew in China, a history book, but also the first work I succeeded in completing. Two years later, although I didn’t know why, perhaps guided by Paul d’Ampères ghost, I began work on another book about two great translators of the past—his precursors, you could say—who travelled the length and breadth of China as he did and became Chinese citizens. This was the synopsis:

  The story takes place in fifth-century China and retraces the lives of two great translators of Buddhist sutras. The first, Buddhabhadra, was born in Kapilavastu, Buddha’s homeland, and was a follower of the strict Theravada discipline, Hinayana. He brings the Pali canon to Changan, then the capital of China, where the other protagonist, Kumarajiva, a native of Kutcha and a follower of the Mahayana tradition, reigns as absolute master of all religious activities. The latter owes his celebrity as much to the quality of his oral translations of Sanskrit texts into Chinese (each of his performances presided over by the emperor himself in the presence of hundreds of faithful disciples and scholars writing down every word he utters) as to his reputation for lax morals, particularly, if historians are to be believed, in his relationships with the fairer sex.

  The differences in their doctrines rapidly create enmity between the two men, setting the court ablaze and dividing not only the court itself but also its intellectual following, while confronting the entire country with a dilemma as to the choice of a national religion. Buddhabhadra is appreciated for his erudition and talent and for the rigorous restraint of his behaviour, but his contempt for the great of this world, particularly with respect to the emperor, hampers the spread of Hinayana in China (in the same way that, a thousand years later, the Jesuits would miss the opportunity to convert that vast empire to Christianity).

  Kumarajiva emerges triumphant from the dispute. The emperor, who dedicates what amounts to a religion to this great translators qualities, even comes up with the idea of perpetuating these by ensuring the monk has descendants, setting him up in sumptuous apartments with ten wives of unmatched beauty while the loser, Buddhabhadra, is forced to leave the capital and trail around southern China as a simple beggar, dressed in the rags dictated by his beliefs.

  Nevertheless, driven by personal desire—the source of all our misfortunes—he decides in a final spasm of pride to challenge Kumarajiva with his written translations, given that the latter translates only orally into Chinese, aiming less at faithfulness to the original than at clarity and elegance. And so it is that Buddhabhadra, while begging in the street and living on alms, translates the twenty volumes he still has of The Jatakas (the complete Jatakas comprises fifty volumes, but thirty had been stolen from him along with all the other sutras in Pali that he took with him). The Jatakas, or “nativities,” consist of some five hundred accounts, in a mixture of prose and verse, relating the former lives of Buddha. All specialists in the field agree on one point: Buddhabhadra’s translation is a masterpiece of Chinese literature, a veritable miracle if its translators foreign origins are taken into account. Nothing more beautiful has ever been created before or since those twenty volumes of The Jatakas in Chinese, volumes in which Buddhabhadra evokes every hardship suffered by the future Buddha, whether in animal, human or divine form, his sentences stripped of all weight, unremarkable in themselves yet dazzling when put together, like simple bricks which together make the edifice of a magnificent shrine.

  These two adversaries die within a day of each other. Kumarajiva, whose lack of children thwarts the emperors wishes, sees his popularity decline and is increasingly challenged by Chinese scholars who openly accuse him of mixing his own ideas in with Buddha’s in his oral translations. Feeling, at his more than respectable age, quite ready to breathe his last, he begs Buddha that justice be granted to him after his death by ensuring that, during his incineration, his whole body should be reduced to ashes except for his tongue, as sacred proof of the fidelity and veracity of his oral translations. Perhaps we should see this extreme spectacle as a final bit of spin from Kumarajiva, the great master of communication, but also as a sincere need to justify himself. Kumarajiva’s wish is granted. In the largest temple in the capital, before the emperor and his entire court, the pyre is set alight and eventually delivers a verdict in favour of the late great translator. The emperor immediately declares the Mah
ayana doctrine Chinas official religion.

  In response, Buddhabhadra sets off for Ceylon in pursuit of the remaining Jatakas in Pali, intending to translate them in their entirety. But that same evening he is assassinated by a fanatical disciple of Kumarajiva’s in a miserable inn near Prome, an ancient kingdom in Upper Burma known at the time as Pyu. After committing his crime, the murderer rips the filthy patched robes from his victims body and, screaming frenziedly slices them with his knife, cutting them into pieces no larger than a fingernail, a symbolic gesture representing the annihilation of Buddhabhadra’s beliefs.

  It seems to have been at the mention of the name Prome, or Pyu, that in late July 1990, on a night when my “glass menagerie” was plunged deep in silence, I decided to make use of my long summer holiday to set off in search of historical documents at the scene of the crime, in Burma. But the most likely determining factor, as I acknowledged on my way there, was my reading a footnote by Paul d’Ampère who, in order to check the name of Prome, which was barely mentioned by Marco Polo in his book, had gone to see the place for himself:

  Having walked for nearly two weeks without seeing anything except for jungle trees and the course of the Irrawaddy, suddenly a huge rounded hump, several dozen metres in height, I would think, loomed out of the river mist. It was an imposing sight, which drove everything else into the background. This was Bebe Paya, the temple of Sriksetra, so like its Indian forerunner in name and physical form: monolithic, solid, tall—so tall I was almost afraid to look up—sculpted and hollowed out of blocks of granite, topped with a tiered pyramid embellished with miniature pavilions populated by sculpted figures, alone or in twos, and narrative bas-relief designs, symbolically representing the universe; and at the top stood an elaborately carved polygonal cupola, which can be seen shining from far away on land or sea.

  Later the visitor discovers the complex of eighty-three stupas, Buddhist reliquaries, each constituting a complete microcosm: a square base rising in increments and representing the divine residence analogous to the mountain at the centre of the cosmos; a central staircase inside, signifying the central pivot of the world; and the secret chamber housing the relics, identified as the receptacle for the embryo of the universe. Finally, faithful to the Indian model, beside the entrance to each stupa stands an isolated column topped with a capital shaped like an upturned lotus or a group of animals standing back to back, reminiscent of the pillars erected by Emperor Ashoka to be carved with his moral edicts. The royal palace and capital are enclosed within a wall of brick covered in green enamel, ringed with a moat, punctuated by twelve doors and fortified with towers at each corner.

  4

  IN A LUMBERING YELLOW BUS GROANING with chickens, pigs and human passengers, some of whom clung in clusters to the door like dark caterpillars on the skin of a ripe mango, I made my way to Prome, where a scooter taxi took me on to Maungun. From there I continued on foot with a local guide. It had rained the night before and my dainty ankle boots sank pitifully into the muddy path between fields of sugarcane. Later, when we cut through a crop of maize, most of which had been harvested, the boots became so bogged down in the soil that I had to keep making jerking movements with my whole body to heave myself out as, step by difficult step, I drew closer to the last vestiges of the capital. Everything had disappeared: temples, stupas, walls, moats and palaces. All that remained of the entire city was the huge raw hunk of rock rising up in the middle of the fields, a block of pink sandstone of the most magnificent shape and colour, forming an alcove two and a half metres tall by ten wide in which a Buddha carved from the rock lay resting. It was a representation of what Buddhists call “Total Extinction,” the last of the four miracles of his final earthly existence (after “Birth,” “Awakening” and the “First Vow”).

  The Buddha’s profile stood out against a delicately carved background, and I was struck not only by how beautiful he was, but by the breath of life which seemed to emanate from that resting body, a good proportion of which, perhaps a quarter, was already buried in the ground, having sunk lower and lower over the centuries. His clothing exposed his right shoulder, and where the cloth draped over his left arm it was carved in a series of folds, spaced apart to afford glimpses of his palpably supple, recumbent body. Life quivered in every fluid contour of his body right up to his head as it rested on his right elbow. His round face with its closed eyes expressed a contemplative serenity, while a tuft of hair between his eyebrows appeared to ripple in the breeze. His mouth had the barely perceptible hint of a smile and, like so many other details, I recognised the bulge on his head, where flames seemed to spring up between the flat coils of hair (according to legend, Buddha had two brains). Lastly I found a dozen or so ancient letters carved onto a background of clouds. They were so close to the Buddha’s left hand that, in his dreamlike state, he seemed to want to touch them.

  I started to photograph them, but they wavered slightly in my viewfinder. All at once, in the blink of an eye, I thought I saw the Buddha’s left hand move, as if giving me a sign, but there were too few of those archaic words in Pyu for me to form any sort of opinion, least of all on the subject of an assassination which dated back all of fifteen centuries.

  Once back in Rangoon I carried on with my investigations for a few more days, taking rickshaws through streets and neighbourhoods in search of traces of old trading links with Ceylon or legends about monks who translated sutras. One day when I was waiting for some administrative documents in the foyer of the French Embassy, I happened to go into the library and leaf through Auguste Pavie’s memoirs, although I was not sure what I hoped to find there. Granted, this telegrapher who became a hero for single-handedly and peacefully conquering what is now known as Laos warranted attention, but I found little of interest in his writing and was about to close the book when a passage leapt out at me and it felt as if clouds were breaking open to allow the sun’s beams down onto me:

  In 1907 negotiations to determine the borders between Laos, Burma and Thailand brought together delegations from the three countries in Mandalay, the largest city in Upper Burma. In the pause between two exhausting sittings, I tried to go down the Irrawaddy by boat. Lo this day the rivers name alone conjures the sheer size of its muddy bulk. We stopped off at Pagan, a town accessible only by boat. This former capital of Burma, which prospered between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, is indisputably the most impressive site for Buddhist temples after Angkor, though they are all already in ruins. There is a printing house run by monks for sutras in Pagan, and I vied at length to buy a particular stele; I desperately wanted to take such a treasure back to France, where, I was quite sure, it would have delighted our museum curators, for it bore an inscription of a long text in Pyu, Mon, Pali and Burmese, relating, according to the translation I was given, a grim assassination committed in the fifth century. The victim was one of the most famous Buddhist scholars of the time. But the head of the monastery proved intransigent and refused to let me have it, whatever my price.

  The name Irrawaddy may have made the adventurous telegraphers ears ring to the sound of the river sweeping through high mountains, but that of Mandalay had been charming—even fascinating—pilgrims through the ages. From the nineteenth century onwards, Mandalay had the same effect on English writers and poets who covered the length and breadth of the British Empire, under the spell of its name. I myself took the Mandalay Express and, sitting on a narrow seat between sleeping passengers, I read Somerset Maugham’s The Gentleman in the Parlour. Maugham travelled across Burma on a pony between 1922 and 1923. Mandalay, he wrote, is above all a name. There are towns like this whose names have their own magic. He thought that a man might be wise not to visit such places for fear of disappointment: like Trebizond, which might be just a miserable village but whose name carries the weight of an empire, or Samarkand—the word alone makes the pulse race and fills one with a sense of unquenchable longing.

  Even before Somerset Maugham, towards the end of the nineteenth century, Kipling himself
had written a poem called “Mandalay” in his collection Barrack-Room Ballads, earning him comparisons with Byron from the critics of his day. Although Kipling wrote it after his one brief stopover in Burma, and his talent as a poet doesn’t match his abilities as a short-story writer, the fascination exerted by Mandalay is here, conjuring its nervous energy as it quickens the heart:

  “If you’ve ‘eard the East a-callin’, you won’t never ’eed naught else.”

  No! you won’t ‘eed nothin’ else

  But them spicy garlic smells,

  An’ the sunshine an’ the palm-trees an’ the tinkly temple-bells;

  On the road to Mandalay …

  For me, personally, the road to Mandalay, the very name Mandalay, is more inclined to evoke the gloomy apprehension that gripped me when the tropical fever—which I’d congratulated myself for avoiding for more than five years—suddenly took hold again without any warning in a carriage on the Mandalay Express after seven hours of travelling, when I was still only halfway there. I stayed pinned to my seat by the hefty threat implied by this gratuitous recurrence. Scalding hot flushes, each hotter than the last, then bouts of icy shivering, each colder than the last, swept over me, growing more powerful, more furious, overwhelming me when I was already dazed by the constant stream of local music spewing from loudspeakers.

  As the train began to climb an incline I felt myself descending into a sort of trance and, unable to bear the music another second, I opened the carriage window; a cloud of white mist blew in and through it I could see neat lines of crosses in a military cemetery, stretching as far as the eye could see, probably the graves of soldiers who fell in the battle of Mandalay in 1945. I saw ghosts looming out of the fog and glimpsed scattered bones from skeletons, strangely clear but swallowed up immediately by the dark night. I couldn’t say how long the hallucination lasted. A minute? Thirty seconds? I was afraid this fleeting moment was only the prelude to an even more violent attack, an imminent catastrophe, but nothing disastrous happened.