by Martin Booth
Sandingham had first learned of the monastery when he overheard two Europeans discussing it on the Star Ferry. One of them had visited it as a weekend trip, taking a long hike to what he obviously considered, in a patronising way, to be a typically Chinese – he implied ‘native’ from his tone – and yet movingly strange and wonderful place. He had gone simply as a tripper and, although he had not really regarded his visit as anything more than a curiosity call, Po Lin monastery had left its mark on him.
‘Anyway. This monastery’s a quiet spot and no mistake. Buddhist. No cars, no phones. No electricity, either. Or hot water: had to shave in a trough fed by a stream. Just the monks muttering prayers about the place and one old boy ringing a damn great bell all the time. Must be bloody freezing in mid-winter as it’s a fair way up the mountain. Still, they like a bit of ascetic discomfort, don’t they? Purges their souls!’
Both men chuckled magnanimously.
‘Cost you much?’
‘Ferry fare. And the pain of undiscovered muscles. But staying in the place is buckshee. The monks are bound by an oath of hospitality. Can’t turn you away. Naturally, you drop a bit in the old box before you leave, but how much is up to you.’ The ferry slowed as it approached the pierhead: the man looked at his watch and continued, ‘The food’s bloody good. All vegetarian, of course.’
For the rest of that day, as he sought tourists to filch from, the thought of the monastery lingered in Sandingham’s mind. Such a place might do him good. He wanted such peace so very badly.
The monk left and Sandingham went up the stairs.
The upper floor was made of bare planks. Along all four walls were two-tiered bunks. It had the familiar security of a dormitory, the certainty of comrades, the safety of numbers. Over each bunk hung a mosquito net tied into a suspended knot, and at the foot of each was a thin cotton quilt. In lieu of a pillow was a chocolate-brown lacquered box shaped to fit the neck. There were no mattresses but instead there were dun-coloured blankets.
He looked out of the window. The wind was risen higher still and the force of it had dispersed the mist. The storm was coming. He placed his knapsack on the bunk nearest the window and, going downstairs, left the monastery to walk south through the adjoining fields. Ahead of him was a low rise on the sides of which were pagoda-like vaults, fifteen feet high, the tombs of former monks. He walked up to one, looked uncomprehendingly at the characters engraved upon the stone, then topped the rise. There was a boulder there that was shaped like a crude seat: the abbots sometimes went to sit upon it and meditate.
Sandingham looked down over a deep, wide valley beyond which was a thin strip of beach and the open South China Sea. The swell was heavy and crashing in spray upon the sand and the rocky outcrops nearly two thousand feet below. The village that was halfway across the base of the valley seemed to be cowering from the imminent storm. Each breath he took was a struggle to snatch from the howling wind. When the rain started once more, rising vertically up the hillside towards him, he left the boulder and returned to the monastery where he lay down on his bunk and let his limbs slacken.
* * *
The dull bell boomed against the wind. It was not a continuous ringing, such as one might hear from a church belfry, but a deep, broken knell that came every ninety seconds exactly. The monk in charge of the bell rang it daily, for hours on end, and his blood was attuned to the sound and the timespan for each impact of the log-like hammer that hung from two points on a rafter over his head.
Sandingham could hear it as he shaved in a basin of cold water he had collected for himself from a trough outside the dormitory. A small mirror was screwed on to the wall near the stairs and, by the light of a paraffin lamp, he was able to do a fair job of his toilet. He washed under his armpits and sluiced his chest. The water refreshed and renewed him.
‘We eating in t’irty minutes,’ the monk said who had come to tell him. He was ready; even his shirt was clean – he had rinsed the one he had worn for the climb in the overflow from the trough.
The wind was vicious but warm and the rain had eased off as he opened the door to the dormitory, turned left and made his way through a round moon-gate into a tidy garden in which shrubs were flourishing in porcelain pots under the shade of Chinese willow and plum trees. Faint lamplight from the windows cast a waxy pallor on to the swaying boughs.
A row of twenty-three monks was filing in through a rear doorway as he entered the refectory. They chanted as they moved and the sound that issued from them was more like the wind’s than a man’s voice. The guestmaster pointed to the place at which Sandingham was to sit.
There was no table. The monks squatted along the walls of the room on child-size stools. A rice bowl, china spoon and chopsticks were laid on a woven reed matting before each setting.
The abbot sat at the head of the gathering, coming in last. He made no acknowledgement of Sandingham’s presence. Nor did any of his brethren.
A monk worked his way round the oblong of monks with a ladle and cauldron. From this, he filled each bowl with a thin soup in which small yellowish leaves floated. Sandingham did not eat. He watched what the others did. In their turn, they prayed, intoned and murmured, sipping at the soup between verses or prayers. Sandingham could not understand – could hardly hear – a word of their speech. It was so low that even the simplest words escaped him. He was even doubtful they were speaking in Cantonese. Slowly, so as not to appear in a rush, he drank.
Over the space of an hour other courses followed. Each was served by the same monk. They consisted of dishes made with vegetables, milk, eggs and cheese, bean curd and rice flour. Several looked like meat and tasted like meat but Sandingham knew that they were not. It was against the Buddha’s teaching to kill flesh.
When the last of the meal was eaten, tea was served in smaller bowls. When the tea arrived the monks stopped their incantations, but they did not start to speak.
A moment was reached when, as if by an invisible signal, all the monks rose to their feet, their dark robes swishing on the ground, and left the room.
Sandingham was alone.
The serving monk then came in and began to collect up the bowls, stacking them on a broad wooden tray. Sandingham voluntarily helped him. The man spoke no word of thanks, but smiled warmly at this Englishman who was staying at his monastery in the wrong month of the year.
As Sandingham made his way through the garden, the storm now raging on the mountain and across the plateau, another monk appeared and beckoned for him to accompany him as he led the way down a pathway on the right and into a building.
The abbot was seated on a plain metal chair at a deal table with a covering of sticky-backed plastic. It seemed most out of place in the monastery – more suited to a cheap Kowloon restaurant for coolies. Another upright chair was before it. A paraffin lamp gave a cosy hue to the room. A Chinese pot of jasmine tea was to one side of the lamp and there was a pair of bowls already poured. The guestmaster was seated in the shadows beyond the lamplight, to act as interpreter.
‘Mr Sandingham, I am glad to see you back at Po Lin. How are you?’ the abbot asked through his acolyte.
He indicated the chair and Sandingham took it nearer to the table before sitting.
‘I am well enough, Abbot. Not too well, but well enough.’ He spoke in English, preferring to use the services of the guestmaster, as his Cantonese was not up to a good conversational standard.
‘You still smoke a pipe of opium?’ enquired the abbot.
Sandingham nodded. He knew that he must not smoke in the monastery buildings. It was forbidden.
They sipped at the mild-flavoured tea. A limp jasmine blossom was spreading its petals just below the surface in Sandingham’s cup. It reminded him of the bloom in one of those glass domes filled with dessicated coconut snowflakes which, when agitated, vanished in a tiny artificial blizzard. The liquid in which it floated was the straw-colour of plasma and piping hot.
‘And how are you in yourself?’
The
abbot knew of Sandingham’s anxieties. They had talked of them long into the night during his last visit. From their meeting then, again conducted through the translator, Sandingham had gained some solace, though it had evaporated as soon as he returned to his everyday living.
There were times when he wished that he were a monk, carefree except for a study of prayers and texts and the observance of a rule, regardless of what the world was doing outside the encompassing barricades of belief. If he were to be a monk, he’d become a Trappist, take the vow of everlasting silence and close his inner as well as his outer eyes to the world, facing only the wall of himself, his religion and his cell. But then he knew that that was what he did now – face only matters in the confines of his world, his personal universe.
‘I am still troubled.’
‘By what?’
‘The same as I was before. The futility of it all.’
The abbot twisted the cog-wheel on the lamp and lowered the flame which was beginning to smoke. His steady hands were smooth, untanned and the skin was uncrumpled.
‘Once there was an ant,’ he said, speaking quickly. ‘It discovered a dead hornet on a dusty pathway and tried to tug it to its nest. It knew that hornets kill and eat ants, but this one was dead. The ant could not move it for the insect was too large. Instead, it returned to the nest and waved its feelers about, sending its word to the worker ants with which it lived. “I have a dead hornet! Follow me.” “Are you sure it is dead?” the other ants asked, warily. He assured them it was. There could be no harm from it. They marched from the nest to the hornet. It certainly seemed dead and they rejoiced. They scattered around its corpse, testing it with their feelers, assuring themselves it was truly dead. Once convinced, they joined their jaws upon it and started to move it off the path. Once in the nest, they would scissor it up and consume it. It dragged in the dust. It was snared by stones. It jarred on twigs fallen on the pathway. In their tugging, a leg broke loose. The ant, wanting the leg, returned to the centre of the path to fetch it. There, a man too busy looking upward for rain stood upon the ant, killing it.’
He looked at Sandingham’s face while the guestmaster’s version in English caught up.
‘You are like the ant,’ he continued, sucking the hot tea in with his lips. ‘It had its life to live. It shared with others its fortune. It met its fate. So it is for us all. We find goodness in wickedness, we turn it to our use, we live with it. We die. As the ant did. That is all.’ He put his fingertips together pensively.
‘The abbot says it is not a good story,’ translated the guest-master. ‘He is sorry…’
Sandingham enjoyed the abbot’s parables. He saw his present situation in them, even if they were allegorical: they showed him his predicament all too clearly.
‘It is a very good story,’ he replied, politely. ‘Yet how does it relate to me? I cannot turn evil into good. My hornet cannot succour others.’
A bell sounded in another room. The abbot heard it and glanced at the interpreter.
‘You use your hornet to be alive, as did the ant. Even if it is the evilest of things. It is food for you. In it lies your reason. The more you know of it, the more it helps you see men. It is sad you see them badly. Often they are so. But you see some who are good through it, too. You are good, for you know what it is. It makes you good.’
The conundrum puzzled him and, putting his cup down, Sandingham said, ‘I am not good. I –’
‘No!’ interrupted the abbot. ‘You are good. You are good because you care. For life. About the hornet that buzzes in you. The evil you know makes you concerned. That is the view of a good man.’
Sandingham was about to reply, to prove his wrongness, but the guestmaster pointed out that the abbot had to go to prayers.
‘Before you go for tonight,’ Sandingham spoke quickly. ‘What can I do about my hornet anyway? The ant’s was dead. Mine’s alive, and flexing its sting.’
The monk had trouble with the word ‘flexing’, having to request that Sandingham give an alternative. He did.
Standing up, the abbot answered, ‘Avoid the sting. Teach others to avoid it.’
‘How can I? I am but a small man.’
‘Was the ant not small, one of a larger mass? He stood still and passed on his message. So must you.’
The abbot bowed slightly. He asked how long Sandingham would be staying and the guestmaster told his superior, adding to Sandingham, ‘You shall talk together again. Tomorrow. Now the abbot says goodnight for you.’
* * *
Lying on his back in the bunk, with the quilt pulled up to his chin and the lamp guttering as the oil thinned in the tin reservoir beneath the wick, Sandingham gazed at the rafters. They jittered as the flame bucked. Rain beat upon the louvred slats of the shutter. There was no glass in the window itself, just wire mosquito mesh. The blast penetrated it with ease.
He was not good. He wanted to be, but he couldn’t be. He wanted to act, but was unable to. He had let people down. Himself, too. He smoked opium and was addicted to it. He drank too much and that was also necessary to him. He stole. He had killed. He lustfully desired men: was that not a mortal sin?
He drove himself into sleep on these thoughts and, during the night and his dreaming, cried.
* * *
The sky was still smothered and grey but less foreboding. He stood at the stone trough and emptied a wooden dipper over his head, rubbing the yellow flakes from his eyelids. The iciness of the water made him see stars, as if he had been clubbed by the flow.
During the night, the eye of the storm had passed and now the wind, though still strong, was lessened and blowing from the opposite direction. A drift of green leaves, torn from their stems, floated in the corner of the trough, held in place by the fist of the wind. It flagged at his open shirt.
Back in the dormitory, he saw that someone had placed a pot of tea and two sweetish buns on the table while he had been outside washing. He sat and ate this meagre breakfast in silence. The monks had long since broken their fast and were now going about their daily duties. Some swept the monastery and did domestic work. Others were out in the fields picking crops for the day’s meals or repairing storm damage. Still others prayed in the seclusion of their rooms.
Fortified by the tea, Sandingham tidied his bunk, put on his jacket and went to the monastery temple, entering it from a back door that gave on to the alleyway.
It was dark inside and he had to move slowly around the side of the large room to the front where the doors, facing south, were still closed against the wind. He could hear it whining through chinks in the panelling.
The altar was set to the rear and the image of the god was higher than the level of his face. No one looks down upon their god, he thought. Before it was a table covered by a gold brocade cloth, upon which was embroidered a pattern of pine boughs, flowers, clouds and white cranes, their black beaks thinly angled against the rich yellow background. On this table was an assortment of white vases, earthenware pots and bowls of fruit and sweetmeats. In the centre was a silver-plated basin filled with sand in which were stuck many joss-sticks, all of them alight. Candles on bamboo sticks flickered with them. The blue smoke marbled the air above and wafted into the roof beams. Behind the table was a crimson fence like an altar railing in a Christian church. Beyond this was the high altar, surrounded on either side by small silver statues of the Lord Buddha, of animals and more incense-burning vessels. Two red oil lamps swung gently from the rafters, glowing hotly.
The main figure of Buddha was set in a dark cupboard-like recess in the centre of the altar, draped on either side by deep green curtains. The shutter doors were open but might be closed upon the god. He was constructed of wood and was at least four feet high. The entire surface of the wood was burnished with leaf and sheet gold, which glimmered secretively. The idol was seated in the lotus position, one hand resting palm upward in its lap, the other holding its finger in a delicate formation before its chest.
This was not the Buddha of
the tourist curio shops in Tsim Sha Tsui – a gaudily painted china figurine with a jovial face, pot belly and twinkling eyes. This was a serene and dignified man with an expression of calm and saintliness upon his face. He was strangely non-racial – not Chinese, not Indian, not European but an amalgam of all three.
Above the Buddha’s head was another red light. It had a thin flame, unlike the other lamps, yet it gave out much more illumination than might have been expected. The only other source of light in the temple came from two slit windows high on the wall over the south door.
The pungent scent of joss tickled Sandingham’s nose and he was obliged to rub at his nostrils to clear them.
He felt both ill at ease and fully at peace. If this had been a church with Christ on his crucifix he would have know what to do – genuflect before the altar, cross himself or simply bow. Yet the monks of Buddha did nothing like this of which he knew. In reverence he dipped his head and, taking a handful of joss-sticks from a side-shelf, he held them in the flame of one of the candles until they were alight. He then blew the flames out that the joss might ember and smoke and shoved the red-slivered ends into the sand in the silver basin.
On the floor were what he took to be kneeling cushions. He lowered himself on to one of these with painful difficulty: the joints in his legs were stiff from the previous day’s long hike up the mountainside.
Holding his hands together as if he were a recumbent figure on a medieval tomb in an English cathedral, he tried to pray. From his fingers he could smell the dust of the sandalwood incense.
It was difficult. On his last visit, he had considered praying but had not made the attempt. Now, facing the task of opening his heart to a god, he struggled. For half an hour, he strained to talk to the immovable, inscrutable face of the idol. It was not that he could not speak: he could. Yet the words he uttered were false, unconvincing even to himself. If they sounded so fake to him, how must they appear to Buddha?
At mid-morning, he opened the south door and walked on to the temple forecourt. The wind had dropped to a sharp breeze and the sun was striving to penetrate the clouds. Every now and then a diluted ray succeeded. Another mountain path, other than the one he had taken to arrive at the monastery, meandered through the farm fields and tea plantation before disappearing around the corner of the low hill where he had sat the previous evening.
