Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud

by Sun Shuyun

  I asked her why things were so bad in Khotan.

  ‘This is different from Turfan. Turfan has a lot of Han Chinese and oil workers. Here we’re a minority and I guess we feel threatened.’ She was heating up half a dozen dishes she had prepared.

  I told her that I had heard that the armed police in Khotan had put on a parade for three days to show they would crush anyone who dared to make trouble.

  Yang nodded. ‘My male colleagues even have to hand in their exercise weights and clubs. The government thinks they could be used as weapons in a confrontation.’

  Were we not overreacting?

  She paused. ‘You know since the shoot-out and the murders, all of us in the government have been going to villages, telling people not to follow the separatists. You know what they said to me? “We don’t want much. Can we have our own head of village instead of a Han Chinese who is too young to grow a beard? Can you treat us equally and let us grow what we think makes money on our own land?” ’

  Just like the taxi-driver complaining about the silkworm quota?

  She nodded, and continued. ‘You’re following Xuanzang. I don’t know if you’re a Buddhist. I have trouble understanding Buddhism. I think we have trouble understanding Islam too. You know the saying: “You are not fish, how can you know the fish’s pleasure?” Our education, our beliefs and our lives have nothing to do with religion. Religion is a bad word, synonymous with superstition, backwardness, feudalism. The Uighurs are devout Muslims. That’s part of our problem. My parents have given their lives to Xinjiang – my name is Weijiang, “Defending Xinjiang”. It’s sad things have not turned out the way they hoped.’

  I apologized again for putting her to so much trouble. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said, putting yet another mountain of food in my bowl. ‘It’s rare for us to have a visitor. No Han Chinese wants to come here. I’m only sorry I can’t spend more time with you, or find you a proper car.’ She had managed, however, to find an old jeep that was not earmarked for the emergency. ‘Perhaps it isn’t suitable for the desert, but that’s the best we can do,’ she said resignedly. But she had persuaded a colleague to come with me. ‘He knows all about the desert and your monk too. You’re in safe hands.’ She had put so much thought and effort into my visit and I thanked her again. ‘You’re Fat Ma’s friend so you are my friend. Don’t we say, one more friend, one more option.’

  Next morning I got up early – Yang said we should leave before it became too hot. But by eleven o’clock there was still no sign of the elusive vehicle or the guide. I called her on her mobile and it rang for three minutes before she answered. Then she mumbled into the phone, clearly only half-awake. She had been called out, not long after I left, for a training exercise, hunting for a canister of mock explosives hidden somewhere in her work unit. ‘It took us so long to find it. If it had been a real one, you’d be talking to a ghost now,’ she grumbled. The good thing was that she had been given the morning off and she would be able to accompany us. She said she would come straight away.

  Finally she arrived in a decrepit Beijing jeep with a driver and her colleague, a big Uighur man in his fifties. I had visions of spending the whole day getting stuck in the desert, running out of water, and losing the way when the sun began to set, as Xuanzang did when he crossed the desert for the first time. But there was no choice. Heaven knew when the emergency would end. Off we went, shuddering jerkily along for fifty kilometres before we came to the desert road. Then the jeep began to groan and stop and start until it was completely stuck in the sand with the wheels spinning wildly. Yang’s colleague, Yashkar, suggested that we walk the last five kilometres to the stupa, while the driver went to get help at the nearest village, six kilometres back. We were barely in the desert!

  As we set out on foot for the stupa, I was first struck by the beauty of the desert, the sand sculpted into dunes and steep curving hills, and the valleys rising and falling between them. It was all minimal, bare and elemental. But as we went further in, my aesthetic pleasure was overwhelmed by the heat and the threatening void. What Xuanzang had faced was suddenly brought home to me. The dunes stretched out, wave after wave, to left and right, ahead of me and behind, and as far as I could see, a trackless immensity. It was awe-inspiring, terrifying. An inexpressible fear gripped me and I stopped. Yang turned round and asked me if I was too hot. I blurted out my anxiety: how did we know which way to go? Yashkar picked up some sand and showed me the coarse, heavy grains. ‘This is the deposit from the bed of the White Jade River,’ he said, and then pointed towards the white tree-stumps and the tamarisks that dotted the landscape here and there. ‘I think they once grew near the river. In the desert, the road follows the river, and the monasteries were never far from the road. This used to be an oasis when Xuanzang came here. You will see, such a splendid thing could not have been built way out in the desert. But over the centuries, the White Jade River changed its course. Without water, the oasis turned into desert.’

  Yashkar worked on the problems of desertification in Khotan. He had visited most of the ruins in the region, trying to figure out why people had abandoned their homes, sometimes even entire towns. It could be the decline of caravans on a particular route; it could be wars or epidemics. But mostly it was to do with water, or the lack of it. ‘Water is the lifeblood of the oasis and irrigation the arteries,’ Yashkar said. ‘Without the two, we are as good as dead.’ Then he told me he had Xuanzang’s Record on his shelf, and he referred to it constantly. ‘You can’t believe how poignant his stories are. If you look at what he said about Khotan, environment was very much on his mind.’

  Yashkar was right: Xuanzang begins his account of the ancient Khotan by saying ‘the greater part of the country is nothing but sand and gravel and the irrigated land is very limited’. He tells us the capital was carefully chosen by a holy man to make sure it was surrounded by water. It was remarkable. You would think that as a monk passing through the country, his mind would be on holy things. But he noticed the problem, one that Khotan still faces today. Environment was very much a Buddhist concern. According to Buddhism, everything is interdependent: to destroy our habitats is to damage ourselves. The Pure Land, the final destination that my grandmother and many Chinese Buddhists dream of, is described as clean, peaceful, harmonious, graceful and majestic: it is ideal for cultivating a pure mind. It is a goal that Buddhists want to realize here on earth too. Xuanzang could not help but be impressed how Buddhist Khotan was struggling to maintain its fragile balance in one of the most inhospitable environments on earth. Of the many stories he recorded in Khotan, I particularly like the one about the minister who sacrificed himself to get the White Jade River flowing again.

  The White Jade River, which supplied Khotan with jade and irrigation water, dried up one day. The king went to a Buddhist temple to consult the monks, who told him to prepare a ritual ceremony on the riverbank. The king obliged. As he was performing the ritual, the river goddess appeared. ‘My husband has just died,’ she declared, ‘and I am lonely. If I can have one of your ministers as my companion, the river will be filled with water again.’ She cast her glance at one of the king’s ministers who was tall, handsome and with a noble appearance. He came up to the king and said: ‘I have been holding this important position for a long time but never really contributed very much to the country. Now is my chance. To save the people, why worry about losing a minister? I am here to serve them. So please do not hesitate, Your Majesty. My only wish is for you to build a stupa and to pray for my good karma.’ When the stupa was built, the minister mounted a white horse, bade farewell to the king, and disappeared into the river. The White Jade River started flowing again. Xuanzang even visited the stupa and was sad that it had fallen into disrepair.

  Yang burst into laughter when she heard the story. ‘Find me one official like that today and I’ll give you a million dollars,’ she said to Yashkar. Just then, Yashkar cried out: ‘Rawak, the Mansion. We’ve found it!’ I looked up. Then I saw it too, at the edge of t
he horizon. A long stick of tamarisk bent by the desert wind stands on top of a stupa of the classic Indian type, a square base with a round dome. As we walked towards it, it grew bigger one minute and disappeared the next, as if it were just a mirage. When we climbed the last dune, we saw it without a shadow of doubt.

  The mud-brick stupa with steps leading to its top is still intact. Surrounding it are the high walls of a quadrangle enclosing the court; they have fallen in here and there, and in places sand has already engulfed them. I told Yashkar that it looked very much like the picture Stein took after his excavation. Yashkar laughed. ‘If we come back in again in a few months, this will be half buried by sand. The site is on the government’s conservation list. They have people clearing the sand and looking after it. There’re huge statues just underneath the surface. The treasure hunters can’t wait to get their hands on them.’

  In Xuanzang’s time treasure hunters were already probing into the buried cities and monasteries. He tells how a rain of sand and earth engulfed one entire city – the Buddhist message was that the inhabitants did not take the advice of an arhat who prophesied its doom, and even humiliated him. Later people heard about the treasures buried there and went to look for them, but a furious wind sprang up, dark clouds gathered, and the treasure hunters disappeared. This fable lived on. When Stein and other twentieth-century adventurers set off for the desert, that was exactly what the local people told them: don’t go! The ghosts of the dead are guarding the treasures. You will become a ghost too.

  Stein excavated for nine days in Rawak in 1902. After removing mountains of sand he found eighty-one Bodhisattva statues on the southwest and southeast walls of the courtyard. They were colossal images, richly decorated with elaborate drapery and intricately carved strings of jewels on the breast and arms, all in the Gandharan style. On some of them he found remains of gold leaf patches, reminding him of a quaint custom recorded by Xuanzang about miracle-working Buddhist statues: ‘Those who have any disease, according to the part affected, cover the corresponding place on the statue with gold leaf, and forthwith they are healed. People who address prayers to it with a sincere heart mostly obtain their wishes.’

  Much to Stein’s regret, he could not remove the statues without destroying them. So he had to content himself with photographing them, recording their exact positions, and burying them again in the sand. ‘It was a melancholy duty to perform,’ he wrote, ‘strangely reminding me of a true burial, and it almost cost me an effort to watch the images I had brought to light vanishing again, one after the other, under the pall of sand which had hidden them for so many centuries.’ But when he returned five years later on his second expedition, he found that all the heads of the statues had been smashed by treasure hunters in the belief that they could find valuables inside. Then more tomb robbers came. Yashkar said there were still a few statues left, barely half a metre under the sand, but for how long?

  I stood in the midday sun, my legs sinking in the sand up to the knees, as if I was drowning in a dream. It was remarkable that Rawak is still here one thousand five hundred years after Xuanzang’s visit, having withstood the onslaught of time, nature and human destruction. But it is also a poignant reminder of just how far the oasis has receded, as he had feared. In the battle between nature and man, nature seemed to be winning.

  The sand of a thousand years buried the stupa. Though it was not nature alone, but the Muslim crusaders who wiped out Buddhist Khotan. Nowhere did the battle of faiths leave a clearer mark than on the Gosringa Mountain, or the Kohmari Mazar as it is called today.

  We decided to visit it on our way back to Khotan. This is how Xuanzang describes it: ‘There are two peaks to this mountain, and around these peaks, on each side, is an undulating line of hills. In one of the valleys is a monastery, with a statue of the Buddha which emits rays of glory from time to time. This is the place where the Buddha formerly delivered a concise digest of the Dharma to heavenly beings, and where he prophesied a kingdom would be founded and the principles of the Dharma would spread.’ According to the Tibetan Gosringa-Vyakarana Sutra, the Buddha even asked some of the heavenly beings to stay on here to protect Khotan. The mountain was an important centre of pilgrimage for Buddhists; the Lotus Sutra says it is one of the twenty-five most sacred places of Buddhism.

  We left the jeep at the foot of the mountain and started a long and steep climb. It was totally barren, without a single tree or blade of grass. I was not sure it was like this when Xuanzang came up here: Buddhist monasteries were normally surrounded by trees and water. We were passed by a Uighur family, who were walking briskly. Yashkar said they were pilgrims going to make offerings to Maheb Khwoja, one of the direct descendants of Mohammed the Prophet.

  ‘He led the crusade to conquer Khotan?’ I asked.

  ‘He was the man.’ Yashkar nodded.

  More than halfway up the mountain, near the edge of a cliff, we came to the cave where Xuanzang says ‘an arhat is plunged in ecstasy and awaiting the coming of the Maitreya Buddha’. He tells us he did not see the arhat because giant fallen rocks had blocked the entrance to the cavern. The king had sent his soldiers to remove them but swarms of poisonous wasps had thwarted their attempts.

  The cave was open now and reachable by a ladder. The path leading to it was lined by ramshackle huts for pilgrims to stay in, and next to them stood two rows of fencing divided into cubicles. Yashkar said he had to clean himself before entering the cave, just as he would do before going to the mosque. He excused himself and disappeared into one of them. When he reappeared a few minutes later, he led the way up the ladder, through the narrow gap, and we found ourselves in a black hole. There was little light inside, and the cave was empty; the walls were covered with soot. Yashkar explained that the locals believed that the soot was from the smoke that suffocated Maheb Khwoja when he was hiding here – his enemies set fire to the whole mountain, which explained why it was barren. Could Xuanzang have imagined that a Buddhist master and an Islamic martyr would share the same shrine?

  The crusade against Khotan in the tenth century was one of the longest and bloodiest wars waged by the Arabs. They first captured Kashgar, the westernmost oasis of the Taklamakan Desert. From there they launched repeated attacks on Khotan. Yashkar said there is a local record with a vivid description of the ‘holy war’. ‘They laid siege to the cities and sent in messengers, asking the inhabitants to surrender: “We are the descendants of the Prophet and we are part of the 140,000 crusaders fighting to spread Islam. We are here to convert you all. You must surrender. If you do not, we will kill you, keep your children as slaves and raze your place to the ground.” The reply was: “We will never betray the religion of our ancestors.” ’

  The King of Khotan did everything he could to ensure the survival of his kingdom. Huge portraits of the Buddha were commissioned, special ceremonies were performed in monasteries throughout the country, and his people prayed day and night – all to evoke the protection of the kingdom as told in the sutras. But he did not just leave things in the hands of the gods. He sought an alliance with local rulers in Dunhuang in Western China. He also sent his own children to the Chinese capital to plead for help. The letters that the princes sent to their father from Dunhuang revealed just how desperate they were. They were beleaguered in Dunhuang: bandits had taken away their luggage, their supplies, their tributes and letters of state to the Chinese emperor. They begged the king to allow them to stay in Dunhuang longer, but in vain. They were told to carry on regardless, with no further delay. In one letter, the princes were in despair: ‘How can the Chinese emperor reward us even if we turn up in the capital? We are like beggars. There is a war and many people have died in the next town. If you indeed order us to proceed, you will be forcing us to walk into the fires of hell and we will not come out alive.’ It was not clear whether the king had insisted on his children risking their lives, but he was looking death in the face, for himself and his country. He had no choice but to pay the ultimate price, as a father and as
a king.

  As a pious Buddhist, the king must have questioned whether he ought to fight in the last resort. Not to kill is the first precept of Buddhism, and non-violence its hallmark. Buddhist scriptures are full of stories about kings and princes who will not fight wars even to defend their kingdoms. The King of Benares once opened the gate of his capital to invaders. ‘Do not fight just so I may remain king,’ he told his people. ‘If we destroy the lives of others we also destroy our own peace of mind. Let them have the kingdom if they want it so badly. I do not wish to fight.’

  Even for selfish reasons, Buddhists should not fight – it brings bad karma and impedes their liberation. A village headman once asked the Buddha where he would go if he died in battle defending his people. ‘You will be reborn in the hell called the realm of those slain in battles.’ The Buddha said the man’s mind was already seized by the thought: ‘May my enemies be struck down, slaughtered or annihilated. May they not exist!’ There could not be a holy war in the name of the Buddha. Buddhists have never waged a war to propagate their faith, or persecuted believers of other religions. Asoka sent people to spread the Dharma armed with sutras, not guns; the message was peace and compassion.

  But the King of Khotan decided to defend his kingdom at all costs; after all in the sutras, even the Bodhisattvas killed devils to protect the faithful. But he had to fight alone against the tidal waves of crusaders. The Chinese never came to his rescue – China was in a deep turmoil of its own: peasant rebellions, attacks by nomads in the north, and the crowning of a new emperor. In the end, after almost half a century of lonely resistance, Khotan fell to the crusaders, who could not conceal their joy at conquering this stronghold of Buddhism, even though they had suffered terrible losses – in Khotan today, there are more tombs for Islamic ‘martyrs’ than in any other place in Central Asia, a reminder of the protracted battles of the faiths. The Dictionary of the Turkic Language, edited by the Islamic scholar Muhammad Kashgar in the eleventh century, collected this verse: