by Sun Shuyun
I went through the motions of the ceremony. But my mind kept wandering off, to the Mogao Caves, to Grandmother who had set her mind on the Western Paradise, and even to the rituals that every Chinese had to go through during the Cultural Revolution – bowing to Chairman Mao every morning and repenting to him every evening, praising him as our saviour, reciting slogans and passages from his Little Red Book, pledging our commitment to the goal of Communism, searching our souls in self-criticism, and repeating ‘May our great leader Chairman Mao live in good health for ten thousand years and beyond!’ We had to keep a diary to be read out in class recording our transgressions. One entry from my third year in primary school read: ‘Our great leader, teacher and helmsman Chairman Mao said that unity was paramount: without it, there would not have been the victory of the Communist Party. But I fought with my brother today over a very trivial matter. If I could not even unite with him, how could I do so with all the people in the motherland? If people do not unite, how are we going to realize the goal of Communism, the paradise on earth? Must read more of Chairman Mao’s works, listen to him more attentively, and be his good child.’
For many Chinese Buddhists like Grandmother, rebirth in the Western Paradise is the core of belief, perhaps more than enlightenment, which is too much hard work, often requiring numerous rebirths – that is if you can achieve it at all. The Lotus Sutra even says that true Dharma is beyond understanding and only the Buddha knows all. But the faithful should not despair because there is a vast pantheon of Bodhisattvas ready to give anyone a helping hand. Amitabha, the Buddha of Infinite Light, created the Western Paradise as a way-station for those who proceed to nirvana. Anyone can rest there, even murderers, as long as they repeat their wish to enter it ten times.
I used to have the impression that the Western Paradise was an end in itself, not a means to reach the final goal of nirvana. It was on Grandmother’s lips all the time; I never heard her mentioning nirvana at all. Besides, these way-stations as described on the murals were so delightful, why should the faithful bother to strive for nirvana at all, especially as many are not exactly sure what it is? Grandmother’s paradise also reminded me of the promise of the Communist utopia where we were told we would have everything we desired. The Communist utopia did not work. For me, be it a Buddhist or a Communist one, an eternal heaven, which provides all forms of pleasures desired by men and women and where they enjoy every happiness is inconceivable. I cannot imagine that such a place could exist, except in our hearts.
‘You sound like a Zen Buddhist,’ Shan Ren said when I told her my doubts about the Western Paradise. We were taking a walk in the courtyard after dinner. ‘You know what the Sixth Patriarch of Zen says about the Western Paradise?’ I shook my head. ‘Deluded people do not know that the Pure Land is within themselves. They recite the Buddha’s name and look for rebirth in the Western Paradise. But if they do not rid the mind of evil thoughts, what Buddha will welcome them? The wise purify their own minds. A pure mind is the Western Paradise.’
I had always liked Zen poetry, Zen gardens, the purity and simplicity that Zen seems to stand for. But I associated Zen Buddhism with the mind-boggling koans, or public cases, which were supposed to break conventional mindsets and make you see your true nature. Many of them did not make any sense to me. I said as much to Shan Ren. She smiled. ‘You have no problem understanding the Zen Paradise, do you? You will like the Sixth Patriarch’s Sutra. It’s very much about the cultivation of the mind.’
She was right. The more I learned about Zen Buddhism, the more appealing I found it. There is no belief in an intervening deity, no Amitabha. It is concerned with what one can do oneself: gaining insight into how things really are, achieving inner freedom and abandoning attachment to worldly pleasures. It does not rely on performing rituals or on books, but calls for self-discipline and constant meditation. I suppose it was unrealistic to expect that someone like Grandmother could adopt it. She needed the simpler comforts of the Pure Land. I think I will find it difficult myself but it is the sort of direction I would want to take.
But I was intrigued by Shan Ren. She was very knowledgeable about Buddhism and was obviously well educated. How did she become a Buddhist? After all, she belonged to my parents’ generation, who were usually either devout Communists or total atheists. But in a monastery you do not ask people about their past, certainly not on the first day. I was half-dead as well. If I wanted to do better the next day, I had better catch up on my sleep. So I said goodnight to Shan Ren. ‘You’ve done well to stay up this long,’ she said. ‘Let me get you some hot water and you go to your room.’
She brought me a thermos full of hot water. I poured myself a cup. But then I decided not to drink it: the toilet was a hole in the ground in a shed at the far corner of the monastery, near the orchard, with no lights, and I wanted to minimize my visits there. I brushed my teeth with the water, had a quick wash, and lay down, with my clothes on. I had forgotten about the curtains. I would have to ask for them tomorrow. Within seconds, I was asleep.
I soon fell into the routine life of the monastery: two services; three meals; a little bit of work in the morning, sharing Shan Ren’s tasks dusting and cleaning the shrine hall and watering flowers and plants; taking a siesta; learning about Buddhism from the old and young abbots, and from simply being in the monastery. The abbot said that in Xuanzang’s time, monks would spend more hours on learning the sutras and meditating and less on the ceremonies, otherwise monastic life then and now was not very different. It seemed to suit me. I liked the structured days. Nothing was rushed, except for taking food. The monks were cheerful, gentle and considerate. I even began to enjoy the impenetrable mantras and their chanting. I learned so much every day about Buddhism and its history. I found out why my haiqing is so big: it is supposed to be like the shape of a giant wave, absorbing a sea of wisdom. I discovered why monks had to work even if they had enough donations to live on: the self-reliance of the Zen monks ensured their survival in the mountains after many other sects perished in the most deadly persecutions of Buddhism in 845 AD. I began to see how much Buddhism has enriched our lives and opened us to sympathy and compassion. Its promise of salvation for everybody has given countless people hope; its emphasis on devotion, self-restraint and tolerance has helped us to live with each other; its rituals and festivities have over the centuries provided relief for, and given colour to, an existence that was often grey and humdrum.
In return for all the things I had learned, I was glad I could be of some use to others: on two occasions I was actually useful making up the numbers for the ceremonies for the dead. In Buddhism, everyone becomes a preta, literally a departed person, after death and they will remain in the intermediate state until the funeral rites are completed. Then depending on one’s karma, the reincarnation may be as gods, humans again, animals or creatures in hell where King Yama hands out appropriate punishments. Unlike those in Dante’s Inferno, King Yama’s damned are not beyond redemption. Pretas can be helped: by reciting penances, the monks can draw on the inexhaustible store of merit of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and their own good karma to cancel out the bad karma of the dead.
I prayed, bowed, prostrated, chanted sutras and walked around the shrine hall twenty times invoking the name of Amitabha Buddha a thousand times. I was not sure, however, that my participation in the ceremony contributed anything to ‘delivering the dead’ to a good destination. My mind was full of impure thoughts. It looked to me as though rebirth was not simply a matter of karma. If monks could transfer their merit to the dead, where was the incentive for people to lead a good life and be virtuous? Whatever they did, they would be saved in the end. I could not figure out the logic of this.
But the real problem I had in the monastery was the daily meditation in the evening. I had no difficulty sitting with my legs crossed in the lotus position for an hour but I found it extremely hard to concentrate. My thoughts darted about like butterflies, coming and going as they pleased. Memories from my past inte
rtwined effortlessly with impressions from the present: the beatific smile of the Buddha, the subtle blue of the sky, a camel in the desert, a friend from work, my father on his hospital bed, my grandmother praying in the dark – they arrived unbidden from some deep recess, as if trying to defeat the very clarity I wanted to achieve. These subterranean thoughts may have a purpose that we do not understand, as our dreams have, but what is certain is that they distract us from total concentration.
The poster on the door of the meditation hall reminded me that I was supposed to be contemplating who the Buddha was. Was he a god, as my grandmother would have me believe? Was he our very being but hidden from us by our worldly desires and ignorance? Was he the wind that made a banner ripple in the air? Or was he simply nothingness, the void? Meditation is an exercise that focuses the mind on an object or an idea. When the sea is rough and throws up the sediments at the bottom, the water becomes murky and we cannot see clearly. The same is true of the mind. The stream of thoughts and associations clouds our perceptions and prevents us from seeing the object or the idea as it really is. Through learning to meditate, a process as long and painful as psychoanalysis, the restless stream of one’s consciousness is brought under control. A mind with enough training can perform extraordinary feats, just like a ballet dancer, whose leaps seem astonishing to the untrained. Totally emptying the mind of distracting thoughts would be just one of them. Ultimately one can reach another realm; this is what the monks aspire to. Meditation is a very important part of their training; in fact it is one of the three pillars of Buddhism. It is how the Buddha became enlightened under the Bodhi Tree. Only by combining discipline, meditation and wisdom can a monk begin to hope for awakening. As for me, I have a long way to go to achieve this state, a virtual Himalaya to climb.
Quite a few times I found myself dozing off during meditation. I confessed as much to Shan Ren. She smiled. ‘Do you know what people say about meditators?’ she asked. ‘Eat their fill, sit down, shut their eyes and go to sleep!’ I laughed. ‘But it does help you to think,’ she added.
Did she find it difficult? What went through her mind? I asked her.
‘It is not easy. Things you’ve done do come back to haunt you,’ she said slowly. ‘For our generation, so much harm has been done in the name of good causes, so many people wronged. Looking back, I cannot believe how we could have been so cruel, so merciless, so inhuman.’
I asked her about karma.
‘It’s tempting to believe it,’ she said slowly, ‘but it’s too easy to say everything is fate. We did some mad things and we have to hold ourselves responsible. I am living with the consequences of my actions. I denounced and divorced my husband in the Cultural Revolution. How could I do such a thing? That’s difficult to live with.’ She paused for a long moment. ‘But what is done is done,’ she said gently, looking me in the eye. ‘It’s no use mulling over the past. Do good and no evil and live each day as it comes – that is my motto.’
I hope that she will find inner peace. I only wish my father had found some resource to enable him to cope with his bitterness. If he had, he might still be alive today.
As the days went by, I found out more and more about the monastery. It really was tiny, but still the abbot had a lot to cope with. The Chinese say if you plant a tree, the phoenix will come. The old abbot had built the monastery but it could not attract enough monks or enough money. Dunhuang is no longer the metropolitan city of the Silk Road. It is isolated and poor, in one of the most impoverished regions of China. The oasis used to boast seventeen monasteries and the Peerless Caves; one-fifth of its population were monks and nuns. Today the donations barely cover the basic bills of the Thunderbolt Monastery, the only one in Dunhuang. Life is austere. I had been eating the same food every day since I arrived: porridge, noodles, steamed buns and aubergines from the vegetable plot, or cabbage, the cheapest vegetable in the market. Shan Ren could not find me a curtain – the monks’ had been donated by their followers – so I had to do without. I did not have a shower for five days. There was only enough hot water to make tea – the monks washed themselves with cold. It was no surprise that few wanted to come here. If they went to the better-off regions, the monasteries would have far more creature comforts.
The monastery seemed to have only three resident monks – the abbot, the retired abbot and a young monk. Fortunately there were three itinerant monks while I was there, and another waiting to be ordained. Otherwise I could not imagine how they would conduct morning and evening services, which require at least four people. One day the young monk came into the abbot’s office with a form, asking for leave to study in another monastery near Shanghai.
‘You’re a commander without any soldiers now,’ I joked with the abbot.
He laughed wearily. ‘You know I was told that in Xuanzang’s time the Thunderbolt Monastery was so popular they had to devise ingenious ways to keep people out, such as making the applicants memorize an entire sutra of tens of thousands of words. We cannot make any demands now.’ I asked him what he would do if the itinerant monks left. ‘That has happened before. I had to do a one-man show; the show must go on!’ he said resolutely.
The Thunderbolt Monastery is not a spiritual haven with great teachers ready to impart wisdom and truth. When I asked the young abbot about Yogacara, he said, ‘I’d be glad if you could tell me what it means.’ But as Zen Buddhists say, you can find Buddha nature anywhere. I certainly had a most memorable experience at lunch one day. As usual I took my seat next to Shan Ren. The lunch that day was overcooked noodles with a few cabbage leaves on top. For some curious reason they put soda in it, so much that I felt sick after the first mouthful. But to leave anything uneaten was not an option. I had been told off at breakfast for leaving two grains of rice in my bowl. I struggled on, morsel by morsel, feeling as if I was going to throw up at any minute. I looked desperately at Shan Ren, pointing my chopsticks at the bowl and my mouth. She nodded. Yes, I’d better not leave anything behind. But there was no way I could finish it, so I pushed my bowl to the edge of the table with my chopsticks next to it, indicating my lunch was over. Shan Ren, who had already finished, reached out, took my bowl and poured my leftovers down her throat. She wiped her mouth, said a short prayer and then we stood up to go.
Shan Ren’s gesture preoccupied me. The truth was, I was shocked at her finishing my meal. When I was young, my brother and I sometimes left food in our bowls in protest – not often, because there was never enough to eat, but when for example we had to eat noodles made of sweet potato flour for five days in a row. My brother could get away with it but my father would insist that I finish mine. I would play with my food until he left the table. By then the food in my bowl was cold and watery. It was always my grandmother who ate it. She was my grandmother after all. But Shan Ren had no idea whether I had some disease. Perhaps she even saw me spit my last mouthful of noodles back into the bowl. What made her do it?
Was Shan Ren simply following the example of the ever-compassionate Bodhisattvas who love all beings as a mother loves her children? Her love is boundless: she gives and expects nothing in return. The happiness of the child is hers and so are the tears, pains and sorrows. For Bodhisattvas, other and self are identical. A selfless life, like that of the Bodhisattva, said the Buddha, would lead men and women to nirvana. In Mahayana Buddhism, there are supposed to be tens of thousands of Bodhisattvas taking care of the faithful, and the Chinese are particularly fond of four: Dizang, the Bodhisattva who vows to save all beings from hell; Puxian, the Bodhisattva of Universal Worth on his white elephant, which stands for weightiness, thoroughness and perfection in propagation; Wenshu, the Bodhisattva of Wisdom, without whose guidance enlightenment is impossible; and of course, Guanyin, the Bodhisattva of Compassion who listens to and understands all our sufferings. You find them in all the temples and monasteries – the four most beautiful mountains in China are dedicated to them as their earthly abodes.
When I looked at the murals or read the stories of the
miraculous Bodhisattvas, I used to think of them as mere fantasies, like Grandmother’s paradise. But Shan Ren had made me see them in a different light: the scenes of paradise and the compassion of the Bodhisattvas have not only comforted countless followers but also instilled in them the very virtues the Bodhisattvas possess. Xuanzang was the best example. He prayed to them, he was guided by them, and above all, he aspired to become one. His determination to reach the true Buddhism at whatever cost, his compassionate wish to bring it back for the faithful in China, his calm presence that soothed even the most vicious enemies, his equilibrium that made him indifferent to the flattery of kings and worldly fame, his skilful ways that won him the hearts of beggars and emperors alike and his wisdom that illuminated others – he is, in the eyes of many Buddhists, a Bodhisattva, who devoted his life to the service of others.
In the dim light of the meditation hall, the image of the Buddha on the altar seemed to blur and turn into Xuanzang, the old abbot, Shan Ren or my grandmother – without all the trappings and offerings but somehow each a holy figure. I felt I had come to a certain realization. I could not be a believer like my grandmother, with total faith in divine intervention and final deliverance from the pain and suffering of life. But I had come to understand the core of the Bodhisattva way, as they had showed me. To try to live it was to become a Buddhist.
