Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud

by Sun Shuyun

  Emperor Gaozong was as impressed by Xuanzang as his father had been. He continued the imperial patronage, but he also made equally strenuous demands on the monk – the blessing of his family members, the consecration of monasteries and palaces, or accompanying the emperor and the empress to their summer retreats. Xuanzang was willing to oblige. Before the empress gave birth, he prayed fervently for her and forecast that she would have a son. When the crown prince was born, he chose the name of Fo Guangzi, Buddha-Light Son, for the boy. After a month, he sent a delegation of monks to the palace, congratulating the empress again and bearing auspicious presents for the child: the Heart Sutra written in gold letters, the Sutra on Gratitude to Parents, a cassock, an incense-burner, a sandalwood desk, a wash-jug, a bookcase, a rosary, a monk’s staff and a toilet-box. He even proposed to the emperor and empress that their son and heir follow the example of the Buddha, renouncing the crown for a monastic life. This was very bold of Xuanzang – he was obviously trying every possible means to fortify Buddhism in China. It would have been something unheard of in Chinese history; and indeed the emperor thought it was going too far.

  Xuanzang came up with another suggestion. He proposed that Gaozong should build a pagoda to house the sutras he had brought back from India and all his translations. It would be a grand monument for the achievements of the emperor, including his support for Buddhism. Gaozong agreed, though to a pagoda smaller than Xuanzang had in mind. On the day of construction, Xuanzang instructed that two stone steles bearing Taizong’s and Gaozong’s prefaces for his translations be built into the pagoda’s lower walls. He wanted the most permanent possible protection for Buddhism. History has proved the good sense of Xuanzang’s foresight. The Big Wild Goose Pagoda survived two further persecutions during the Tang dynasty, when most monasteries in the country were destroyed, numerous wars and, last but not least, the Cultural Revolution. All these years later, it is still with us.

  Gaozong’s and Empress Wu’s tomb has survived too, in truly imperial style. A broad avenue of grey flagstones sweeps up to the remains of the entrance pavilions, past giant stone statues placed opposite each other – first, exotic tributes of lions and ostriches, then Heavenly Horses with their riders, and lastly the irreplaceable Confucian scholars who are supposed to advise the Son of Heaven even in death. Behind the entrance a steep hill rises with the tomb on its pinnacle. In a separate enclosure to the right is an honour guard of sixty-one foreign kings – life-size statues, as if the emperor was saying, ‘You received my protection. Now stand vigil over my grave.’ In fact their vigil was long over: they have been headless for centuries.

  Both Li and I were more interested in the stele opposite that of Emperor Gaozong, erected by Empress Wu for herself. It is a straight-sided obelisk, with a curved top carved into dragons, but no inscription. Yet no other figure in Chinese history has attracted so much controversy as Empress Wu. And understandably so – ever since Confucius’s time, women had been regarded as inferior, ‘long in hair but short on wisdom’. A boy was a blessing for the family and a girl a curse. A daughter, a wife and a mother – that was all women were allowed to be. There were precedents of other empresses and concubines drawn into palace politics, but they never managed to push their husbands or sons totally aside and occupy the throne themselves. Shang Shu, one of the Chinese moral classics, says, ‘If a hen replaces the cock to crow, the household will suffer; if a woman usurp her husband’s power, the country will fall.’

  Empress Wu broke all the rules. Originally one of Taizong’s concubines, she was banished to a nunnery after the emperor’s death. Her striking looks caught the eye of Emperor Gaozong when he came to the nunnery to pray for his late father. She was called into the palace as a concubine again, used all her charm and skill to win Gaozong’s heart and her rank rose rapidly. She smothered one of her daughters and put the blame on the empress, who had already lost favour because she bore no children. Wu got her wish: the empress was deposed and she was crowned in her place. To remove any threat once and for all, she had the former empress thrown in a barrel of liquor and drowned. When Gaozong died after a long illness, Wu put two of her sons on the throne and then deposed both of them – one died in exile. At the age of sixty-seven, she ascended the throne herself, the first and only woman in Chinese history to do so. She was well aware of her historical importance. The emperors were the Sons of Heaven; she gave herself a new name, Zetian, the Equal of Heaven.

  Li told me that Empress Wu’s reign was remarkable. She stopped the expansion of the empire because it imposed too heavy a burden on the people. Taxes were lowered and the bureaucracy was made meritocratic. When a Confucian scholar wrote a pamphlet calling for rebellion against her, she said she could use his talent and courage in the court. Ordained by Xuanzang, she became a lay Buddhist devotee before the birth of her first son, and went on to become a great patron of Buddhism: some of the most beautiful statues and Buddhist caves in China date from her time; at least Buddhism did not rule out the possibility of a woman becoming a ruler. She repaired the Big Wild Goose Pagoda and left it as we see it today. She reigned supreme for fifteen years until she was eighty-two, when her prime minister led a military coup and installed her deposed son. Barely ten months later, she died.

  I asked Li why we never heard those good things about Wu. ‘Just think who writes our history,’ she said. ‘Men!’ Throughout the centuries, Wu has been called all kinds of names: she was a whore who usurped the throne; she was the most ruthless dictator in Chinese history, killing her own children or anyone in her way; and she ruled the country by the only means she knew – by secret police and informers. ‘What infuriated them most,’ Li went on, ‘was that she openly asked men for sexual services. The story goes that all over the country men joked about the size of their penises and wondered if theirs was big enough to satisfy her. I am not sure whether it was a historical fact or whether the historians made it up to prove she was a bad woman.’ She paused to get her breath back. ‘But even if the story is true, it couldn’t begin to compare with the thousands of concubines the emperors had. Women had to be chaste; men did not – because men made the rules.’

  Whatever historians would say about her, Empress Wu knew her place in history was guaranteed. Unlike all Chinese emperors who left elaborate accounts of their achievements, she needed no inscription for herself. Just this empty stone stele – it asks us, and history, to make our own judgement. It suddenly occurred to me why Empress Wu was possible only in the Tang dynasty. I had never thought of it before. This was a time when a girl child was treasured as much as a boy, when women could put on men’s clothes and go hunting with them, when they could marry and remarry, even three times, when an emperor could take on his father’s concubine. Grandmother had to have her feet bound to please men, and to make them feel safe – she could not run away; she was forced to remain a widow for almost half a century after Grandfather’s death. In the Tang dynasty women were taught to read and write for their own good; in Grandmother’s day, and in my mother’s youth, ignorance was a virtue in a woman, and education was supposed to put wrong ideas in their heads. In the Tang, women could take pride in their beauty and wear tantalizing clothes – when I saw the first Tang drama, the costumes were so revealing I thought they were a director’s ploy to please the audience. My mother had to hide her femininity completely. In the Tang, if a woman fell in love with a foreigner, no one blinked an eyelid. When I did, my father nearly disowned me.

  How are the mighty fallen. On the way back into the city, we saw huge billboards advertising new housing developments in the Tang style, with slogans such as ‘We are the descendants of the Great Tang and must live accordingly.’ There were more serious posters, calling on every citizen to learn the Tang spirit and make Xian a metropolis of the world again. I asked Li whether she thought it would happen.

  She smiled and shook her head. ‘Everyone talks about the Tang spirit,’ she said dismissively. ‘It’s in the papers, on TV and radio. But people haven�
��t the faintest clue what it is, still less how we are going to get it back. The spirit of the Tang was its openness and its ability to borrow what suited it best. The ethos of Xian today is still Communist self-reliance. As the Chinese say, the cart is heading south, but on an east – west track. How can we catch up with the world if we are not looking forwards, but backwards?’

  I thought about what Li had said after I dropped her off at her university and headed back to my hotel, a simple concrete box above a small restaurant on Red Bird Street. The people in Xian obviously wanted very much to revive this ancient city. Some scholars even advocated studying and applying the spirit of Xuanzang to achieve the goal. If everyone, they argued, had a little bit of Xuanzang’s willingness to bear hardship, and his indomitable will to remove all obstacles, Xian would be its glorious self once more. But perhaps another Taizong is closer to what is needed, I thought to myself. No doubt Xuanzang would have wished the best for Xian: peace, prosperity and being the centre of the world, as he had experienced himself in this ancient city, his second home, his final resting place.

  On the outskirts of Xian, in a beautiful valley, is the temple where Xuanzang is buried. It was the last place on my journey in his footsteps. In the receding morning mist, the pale terracotta colour of its walls stood out from the lush green of the trees and the fields surrounding it. Inside all was peace. The bell and drum towers stood silent. Nothing stirred, except for the wind murmuring through the trees that nestled in among the temple buildings. No tourists, not even a monk, were to be seen. An old man in a Mao jacket was sitting on a stool in the courtyard, reading a booklet. He asked me to buy a ticket. ‘I’m glad to see you,’ he said warmly, ‘so few people come here. Today is quieter than usual, all the monks have gone. They are off somewhere, performing Buddhist rituals.’

  He asked me if I was a Buddhist. I shook my head. He then asked what I was here for. When I told him about my journey, his eyes brightened.

  ‘You mean you have seen everything the Master saw?’

  ‘Quite a bit.’ I nodded.

  ‘How lucky you are! You must have accumulated a lot of merit.’

  I had definitely acquired some understanding of Buddhism, I told him.

  He was happy to show me round. He stood up and closed his booklet, a compilation of extracts from various sutras. ‘Some of these are the Master’s translations.’ He waved it proudly. ‘Wasn’t he wonderful? He turned down two emperors. That takes a lot of strength. He just wanted to get on with his work so people like you and me could read these sutras and benefit from them. You know some of the actual palm-leaf sutras the Master brought back from India are in our library,’ he went on excitedly. ‘They are the most precious objects in the temple, perhaps next only to the Master’s remains.’ Unfortunately, we could not go in – the monks had taken the keys with them. Still I wanted to have a peek. He took me through a semi-circular gate to the east of the main shrine hall and told me to look up. Above the huge groves of bamboo appeared the flying eaves of the library, and turning around a corner I saw a two-storey building right in front of me.

  It was big, perhaps spacious enough to hold all the sutras Xuanzang had acquired in India, and his translations. He managed, despite his onerous official duties, to translate more scriptures than anyone else in Chinese history, surpassing even Kumarajiva with his army of helpers – seventy-five sutras and commentaries in a total of 1,346 volumes. They encompassed a variety of Mahayana texts. The most important for Chinese Buddhism was Prajnaparamita Sutra, the Wisdom Sutra. Together with commentaries, Xuanzang’s translation of it occupied six hundred volumes, nearly half his work. The core of it was the Heart Sutra, which Chinese monks recite daily in their prayers, to remind themselves of the transience of the world. He didn’t start on it until 660, when his health was failing and Gaozong had finally allowed him to retreat from the world, to the Jade Flower Monastery, the late Taizong’s summer palace. He never left it. The sutra was so long, he feared he might die before he finished it; he worked frantically on it, day and night, probably accelerating his end. When he completed it at the beginning of 664, he knew his time had come. ‘What makes you mention such a thing? You look just as usual,’ his disciples asked. ‘You may see no difference,’ he told them, ‘but I know it is time for me to go.’

  He stopped translating and gave himself up entirely to meditation and prayer. The instructions for his funeral were simple and precise: he wanted to be buried rolled in a reed mat by a mountain stream, far away from the monastery – ‘Let the elk and deer be my companions; let me follow the mallard and the crane.’ Then he set about preparing for his passage to the next life. He paid his last respects to the Buddhist statues he had erected around the monastery, and gave away all his possessions to his disciples. He had a list made of all the books he had translated, the images he had commissioned, the poor people he had supported, and the faithful he had guided. He also commissioned a statue of the Buddha under the Bodhi Tree and asked for it to be placed in the hall where he was to die. Finally, knowing the hour was near, he sent for his disciples and all the monks who had been working with him, and bade them a happy farewell:

  I am weary of the body now. My work is finished and there is no point in my staying longer. May the good works I have done benefit all living beings. May they and I be reborn in the Tushita Heaven of Maitreya, and serve him there. When Maitreya at last becomes a Buddha, may I go down with him into the world, promote the Faith in all lands and attain the highest enlightenment.

  At midnight on March 8, 664, he passed away, at the age of sixty-five.

  Emperor Gaozong was heartbroken. He said sadly to his ministers, ‘Xuanzang was the boat ferrying the faithful over the sea of suffering. The sea is so vast, and now the boat is sunk.’ He adjourned his court for days while the nation mourned the ‘Leader of the Dharma’. When Xuanzang’s body was brought to the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, records say a million people lined the road along which the coffin travelled. As he lay in state, thousands poured into the monastery and filed past his body each day. And when he was finally buried by the river as he had wished, three hundred thousand people kept vigil for three days and nights, as was the Chinese custom. But Gaozong could see the grave from his palace every morning when he looked out and it upset him so much that he decided to have this temple built for Xuanzang’s remains.

  The temple has been destroyed and rebuilt many times throughout the centuries. But the pagoda that holds Xuanzang’s remains is standing after more than 1,300 years. Turning left from the shrine hall, through another semi-circular gate, I saw Xuanzang’s pagoda beyond a bed of flowering roses, accompanied by those of his two disciples, Kuiji and Yuance, who carried on the Yogacara School. There is a memorial hall, a barn-like, simple room, with a wooden statue of Xuanzang, a stone stele showing him travelling on the road, a map of his journey and a painting of him writing his translations. On his birthday, the monks gather here to commemorate him. I asked the old man what they do. ‘Oh, not much. We offer the Master a few simple dishes and then recite some sutras he translated,’ he said sadly. ‘We want to remember him properly. We want to hold big ceremonies on his anniversaries, as they do in the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. But we can’t afford it. There are so few visitors and we have little income. Perhaps if you write up your visit, more people will know about our monastery and the Master.’ He paused. ‘Surely the Master deserves more than this?’

  I looked at the pagoda. It is a small version of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, worn and battered by the centuries, with grass growing out of the top. So modest for a man who did more for Buddhism than anyone else in Chinese history, especially after the grand and imposing tombs of the emperors. I sat down opposite it, feeling sad and disappointed at first. Then I thought Xuanzang would even have regarded this as a luxury. He had asked only to be rolled in a mat and buried under a mound of earth.

  Xuanzang embodied Buddhism and the Buddhist message to the very end. Battered though it is, the temple bears witness to his
achievements: it is rightly called the Temple of Raising the Faith. This told me as much as all the extraordinary things I had found on my journey. I began to ask myself, had I found the Xuanzang I was looking for? In many ways, yes. After two years of intensive reading about him and travelling in his footsteps, I finally came to see the size of the man and his achievements.

  I realized that contrasting this pagoda with the emperors’ tombs was wrong. But they set me thinking. Taizong and Gaozong were among the greatest Chinese emperors, bringing in the golden age. At Ak-beshem in Kyrgyzstan, I had seen the ruined palace of their arch-enemy, the Great Khan of the Western Turks, who built one of the biggest empires in history in such a few years. From King Harsha’s biography, I had learned about this benign monarch who unified India for one of the few times in Indian history. These powerful men between them ruled the whole world east of Persia. They had only one thing in common: they all treated Xuanzang with respect, almost deference. Taizong asked for Xuanzang to be beside him at his death-bed. Gaozong could not bear to look at his humble burial place. The Great Khan, instead of arresting him as an ‘enemy alien’, honoured him by making sure he reached India safely. King Harsha’s admiration for Xuanzang and the favour he showed the Chinese monk so enraged the Brahmin priests, they attempted to assassinate him.

  What was it about Xuanzang, what was in him? One thing was his presence. This tall, serene and handsome man inspired in people who met him the feelings I experienced when looking at the great images of the Buddha in Sarnath and Peshawar. We have a Chinese phrase for it, the ‘Dharma look’, the look of someone destined to spread the Dharma. But when he spoke, it was the wisdom on the lips of so young a man that impressed everyone. He had an intuitive grasp of character and knew what to say to each person; kings and commoners all felt he was addressing them individually, their lives, their concerns. His preaching was profound, as was his understanding of Buddhism, but always clear. And perhaps above everything, people recognized his indomitable determination – it set him apart. He intended to achieve his goals, and nothing would prevent him.