White Lotus

by John Hersey

  Into the offering basket went a reality in the form of a good-sized turnip. Catching the offerer’s eye, Groundnut nodded curtly to him. The worshipper, a young white farmer, fell to his knees and kowtowed to the priest of Everything, who was giving him surcease from the pain of facing life.

  Wisdom and Setting Hens

  After this I could not wait to start my school. Once late at night I was wakened by an owl. I quickly turned over three times on our platform.

  Rock, rousing, sleepily asked, “Is anything the matter?”

  “I’m making a wish: I heard an owl.”

  “Ayah. What now?”

  “That I can prove Groundnut wrong. I mean, through my school.”

  “It’s just a rice bowl for him. Stop fretting. Go to sleep.”

  When we had finished planting our food crops I called on Manager Wu and asked permission to take pupils, and though he frowned and huffed, he finally said I might go ahead, providing I would confine my tutelage strictly to the Tri-Metrical Classic, that I would rely solely on rote memorization, and that I would not strain the children’s minds by teaching them to read and write. The following day he procured for me a single withered copy of the Tri-Metrical from the schoolteacher in the upper hand, and that evening I posted on the circular wall by the village well a notice, which read, School will begin on the tenth day of the fourth month. It will be at Rock Liu’s house.

  Since no one in the village could read, except Manager Wu, Rich Shen, and Suspicious Chang, and those three did not stroll in the open at evening time, the villagers had to ask me, when Rock and I went walking, what the notice said. They knew that I had put it there; a woman had seen me do it. I read it to them. There were some snickers; no other response, no questions.

  I had some days to wait. What if no children at all came to my school? Manager Wu’s disapproval and indifference! Those hand-covered giggles and snorts when I read my notice to the villagers!

  The morning of fourth tenth came. Rock was away early to the tea bushes, and I dressed myself in Provisioner Lung’s gown, and put some morning-glory blossoms in my hair, and waited. How long! The sun climbed. I kept thinking that even if pupils came, I would have spawned a folly. The ponderous ignorance of these people—and the incredible task of learning. Had it been Peace’s “brother” Smart or the Old Uncle at Hua’s who had told me the number of characters in the great K’ang Hsi dictionary? More than forty-four thousand! Unthinkable! Impossible even to make a start!

  Then within a few moments, as if they had hung back all together, eight fathers entered our courtyard with eleven children—seven boys and four girls.

  I bowed to the men and quoted Confucius to them: “Beyond a small material gift I need nothing; and even the one who gives no gift I shall teach.”

  Some haggling followed—between the men, who ignored me altogether—and finally one of them, named Horse Hsing, said that for each child they would give me five catties of rice a month.

  I followed the forms—said I was unworthy. They insisted, unable, however, to hide their inner doubts and unspoken parsimonious regrets at having offered so much—though what they had proposed was, in truth, not much.

  Now I was in for a shock. Having set me up as a teacher, the men concluded at once that I knew everything. A man named Nimble-Hands Chao said, “Horse Hsing and I have been having a disagreement, teacher. You see, it is time to set hens. Horse says, if you want pullets, then a woman must carry the eggs to the nest in the lap of her gown, but if you want cocks, carry them in a man’s hat. I say, set the hen in the morning for roosters, and in the afternoon for pullets. Which is right?”

  I said, “Excuse me, neither one.”

  “Then what’s the way?” Nimble-Hands asked.

  “There is no way. No matter what you do, you will, in the long run, get just as many cocks as pullets. Not in one setting, mind you. But if you keep track of the next one thousand eggs you set, you’ll see that I am right. Half hens, half cocks. More or less. Within a few.”

  The men were exceedingly displeased with this answer, and they glowered and shook their heads and grumbled, so that I was afraid they might withdraw their scholars forthwith.

  Nimble-Hands said, “Horse Hsing thinks he knows all about chickens. He says that if you go to the roosts at exactly midnight, you will hear the chickens sneeze. He says that in the core provinces they tell time this way, by chickens’ sneezing.”

  “Untrue,” I said, as forcibly as I could; then I thought of Groundnut’s shrewd synthesis, for the consumption of these ignorant whites, of yellow doctrines: that there was no link between observable facts and “truth.”

  Apart from Nimble-Hands, who enjoyed Horse’s discomfiture, the men appeared to be angrier than ever at me.

  Horse Hsing cleared his throat and said, “What is the best way to keep the hawks from stealing your chickens?”

  I realized from the way the men thrust their chins forward that they were by now rather doubtful about this teacher’s wisdom, and that I might indeed lose my school on its founding day if I did not watch my words. In despair, with a feeling of being dragged down, I said, “A way my old yellow master Hua used to do it—it worked well for him—was by threading eggshells, that chicks have just been hatched from, onto a piece of straw. Then hang the straw in the chimney. That worked very well for my master.”

  At this the men sighed, as if greatly relieved about me, and nodded their heads with satisfaction. They pushed their children toward me. Horse Hsing slapped his son across the crown and said, “Do as your teacher tells you, you little thief.”

  A Wedge

  School lasted only through the morning, and in the afternoon I joined Rock in what he called the lower crop field. I told him about my exchange with the fathers.

  “You did the right thing. With these stubborn hogs around here, you have to give way a little.”

  “You never used to give way, Rock. Why do you say that now?”

  “Life here isn’t easy. We can see that already. I can see it, can’t you? Everything seems to come at once. While you work at our ‘second,’ I have to work alone on the tea bushes, or here in the crop fields. The millet already needs hoeing, so do the bean rows. The melons are coming up. The first flush of tea leaves is beginning, and before long we’ll have to pick—you’ll have to close the school while we pick—and then we’ll need help from someone with experience for the withering and rolling and fermenting and firing, or else the crop will be worthless. You know some of the classics, but you don’t know tea—and you’re not a great scholar of chickens, either, for that matter.”

  “Is not knowing tea a reason for giving way to worse ignorance?”

  “We have to eat. That comes first.”

  “Groundnut eats. He’s going to be as fat as Buddha.”

  Now I saw some of Rock’s old quarrelsome side smoldering behind the face of the “old solid.” “Groundnut is a louse. Lice live on others’ blood. We can’t live that way. Ai! We came here, don’t forget, because of our anger at what the yellow people have done all these years to us whites. We thought this would be a place where we could do something as whites and for whites. I couldn’t go around with that offering basket snatching the food those poor fools lay on the altars.”

  “Why didn’t you say some of that to Groundnut?”

  “He’s a white man. I haven’t the time of day to be against him. I’m against Provisioner Lung.”

  “If you want to eat, you’d better not be against Provisioner Lung.”

  “I am against him. From dawn till dark, every day. He is the biggest louse, and he’s a yellow louse. Some of these villagers say, ‘Stay away from the yellows. The village is divided into two hands. Just stay down here where we belong and there won’t be any trouble.’ But we can’t stay away from the yellows, because they’re in every corner of our lives. Provisioner Lung squeezes our stomachs every
day. I intend to fight him all the way.”

  “Can you live off him and fight him, too?”

  “I can try.”

  “But how?”

  “Look, I’ll fight him by driving a wedge in him. There’s a crack in him—right in the best in him, and that’s where I’ll split him. Between the practical good and the spiritual good. Between the Confucian and the Buddhist in him. Remember about the disciple asking the Teacher what he would do first, if made Emperor? And his reply was, ‘Straighten out names,’ and when they said that that was silly, he answered that good government came when the ruler was ruler, the magistrate magistrate, and when the father was father and son son; when things were really what they were called. Dominance is for the ruler, husband, father, elder brother; submission for the subject, wife, son, younger brother. These slantheads have added four more ‘names,’ no matter the war and the Mercy Errand; master and slave, yellow and white. To keep everything in order, rely on the essential goodness of men and the benign example of those who are dominant. So all the practical-good side cares about, really, is man in this life, and his duties to other men—‘While respecting matters of the spirit, keep aloof from them.’ But on the other side, the spirit is everything: We are born to pain, which is caused by craving—of the passions, for existence, even for nonexistence; and the only way to end pain is to end craving, so as to go quite outside practical daily life into a spiritual state of utmost peace. One must hurt no living creature, forgive enemies, be friendly to every being. But you cannot live by both goodnesses. You cannot, in this world, dominate as ruler or master and not hurt others. You cannot consider pain a noble truth and be predominantly benign. You see, Provisioner Lung, on his decent side—on his lark-training and sweet-manners side—tries to go both ways: Man dominates singing bird; rich yellow is humbly kind to starving whites. And then switch those pairs! I tell you, White Lotus, I’ll split him on his good side. His evil side is solid, I can’t crack that. But his goodness, instead of being his strength, is his weakness. I’ll pry him wide open from that side.”

  “What about your good side, Rock?”

  “When I’m my own man it will be time enough to be good.”

  Bare-Stick Takes a Canter

  On fifth fifth, the day of the Summer Festival, we hung mugwort and willow twigs over the doorway and pasted red papers shaped like gourds on the walls, and, as the first flush of tea leaves was ready for picking, Rock said he thought it would do no harm to walk out to Groundnut’s temple and perform a kowtow or two before the idols.

  I put a fragrant sprig of mugwort in my hair and wrote the character for “tiger” on a circlet of red paper and pinned it to my gown—to bring me strength on the Summer Festival day—and off we went in a holiday mood.

  A large crowd of whites swarmed around outside the temple, and the air of easy sociability raised our spirits. Everyone seemed to know everyone else; strangers spoke to us as if we were friends.

  Near the gate the braggart Bare-Stick was talking with his donkey voice.

  We entered the temple, and we saw Groundnut, in his filthy red robe, upbraiding a middle-aged tea tenant for spitting on the temple floor near one of the altars. “The only place to spit is under the big bronze bell,” Groundnut was crying, with a show of anger. “If you spit anywhere but under the bell, your teeth will all loosen. Truly. Be careful.”

  Groundnut was nearly delirious over this rush of business. His basket brimmed, and he danced about snatching offerings from altars as the outstretched hands of ignorant worshippers were still poised over their gifts to the gods.

  Rock made him an ironic obeisance, and Groundnut received it straight-faced, as something due him.

  We went through perfunctory motions of worshipping certain idols. Groundnut had made the poor tenants believe (and perhaps Rock and I half believed it) that two of the shabby gentlemen near the Buddha were “tea spirits”; we bowed to them, and Rock also wanted to pay respects to the fertility goddess in the second building. As we kowtowed I kept thinking that there was a wide gap between Rock’s mood of revenge, his determination to bring down Provisioner Lung, on the one hand, and the air, on the other hand, of passive submission that even Rock wore in this depressing temple. These sweet and gullible whites! How they seemed to yearn for the false peace that Groundnut offered them—of resignation. If they could but achieve it, then shiftlessness, squalid human relationships, indulgence of every sensual pull, laziness as a virtue, crime as a substitute for effort—everything would fall into its comfortable place, and one could give up trying. That this was precisely what the yellows wanted seemed to occur to no one; if Groundnut understood it, he did not care.

  Now Rock paid tribute to Groundnut’s new-found power.

  “I want to get someone to help me treat the tea leaves after we pick them,” Rock said to him. “Look around and talk around today, Groundnut, and find me someone.”

  “I already know your man,” Groundnut said. “The noisy one. Bare-Stick.”

  “You turtle! That bullfrog? What do you take me for?”

  “Wait, I know him,” Groundnut said. “He is up here all the time. Underneath all that shouting he keeps a little self that isn’t so bad—don’t forget, it’s the feathers on a fowl that make it big. Let me tell you a story I’ve heard. Bare-Stick’s father, called Cudgel, was a slave to Old Cheng, whose former land you work, you know, and they say that he, Cudgel, was one of the best white men in the whole Box River valley. He was in charge of treating the tea crop after the picking, for the entire Cheng plantation, and they say he was no toady to the yellow man: he was expert, and he was stouthearted. And he had one pride, his son, this Bare-Stick. He taught the boy everything he knew, including how to be both white and manly. But it seems that an evil spirit began to seek out the father—it would flutter at the window, would blow out the lamp, and once it slapped Cudgel’s face. One evening, at dusk, this fine man and his little boy were walking along the road back to the plantation from Long Sands, on the river, where they had gone on a market day, and the spirit appeared in the form of a cow with a single horn standing out from the middle of its forehead. Cudgel said, ‘What do you want of me?’ The cow said, ‘I want your boy-child.’ Cudgel said, ‘You can have my girls, I have three girls, you can have all three. This is my only son.’ The cow tossed its crooked horn and said, ‘No. The boy.’ Cudgel groaned and asked, ‘But why?’ The cow said, ‘I am the Spirit of the Fermentation of Tea Leaves. I have worked for you at the plantation for many years. Now I want your son to work for me.’ The father bellowed, ‘NO!’ and summoning all his courage and strength, he grasped the cow by the one horn and lifted it off the ground, and the spirit cried out in pain that it would not take Bare-Stick altogether, it would only ferment the boy a bit. The father then dropped the cow, which vanished, and the good man died within a week. They say Bare-Stick began talking loud from that night onward.”

  “Do you believe that story?” Rock asked.

  “I believe that Bare-Stick talks loud,” Groundnut said with a half smile. “Anyhow, he knows all about withering, fermenting, and so on—learned it from his father, or from that one-horn cow. Get on his right side, hell rescue your crop for you.”

  Outside the temple Bare-Stick was still blatherskiting at the center of a rowdy circle. We joined in. Bare-Stick was saying, “I don’t mind sucking dry yellow tits, if it gets you what you want. Ayah, if you flatter the lids, in a certain way, you can go a lot farther than they ever dream a hog will get. I just make it a joke. I act like a powder-nose—a clown. And I usually get what I’m after. I don’t care how much the lid I’m sucking insults me so long as he gives. If he lets me stay near him and keep talking, I’ll find his sweet side. I say ‘master’ and ‘venerable’ and ‘teacher’ and ‘old uncle’—whatever he wants—pretty soon I’m cracking his walnuts! It’s easy!”

  Rock listened to all this and much more in silence. He seemed to me to be t
aking Bare-Stick’s measurements.

  There were pretty girls in the circle, and the sunlight was like wine. The men and girls were approaching each other and withdrawing—playing the endless warm-weather game of trying to touch and tease. I felt the lazy warmth spreading in me, too, and I saw that big Bare-Stick’s eyes were like clumsy bumblebees droning from one peony to another on a hunt for any honey-pollen at all, even if left over from another. He looked at me. I stared back boldly, on the theory that this might be a help to Rock, and deep in the braggart’s eyes I thought I did see a small boy much impressed by a cow with a single horn.