Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud

by Sun Shuyun

  The pirates would not listen to him. They built a terrace from tree branches and mud and led Xuanzang on to it. Knowing that he would not be spared, Xuanzang asked them to give him a little time so that he could pray. He later told Hui Li the thoughts that went through his mind. This time, he faced death with total calm. ‘He meditated hard and concentrated his thoughts on the Maitreya Buddha in the Tushita Heaven. He prayed to be reborn there so that he would have an opportunity to learn the Yogacara Sutra, which he had not fully understood. Afterwards, he hoped to come to this world again and propagate the Dharma for the benefit of all beings. He concentrated so intensely that he went into a trance, where he saw in his mind’s eye the Maitreya Buddha. At that moment he felt so happy, both mentally and physically, that he forgot completely that he was on the makeshift altar, and would be offered at any moment to the river goddess.’

  But suddenly a gale blew up, churning the Ganges with giant waves and overturning boats. The pirates were taken by surprise and asked their passengers who the priest might be. They replied that he was a great master from China and that the storm was a sign that the river goddess had been offended. Watching the gale becoming fiercer and the Ganges more turbulent, the pirates hurriedly went up to the altar to release Xuanzang. As they touched him, he opened his eyes and asked: ‘Is it time now for me to die?’ They gave back his robes and asked for his forgiveness.

  When he arrived in Patna, he was shocked to find a city totally destroyed by the invasion of the White Huns in the sixth century and then a massive flood. ‘Nothing but the old foundations of the royal palaces remain,’ he tells us, ‘and of several hundred monasteries, only two or three have survived.’ Still he spent seven days in this wasted and desolate place. Whatever the destruction, he would have looked on everything he saw with visionary intensity. This was where the Buddha crossed the Ganges to spread his message, and where so many eminent masters had taught and congregated to write down the entire Buddhist canon. This was where India’s greatest king, Asoka, had renounced violence, embraced Buddhism, and taken the Dharma throughout his empire, the most expansive in Indian history.

  Patna was Asoka’s capital in the third century BC, as it had been his father’s and grandfather’s. The Greek ambassador to his grandfather’s court described Patna as a large and fine city, with an unbelievably beautiful palace and very efficient bureaucrats who controlled the empire with a vast network of spies. Xuanzang stood on the ruined foundations of the royal palace and looked north towards the Ganges. Just by the palace there used to be the prison where Asoka practised his reign of terror before his conversion to Buddhism.

  According to Asoka’s own inscription, his change of heart came after one particularly brutal campaign in eastern India, where his troops killed more than 100,000 people, with many times that number dying from wounds and famine afterwards. Asoka was haunted by the deaths and the suffering inflicted by his men. He was filled with remorse and became a pious Buddhist, giving up hunting and becoming a vegetarian. He sent his son and daughter to Sri Lanka to spread the Dharma. He went on pilgrimages himself and was reputed to have built 84,000 stupas in the important sites associated with the Buddha’s life. He constructed vast networks of roads in his empire, lining them with banyan trees, and providing wells, mango groves and rest-houses at regular intervals. ‘I have done these things in order that my people might conform to Dharma,’ he proclaimed. To reinforce his message, Asoka appointed officers of Dharma to inscribe royal edicts on rocks or pillars throughout the empire, instructing people how to live a virtuous life. Xuanzang recorded several of Asoka’s edicts, including this famous one:

  This inscription of Dharma has been engraved so that any sons or great-grandsons that I may have should not think of new conquests, and in whatever victories they may gain should be satisfied with patience and light punishment. They should only consider conquest by Dharma to be a true conquest, and delight in Dharma should be their whole delight, for this is of value in both this world and the next.

  This remarkable man’s life came to an extraordinary end. Xuanzang visited the Kukkutarama Monastery in the southeastern corner of the city and left us this story about the impermanence of everything. Asoka had built the monastery for a thousand monks and paid for its upkeep. In his last days, he wanted to donate all his belongings to the institution, but the ministers who were taking over from him did not comply. One day, as he was eating a mango, he held the fruit in his hand and asked his attendant: ‘Who now is the lord of India?’

  ‘Only Your Majesty,’ came the answer.

  ‘Not so!’ Asoka sighed. ‘I am no longer lord; for I have only this half-fruit to call my own. Alas! The wealth and honour of the world are as difficult to keep as it is to preserve the light of a lamp in the wind.’ He asked the attendant to take the half-fruit and offer it to the monks, telling them, ‘I pray you receive this very last offering. Pity the poverty of the offering, and grant that it may increase the seeds of my religious merit.’

  Nothing much remains of Patna’s glorious past. I asked Yogendra to drive straight to the Patna Museum on Buddha Marg. Its prized possession is the Relic Casket containing the Buddha’s bones, excavated in the ruins of one of the Asoka stupas in Vaisali, sixty kilometres from Patna across the Ganges. Xuanzang had worshipped at this very stupa, which marked the spot where the Buddha announced his impending departure from the world. Xuanzang was so affected, he even had an image of the Buddha made there. But there was another item in the museum that I very much hoped to pay my homage to – Xuanzang’s own skull bones. It was a great honour to Xuanzang, to be placed under the same roof as the Buddha. They were given as a token of friendship by the Dalai Lama on behalf of the Chinese government in 1957. The guidebook warns that it might take some time to locate anything in the museum – there are more than 50,000 rare and precious artefacts and statues, and a few unusual objects, the sort of thing that seems to be regarded with awe by Indian villagers: the guidebook notes a stuffed goat with three ears and eight legs. Insects and rats have been steadily devouring the exhibits and most of them have no labels.

  The museum was closed. It was supposed to be open from 10.30 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. Now it was only 3 p.m. An extended lunch break? A Hindu festival, a public holiday, or the election? Yogendra was not surprised. ‘They are worried. Election is dangerous. People go mad and do big damage.’

  I was really disappointed not to see Xuanzang’s relics. They were intended to celebrate millennia of friendship with India. The Chinese had chosen something of Xuanzang’s to symbolize the depth of our intertwined histories, and knew the relics would be all the more prized in India because they would be worshipped, like the bones of a saint. I felt I would be close to the actual remains of the man I had followed all this way, at the centre point of his journey. But it was not to be. Like Duan at the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, I had to content myself with walking by the building; but I did not share Duan’s composure.

  Yogendra suggested that I check in to my hotel. ‘Nothing to see in Patna, nothing old, nothing new. Dead city,’ he said. I was taken to my scruffy but friendly hotel on the edge of the city. Its only virtue was that it was easy to leave from there – clearly I had no incentive to stay. Before he went off, Yogendra warned me not to go out. He would come and pick me up at six the next morning. While I was showing the receptionist my passport, I noticed half a dozen soldiers standing in the lobby with their rifles. ‘It is our normal security staff,’ she said. ‘We want to make our guests feel safe.’

  I had time to think about where I was. Apart from Xuanzang’s relics, Patna was known to me for only one thing, which gave it an insidious link to China. Historians might know about it but most Indians do not. Xuanzang would not have dreamed that the fountainhead of Buddhism could be the home of a great evil that almost destroyed China: in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British East India Company, and then the British Crown, controlled the production of opium, and its processing and distribution, from Patna. The M
ughals had introduced the crop to India in the sixteenth century. Production started on a small scale, intended for private and medicinal use. Then the Dutch took it from here to the southern coast of China as a possible commodity to sell. When the British forced the Dutch out of India, they took over and greatly expanded the opium trade to balance their huge deficit with China, caused by the importing of tea.

  The British loved Chinese tea, not only the leisured classes but also the workers. A historian even claimed, ‘Without tea filled with sugar, the poor diet of the factory workers could not have kept them going during the Industrial Revolution.’ In the first decade of the nineteenth century, Britain imported nearly 300 million pounds of tea. Lancashire woollens were shipped to China but could find no takers. The deficit climbed steadily and became a heavy drain on the British economy. They brought tea plants from China in 1832 and tried them in Assam. This proved a huge success, as if tea were native to the Indian soil. Tea plantations mushroomed and spread throughout the subcontinent. Most of the crop, and the best, was for export to London. Even that could not satisfy the British demand. At the same time, the Indians were also acquiring a taste for this almost medicinal drink, practically an addiction.

  Then the British came up with the solution: opium. Cash advances were offered for cultivation in Bihar but very few farmers accepted them. Poppies were harder to grow than grain and the price was low. The agents and collectors working for the Opium Department of the Bengal government – more than five hundred of them – complained: ‘Without coercive measures, it is almost impossible to prevail upon them to raise poppy production.’ Coercion they did not hesitate to use; even during years of famine poppy farmers were not allowed to switch to growing grain or vegetables. So a steady supply of opium was channelled through Patna to China, averaging 25,000 chests a year, with each chest weighing 149 pounds. On the eve of the first Opium War in 1839, profit from opium for British India was nearly ten million pounds a year.

  The British were fully aware of the effects of the drug: they prohibited its use among their own people, both in the UK and in India. But they justified the trade by saying the use of opium was not a curse, but a comfort and a benefit to the hard-working Chinese. The Chinese were not strong enough to resist it – but who is? No country today is immune – and China was almost destroyed. Young people tried it and loved it; court eunuchs could not live without it; bureaucrats were so addicted they turned into smugglers; magistrates were too doped to appear in court; hallucinated troops went into battle and were defeated without firing a shot; even Buddhist monasteries became opium dens for the rich and powerful.

  The rest of the world probably does not appreciate what a trauma this was for China. For two thousand years we had believed we were the centre of the world, the Middle Kingdom. Our pride in ourselves as a great nation was blown to pieces in our first major encounter with the West, the Opium War of 1839–42. The gunboats and technology of the new world, employed in an evil cause, were too strong for the old world. We have been licking our wounds ever since. Even today, we are still reacting against the psychological damage inflicted on us a hundred and fifty years ago. With my head full of these painful thoughts, I dozed off.

  When I woke up the next morning and saw the day’s newspapers, I was worried. On the front page of one of them was a picture of policemen standing over dead bodies; the headline was ‘Police shoot dead six men in riots in Nalanda District’. When Yogendra came to pick me up, I showed it to him. Nalanda was where we were heading for that day, sixty miles from Patna. I asked him how he felt about driving me there. ‘Buddhists, brave people. I have family to feed,’ was all he said.

  On the way we passed quite a few trucks carrying soldiers. A quarter of a million Indian troops were mobilized to supervise the elections in Bihar and the neighbouring state. The special Rapid Action Force was given strict orders to ‘shoot troublemakers on sight’. From the newspaper reports, Nalanda seemed to be a troubled area, so it was reassuring to see forces being moved there. The road to Nalanda, however, was less than ideal. Although it was part of National Highways 30 and 31, it was disfigured by potholes so big they looked as if they had just been blown out by landmines. We bumped along and my head kept hitting the roof. It would have been more comfortable travelling as Xuanzang did, on a wooden bullock-cart, or on an elephant. So these were the Bihar roads I had heard so much about. Apparently Bihar’s Chief Minister Laloo Yadav flew everywhere by helicopter, and he did not think his people needed roads. Not so long ago, a group of farmers met him on his campaign trail and fell at his feet, begging for a road to their village. ‘But whatever for?’ he chortled in disbelief, ‘Where are your cars that you need roads? I thought you are electing me to bring you honour, not for something as trivial as roads!’

  On the verge, large numbers of very young children were playing dangerously, darting on and off the road like kittens. They were very thin, with no shoes and hardly any clothes. Their mothers were clearing up empty courtyards near the road, far from the village proper. Some old women sat slumped in the shade of banyan trees, staring into space. Men were rarely seen. Yogendra said they had gone to the cities to look for work; they had no land. Many of them used to catch rats in the fields to eat, but they did not even have rats any more: fertilizer had finished them off; there was nothing going for them. The only activity I noticed was around a few brick kilns, though the huts were all made from poles, sugarcane leaves and plastic sheets. They looked so fragile, it would be a miracle if they could survive the monsoon. ‘You’re right, Ms.’ Yogendra shook his head in the Indian way which actually meant he agreed with you. ‘Monsoon destroys them. Children die too from cholera. In winter people die from cold. Very bad here. Trouble never stops.’

  The glimpse of life in Bihar I was seeing reminded me of something familiar that I couldn’t quite identify. I turned my thoughts to Xuanzang. When he travelled through Bihar, it was covered with thick forests of banyans, sals, rose-apple and mango. There were also bel trees and ashok, sacred to the Hindu god Shiva, and pipal, so much venerated that its wood could not be cut for fuel. Birds and animals abounded. Falcons, partridges, sparrows and many more, elephants and tigers. People who lived by the forest surrounded their houses with bamboos and thorn bushes, and built them on stilts to keep the animals out.

  Hui Li says Xuanzang had no fear of wild animals. He must have been inspired by the Buddha who spent six years meditating in the forest before his enlightenment. ‘Surrounded by lions and tigers, by panthers and buffaloes, by antelopes and stags and boar, I dwelt in the forest,’ says the Buddha. ‘No creature was terrified of me, and neither was I afraid of any creature. The power of loving kindness was my support.’ Buddhist lore is full of monks following the Buddha’s example, living in the woods; murals in temples and caves paint them in the company of tigers, each looking as if they knew the other was totally harmless. In Bihar today, wild elephants and tigers have been hunted to extinction, and ancient forests have been cleared. But the brutal reality of today’s Bihar was every bit as frightening as wild animals would be to me, and personal safety could not be taken for granted. Our test was patience and endurance. The true believer must be patient, and fearless too.

  After driving barely twenty miles we reached a complete gridlock. The queue stretched as far as I could see. The lorry-drivers must be used to it; they were making good use of their time. Some were crawling on the ground, inspecting their overburdened axles; others were sleeping, chatting, playing games or bringing out their paraffin stoves to prepare a meal. We managed to get to the front after three hours, driving on the wrong side of the road, swerving on to the narrow shoulder or finding a gap just big enough in the queue when we were about to collide with an oncoming car. The cause of the jam? A truck had broken down in the middle of a narrow bridge. There was no shortage of help, but the truck was giving the drivers a long and thorough test of their mechanical skills. After waiting for another two hours in the heat, dust and blaring Bollywood music, Yo
gendra manoeuvred skilfully to the front of the queue. The drivers tackling the broken truck all stood aside to make space. Our Ambassador just scraped through the narrow gap between the truck and the rail of the bridge. Everyone cheered and waved at us, and I gave Yogendra warm applause.

  We did not get to Nalanda until lunchtime, taking six hours to cover sixty miles. Yogendra was in a very good mood all the same, gesticulating and talking rapidly, but I had difficulty making out what he meant. He kept mentioning the name of Lord Krishna, a favourite god of the Hindus, and in particular of the Yadavs, Yogendra’s own caste. But what did Krishna have to do with Nalanda? I did not understand. I asked him to wait till we had found our lodgings, a Chinese monastery. Nalanda had no hotels – there was not much to the place, just the village and a few monasteries built by various countries. The Chinese monastery was built in the 1930s and was now maintained by monks from Thailand, Burma and Tibet. I asked the Thai monk in the office to help me understand Yogendra’s excitement. The answer was a complete surprise. Yogendra had been trying to tell me this was a great capital in the Indian epic Mahabharata and Lord Krishna had graced this place with his presence many times because his father-in-law lived here. I looked at the Thai monk for confirmation but he shook his head uncertainly. Perhaps Krishna had been here, but that was definitely not why Xuanzang came here.