by Sun Shuyun
Duan was even trained at the Chinese Buddhist Seminary in Beijing to answer every kind of question. ‘That was when I learned a lot about Xuanzang and how important he is, not just for us monks, but for Buddhists throughout Asia,’ he remembered. ‘They told us Master Xuanzang was a trump card, very important. In fact he was our only card. We were not allowed to talk about anything but him. I guess there was nothing to say about our religious observance – we did not have any. So all we could do was to show the delegates the sutras that Xuanzang translated, which we were not allowed to read. Then we brought them to the pagoda and told them how we remembered the great man on his anniversary with special ceremonies – which of course we could not hold. Before they left, we gave them a portrait of Xuanzang from a rubbing and told them how we were carrying forward his great legacy. All the time Party officials watched us. Then the delegation left, convinced of our freedom of worship, and we returned to our so-called normal life.’
Much of Duan’s life was taken up by relentless political studies. ‘We were asked to surrender our black heart in exchange for a red heart faithful to the Communist Party,’ Duan said. Week after week, sometimes for months on end, they studied the works of Mao and editorials in the People’s Daily. Then they had to hand in reports of what they learned from their studies.
I asked how much he had really taken on board.
‘A lot of it was beyond me,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t see why we should spend weeks studying the new marriage law. It had absolutely nothing to do with us. Perhaps they knew all along we were going to be sent home and get married so it would do us good to know what our rights were as husbands.’ He gave an awkward laugh.
Was there a lot of pressure for him to marry?
‘Plenty,’ he sighed. ‘Sometimes monks and nuns were put in a room together and were told they couldn’t leave until they agreed to marry.’ There was a nunnery on the outskirts of Xian. One day the abbess came to see Duan and asked if he would take care of one of the novices. ‘The nuns suffered more than us monks. Officials spread rumours about them, saying the nunnery was a den of vice and the nuns were prostitutes. Many could not bear it and left, and the nunnery had only two novices and the old and weak staying on,’ Duan said. He told the abbess that he would think about it, and eventually he agreed. But then the girl died suddenly. He thought it might have been suicide. ‘I felt very guilty; maybe if I had agreed sooner, I would have saved her life.’
Under the unremitting pressure from the government, two of Duan’s fellow-monks finally gave in and got married. Then officials badgered him daily, asking him when he would make up his mind. There was a woman, a water-seller outside the monastery, whom Duan had seen around for ages. She was a widow from the village, with four children to support. He thought, why not?
By then he had been a monk for nearly thirty years. That was the only life he knew: simple, quiet living, with just enough to eat and three items of clothing; content and secure, sheltered by the high monastic walls. Now the routine and the structure were gone – no drum to wake him up in the morning, no services and prayers to shape his day, and no beautiful chanting and great masters to reinforce his belief. He must have found it terribly hard in the real world. I looked round the room we were sitting in – it was antiquated, as if it had not been touched for decades. There was practically no furniture, just a saggy, torn sofa and a refrigerator standing in a corner. Next to it, a small rickety altar with a tiny statue of Guanyin. The bare walls held only a huge Mao portrait dominating the room.
‘He was born to be a monk,’ Mrs Duan interjected before her husband had a chance to say anything more. ‘When we got engaged, a dreadful woman in the village started slandering us, saying we weren’t really man and wife because monks are like eunuchs. I begged him to do something.’
‘What did you do?’ I asked.
‘What’s there to explain? What does it matter?’ Duan said.
Their honeymoon was hardly over when the Cultural Revolution began. Duan still remembered the day when the Red Guards stormed the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. It was early one evening in the summer of 1966 and they were about to have supper. Suddenly there was a thunderous noise outside. Before they realized what was happening, a group of Red Guards broke in, shouting, ‘Smash the old world, build a brand-new one!’ Two of them came into his cell and grabbed the scriptures from his table and threw them on the floor. They ordered him to tread on them to show his support. ‘How could I? They were the holy words of the Buddha. I would incur so much wrath, I would be condemned to hell for ever.’ He refused.
The Red Guards stamped on the sutras themselves. ‘Confess, and we will deal with you leniently; resist, and we will punish you severely. Think carefully. We will come back for you tomorrow.’ With that warning, they left the cell.
Outside, some Red Guards were putting up Mao’s portrait and posters in large characters, while others were throwing ropes on to the big Buddha and Bodhisattva statues in the shrine hall. The cadres from the Cultural Relics Bureau rushed in to stop them, saying those and the Big Wild Goose Pagoda were not feudal objects but the nation’s treasures, from the time of the Monkey King – they had a certificate from the State Council to prove it. The Red Guards were caught by surprise and stood there, not sure what to do. Then one of them started pulling down the silk banners that were hanging from the ceiling. ‘These cannot possibly be state treasures,’ she said harshly. In a few minutes all the banners were thrown outside, joined by the monastery’s precious collection of sutras, many of them Xuanzang’s own translations, and other ancient manuscripts. They asked the monks and cadres to come out and stand around the pile, as witnesses to their revolutionary action. Amid mad shouting and clapping, they set the lot on fire. The fire went on all night.
The Big Wild Goose Pagoda survived, but the loss for the whole country was unbelievable. In 1949, there were some two hundred thousand Buddhist monasteries throughout China. One campaign after another accounted for many of them – they were either demolished or turned into schools, factories, houses and museums. By the time the Red Guards finished their work and the Cultural Revolution was over, barely a hundred remained intact. In Beijing, there were, once, more than a hundred monasteries and temples, and now only five belong to the monks. Grandmother was very upset that the three temples in her village were destroyed and the farmers used the stones to build pig-sties and houses. In Tibet, the destruction was almost total. Gone with them was a large part of our history, culture and life – a part we had denounced as antiquated, feudal and backward, a part whose value we did not know until it was gone.
But Duan did not share my sadness and regrets. ‘I am so pleased the pagoda has survived,’ he said, ‘but even that will go one day. Nothing is permanent. When you look at our monastery today, you think it is great. When I first came here, the monastery was run-down and overgrown with weeds; wolves hovered at the gates. It has been repaired a few times since then. And now it looks its best. But in Master Xuanzang’s time, this was just the monastery’s cemetery, where they buried the ashes of distinguished monks. The monastery itself was a hundred times bigger, if not more, with thousands of rooms, and any number of halls, all connected by streams like in a garden. It could even compete with the imperial palaces in beauty and grandeur. But it is all gone. So what we think of as lasting does not actually last.’ He gave me time to take in this very Buddhist view. ‘Didn’t Chairman Mao say, “Without destruction, there is no construction”? The destruction of the Cultural Revolution gave us Buddhists the opportunity to show our devotion and to accumulate merit for the next life by building new monasteries, bigger and better.’ He paused. ‘You know, when the Buddha first began promulgating the Dharma two thousand five hundred years ago, he and his disciples simply slept under the trees and begged for alms. We don’t even have to have monasteries.’
Did he ever think of resuming monastic life now religion was allowed again? Duan did not hesitate for a moment. ‘My wife was very good to take me on in di
fficult times and has looked after me all these years. The Dharma teaches us to show compassion for all sentient beings. She is getting old and needs me more than ever. How can I leave her? If I have no compassion for her, how can I talk about compassion for anybody else?’ He paused, and then added, looking at his wife: ‘If she passes away ahead of me, I would like to return to a monastery to spend my remaining days there: that is, if any monastery will take me.’ Mrs Duan was all smiles now.
As a Buddhist, Duan attributed his return to secular life to his bad karma. ‘I must have left some important task unfinished in my previous life, or obstructed someone unintentionally,’ he said. ‘That’s why I could only spend half of my life as a monk. You can’t escape your karma.’
I find it difficult to accept that Duan was being punished for past sins, that all those people during the Cultural Revolution had done something wrong to deserve their suffering, just as I cannot accept that Grandmother’s misfortunes were due to the wrongs of her previous lives. I am still struggling with the idea of karma, a linchpin of Buddhism. For Buddhists, the differences and inequalities in the world can not be explained as simple accidents: they are the working of karma. Why is one born a millionaire, another a pauper? How could Mozart write such heavenly melodies in his teens while others are tone deaf? The Buddha said you reap what you sow: we are the result of our karma, although we can make it better or worse through our own efforts. What I can appreciate is the virtuous effect of believing in it: instead of blaming others and bearing grudges, Duan would always look deeply inside himself and think how he could improve.
They offered me a glass of hot water, with a spoonful of sugar in it – it was all they could afford. I thought about everything he had told me. ‘You have had such a hard life,’ I said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I won’t say it has been easy. We were very poor when I was small. We lived by begging, and slept at the city gate. I often passed out with the cold; sometimes I woke up with frozen corpses around me. Then my parents died of starvation and my uncle, who could not even feed his own children, left me outside a monastery, and the monks took me in. At least I had food, clothes, a roof over my head. I survived. Life improved after the revolution.’
‘But how about everything that happened to the monasteries and the monks? Was that not suffering?’
‘We went through many painful things. But the Buddha says suffering is a fact of life. It depends on how we look at it. To me, not to have anything to eat is suffering. I haven’t starved since I became a monk, so I can’t say I have suffered.’
That night in my hotel room, I could see the pagoda from my window. Mr Duan must be doing his meditation and saying his prayer now, I thought. Before we parted, I had asked him what he prayed for. ‘To be a monk again in my next life,’ he said. I had meant to ask him about Xuanzang and his teachings and find out what exactly were the doctrines he went to India to find. I did not. But Duan’s life had given me something more to think about. Monasteries would be destroyed, but he had a shrine inside himself which was inviolate. In his room, he prayed silently, holding fast to his belief, living by it, unperturbed by all that happened to him. For him, the whole world is a meditation hall, where he put the teaching of the Buddha into ultimate practice. In my eyes, he was a real monk, though a monk without a robe.
I went back to the monastery the next day to have a closer look at it. It was hard to appreciate that what I saw was only the cemetery of the original community. There was still a group of stupas to the right of the pagoda. Originally stupas were built to house the ashes and bones of the Buddha. But gradually over the centuries, they were devoted to lesser and lesser beings, but still of great distinction: the masters who had come closest to enlightenment, the heads of Buddhist sects, the abbots and revered monks of the monasteries. Stupas are supposed not only to commemorate the departed but also to inspire future generations. They are distinguishable by their size but above all by the number of tiers on the spires above the base, with the highest being nine for the Buddha himself. According to my guidebook, Xuanzang’s relic stupa was in a separate monastery built specifically for it. The stupas here were all very similar except for one in the shape of a truncated obelisk standing on a lotus flower. The monk’s name, Pu Ci, was carved on one side, while the others bore the date of dedication and decorative flowers. It was delicately made. But there were no tiers, suggesting someone of lowly status. And unlike all the others, there was no epitaph giving information about the deceased. I was wondering what this stupa was doing here in this distinguished company when a young monk walked by. I stopped him and asked if he could tell me anything about Pu Ci.
‘You don’t know about him?’ he retorted. Then he seemed to consider something. ‘But then, why should you, I suppose? He saved us. Without him, I would not be here today. The Big Wild Goose Pagoda would have been just for you tourists. He was a brave man, a true Buddhist.’
I must have looked as puzzled as I felt, when he launched into an explanation of how the government had decreed in 1982 that any monastery with no monks in residence by the end of the Cultural Revolution would be used for public purposes. ‘Pu Ci managed to stay on here, so the Big Wild Goose Pagoda is still a monastery. Without him, it would have been turned into a park or a garden. But he suffered for it.’
If Duan had suffered so much, I could not bear to think what this monk must have gone through.
The young monk said that Pu Ci was the only one who wore his robe throughout the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards ordered him not to but he simply ignored them. They organized struggle meetings in the shrine hall and made him kneel on the floor and confess his motives for carrying on his ‘feudal practices’. He refused to say a word. What was there to say? He had been a monk for so many years and the robe was like his skin. Outraged by his silence, the Red Guards started beating him. Every time they hit him, he uttered the name of Amitabha. They did not know what to do with him. He was locked up to repent but he just meditated all the time. They thought he was mad so eventually they left him alone. I asked how he would have dealt with the blows raining down on him?
‘He probably would think of one of the ten attributes of a Bodhisattva. It is called khanti, meaning patient endurance of suffering inflicted upon oneself by others and forbearance for their wrongs. There are lots of stories about khanti in the scriptures and it is one of the qualities that monks try to cultivate. And he obviously achieved it,’ said the young monk humbly.
I remembered one of the old priests at the struggle meetings in my childhood. I could not forget how serene he was. Now I understood what kept him so calm when he was spat on, when he was made to kneel on broken glass. Deep inside, he would have prayed not for the stilling of his pain but for the heart to conquer it. He perhaps would think that the spit was raindrops and they would dry up when the sun came out. Or would he think that the attacks on him might be the result of his bad karma? If so, they were the outcome of his own actions and he should not harbour bitterness towards his attackers. He was in a different world from us, in the midst of pain, yet above it.
I looked at the stupa again, next to the giant Big Wild Goose Pagoda, not even the size of its foundation. Dappled sunshine fell on it through the thick pine trees. I stared at it, thinking of the story I had just heard. I had the sensation that the stupa was expanding, billowing out into a larger dimension, until it was huge. The Big Wild Goose Pagoda embodied Xuanzang’s spirit, and the Buddhism he disseminated. It could still be a Buddhist institution carrying on the propagation – because of this ordinary monk. He did not despair perhaps because of a simple belief: if the monks were alive, Buddhism would live on, despite the total destruction of monasteries, statues and scriptures. Xuanzang built the pagoda, Pu Ci preserved it. The spirit they stood for, the faith that sustained them, the spreading of the Dharma they carried out determinedly – the hope of Chinese Buddhism.
But the young monk said there were monks who totally despaired. He showed me a stupa next to Pu Ci’s,
which looked no different from the half dozen standing there, but with an inscription longer than any of the others. It read as follows:
Lang Zhao, Secretary of the Xian Buddhist Association, was born in 1893 into a wealthy family in northeastern China, came to Xian and took vows at the age of eighteen; abbot of Wolong Monastery; made donations for the aeroplane that was used to fight against the Americans and supported the Korean people; did farming and built a commune for monks and nuns who lived on their own products and wore their own woven cloth; suffered maltreatment during the Cultural Revolution in 1966 and took his own life on August 18 of that year, at the age of seventy-two, after fifty-five years as a monk.
There is something strange about this – it simply is not how a Buddhist master’s epitaph usually reads. It seems only to refer to his patriotism, not to his contributions to Buddhism. But what I found even more bewildering is the remark I have italicized near the end: he actually committed suicide – a cardinal sin, a capital offence in Buddhism. Why did he do it?
The first rule of Buddhism is not to kill any living creature, not to take one’s own life, and not to help with any killing. ‘Rare is birth as a human being. Hard is the life of mortals. Do not let slip this opportunity,’ is the advice of the Buddha. I had read that the Vinaya, the Buddhist code of conduct, forbids monks to commit suicide, in any form and for any reason. Those who do forfeit the possibility of a good rebirth, let alone that of entering the Western Paradise. What made Lang Zhao do it?
