Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud

by Sun Shuyun

  I realized that others had done the same things before and after Xuanzang. Fa Xian had shown the way to India, and written an account of his journey. Kumarajiva, whose statue I saw in Kucha, made large numbers of translations, still preferred by many Buddhists for their simple language and their lucidity – he also inspired Xuanzang. Other great monks set up Buddhist schools which enriched Buddhism in China and beyond. Xuanzang was only one branch of a big tree. But he still stands out uniquely in the history of Buddhism. Through his journey, his Record, his translations and the inspiration he gave to generations of Chinese, he did the utmost to spread the teachings of the Buddha in China and elsewhere. If there were a special place in the pantheon of propagators of Buddhism, it must belong to him. Arthur Waley, the English biographer of Xuanzang, summed him up with this apt tribute: ‘His kindred, in the world of our imagination, are not the great travellers, not Marco Polo, or Vambery, nor the great theologians such as Saint Augustine or Saint Thomas, but rather Aeneas, King Arthur, Cuchulain. He is the hero of a sort of spiritual epic, as they of their knightly sagas.’

  He had his regrets. He would have liked to have translated more of the 657 sutras he brought back – he managed only seventy-five of them – although that was more than anyone else in Chinese history. He hoped others would finish what he had left behind. He would have had more regret if he had lived to know the fate of his Yogacara School, the form of Buddhism to which he devoted his life. At the time, from the emperor to ordinary believers, everyone read about it; it was very popular. But Buddhism itself declined and lost its intellectual vigour in China after the persecution of 845, less than two hundred years after Xuanzang’s death. Yogacara came to be considered too abstruse; his translations of the texts were lost, only to be restored in the nineteenth century after being retrieved from Japan, where the School still flourishes today.

  I was reasonably happy with what I had been able to discover about Xuanzang, although I am still struggling to make sense of his Yogacara. But had I found what I was looking for myself? If I had, it was mainly through the inspirational people I met: Duan in Xian, the monk who had left his robes and married, but was still a monk to my mind; the dalits in Kushinagar, whose lives were unspeakable but who had found their way to dignity; and Shan Ren, the woman who befriended me in the Dunhuang monastery, who had suffered like my father and had come through, and showed me genuine selflessness: these, and of course my grandmother, about whom I have learned so much. They followed different kinds of Buddhism – but they exemplified one truth common to most Buddhists: the idea that you can change your life by changing the way you look at it. Your mind is what matters, and you can transform it. As the Indian philosopher Shantideva put it, you can either cover the world with leather, or wear sandals.

  My education concealed from me this whole side of Buddhism, leaving me with the false view that it had only to do with gods, prayer and paradise, superstition. Of course that is a large part of Chinese Buddhism; we were taught it was an opiate for the poor. What we were not told about was everything else, and in particular the Buddhism that stresses self-reliance. Frequently there are things beyond our control – what could Duan do against the hurricane of the Cultural Revolution? What could Grandmother do when seven of her children died? They could have despaired, but they found their peace of mind. Before, I thought Grandmother was just resigned to her fate; now I knew she had overcome it.

  If I ever heard about the mind and Buddhism during my upbringing, it was being lectured that existence determines our mind, our material conditions determine what we believe, not vice-versa. This was another strong attack on Buddhism. I could just imagine the Red Guards shouting at Xuanzang, how can the mind determine the world? If we do not have enough to eat, how can we think about anything else? We were told that when everyone’s material wants were satisfied, we would all be happy. It did not occur to me to doubt it; we were lucky if we were not hungry. I did not know the Buddha’s path is called ‘the Middle Way’, avoiding the extremes of luxury and deprivation; and when his disciple asked him to preach to a beggar, he said, ‘He does not need my teaching, he needs food.’

  When I think about what my family and the whole country went through, I can hardly imagine a clearer demonstration of mind over matter. There were relentless political campaigns to cleanse our thoughts and to make us conform to the ideas of one man. Contrary to what was drilled into us about dialectical materialism, Mao clearly believed as much as any Buddhist in the primacy of the mind. During the Great Leap the laws of science and nature were flouted. One of the most popular slogans was, ‘however much we can dream, the land will yield’; newspapers plastered us with news that farmers were producing twenty tons of rice from one acre of land. In the hysteria of the Cultural Revolution, we started every day singing ‘East is Red’: the sun had risen and Mao had descended to the Middle Kingdom; he brought us happiness and he was our saviour. We prayed for his longevity for ten thousand years and beyond, and we believed his thoughts were the Dharma which could solve any problem. He was revered as a god, in all but name. I swallowed all this – my indoctrination was very successful. But then the god died and our faith in him was dashed, leaving us lost and angry. The goal of the revolution was to satisfy everyone’s needs; instead it drove us to starvation and the brink of the abyss. If this was not the power of the mind to change the world, what was?

  From Xian I went home. I had one thing left to do: to go back to my grandmother’s village. It was eight years since her death. In the midst of a field of peanuts and potatoes I found her grave, a little swelling in the earth, with a wooden stick in front bearing a few Chinese characters: ‘The tomb of the woman of the Liu and Wang families’. She had not even been buried with her own name. As was the custom she was identified as the daughter of the Wang family who married into the Liu family. They were there, buried with her – her father, her husband and her two brothers.

  Like all Buddhists, my grandmother believed that death was not the end of life but the beginning of rebirth. She began to prepare for her afterlife when I was in my teens. The unknown was frightening and she wanted to make sure that she would not lack anything in the next life. First and foremost, she needed to be buried with clothing for all seasons. Her needs were not extravagant, but in the 1970s when everything was rationed, from rice, flour, meat and oil, to cloth, each of us had just enough coupons for one outfit for the Chinese New Year. Where could we get the cloth for Grandmother’s four outfits and a coat, which all had to be cut generously? To our surprise, Father, who did not even believe in the afterlife, told Grandmother not to worry. She would have everything she desired for her next life.

  Grandmother lived until 1992. During the intervening decades, one fixture in my summer vacation was to help her get out the ‘death wear’ from drawers under our bed and air them on hot summer days, one at a time so that nobody would accuse my parents of being superstitious. The whole thing was bizarre and I would make fun of her by putting on the back quilted jacket and hat, pretending to be a ghost. Grandmother would get very upset. But otherwise, the expression on her face was no different from mine on New Year’s Day with my new clothes on, showing the whole world that I would start my new year completely afresh. While we were sitting in the shade, keeping an eye on her precious outfits, she told me again and again that I must make sure my mother put on all the clothes for her while she was still breathing, otherwise she would be going to the next world naked.

  She also listed other things she must have for her new life: a house, tables, chairs and cupboards, a cow, a cart, a boat to travel with and of course a large sum of money, not only for her own use but for incidental expenses like bribing infernal officials. Everything would be made of paper, of course. She even taught me how to make ingots. The rich and powerful could put real money, or even real people, in their tombs. Apart from his Terracotta Army, the first emperor had his wives, concubines and children buried with him. But my grandmother was happy with paper offerings. To complete ou
r annual ritual, I would write to my uncle in the village and check that the wood my father had bought for her coffin was not rotting away. When everything was confirmed to be in order, Grandmother would announce to us, with a big smile on her face, that she was ready to go.

  But in fact Grandmother did not enter her next life as she planned. By the time she died, burial had long been forbidden in China because of the pressure on land. Cremation, which would be like burning in hell in her eyes, awaited her. All her meticulous preparations went up in flames. It was good that she did not know.

  Many people would consider hers such a harsh life, a life of suffering till the very end. She had only two comforts: her family and her faith. We loved her and she knew that; but we ridiculed her beliefs, and must have made her feel so lonely and insecure. This tiny fragile woman lived in her own world. I did not know then how much pain we caused her; nor that it was her faith that helped her endure. She never complained. And despite everything, she loved us very much, me especially, the unwanted daughter. I did not understand her faith when I was a child, and although I have begun to learn about it now, I still cannot enter her world entirely. She deserved better of us, and of me – the understanding, respect and tolerance due to anyone. My greatest regret is that we failed to give them to her.

  Standing there by her grave, the memories of her rushed back to me like a film. I could see them so clearly. I remembered all those years sleeping in her bed, washing her feet. I seemed to hear again the click of the red beans in the night as she recited her Amitabhas. I thought of the magical stories she told me. I recalled the last time I saw her, half-blind and barely able to recognize me. If she were in Heaven as she had prayed for all her life, she might be comforted that she had set me off on my journey of discovery, and that what I had learned about her faith would be with me for the rest of my life.

  I placed on her grave bananas, oranges and grapes that I had bought her, the simple things she never tasted in life. Softly, I said Amitabha for her.

  If you enjoyed Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud, check out these other great Sun Shuyun titles.

  In 1934, the fledgling Communist Party and its 200,000 strong armies were forced out of their bases by Chiang Kaishek and his National troops. Walking more than 10,000 miles over mountains, grassland and swamps, they suffered appalling casualties and ended up in the remote barren North. Just one-fifth survived; they went on to launch the new China in the heat of revolution. A legend was born. Justified by a remarkable feat, the Long March was also a triumph of propaganda, for Mao and for the revolution.

  Seventy years later Sun Shuyun set out to retrace the Marchers’ steps. The rugged landscape has changed little. Her greatest difficult was in wrestling with the scenes lodged in her mind since childhood, part of the upbringing of every Chinese. On each stage of her journey, she found hidden stories: the ruthless purges, the terrible toll of hunger and disease, the fate of women on the March, the huge number of desertions, the futile deaths.

  The real story of the March, the most vivid pictures, come from the veterans whom Sun Shuyun has found. She follows their trail through all those harsh miles, discovers their faith and disillusion, their pain and their hopes, and also recounts how many suffered even after the March’s end in 1936.

  ‘The Long March’ was an epic journey of endurance, even more severe than history books say, and courage against impossible odds. It is a brave, exciting and tragic story. Sun Shuyun tells it for the first time, as it really happened

  Buy the ebook here

  Sun Shuyun, a Chinese writer and historian, takes the reader to a tiny and isolated village in Tibet, known for its anti-Chinese stance. She and a team who were half Chinese and half Tibetan, lived and worked there for eighteen months, filming and recording daily life. ‘A Year in Tibet’ is an insight into the relationship between the Chinese and Tibetans, the history behind it, and the way the two interact in the 21st century. Written with Sun Shuyun’s characteristic insight into relationships, this is social and political history with an emphasis on humanity.

  Buy the ebook here

  SELECTED READINGS

  IN ENGLISH

  Allen, Charles, The Buddha and the Sahibs: The Men Who Discovered India’s Lost Religion, London: John Murray, 2002.

  Almond, Philip C., The British Discovery of Buddhism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

  Armstrong, Karen, Buddha, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000.

  Bagchi, P. C., India and China: A Thousand Years of Cultural Relations, Bombay, 1950, Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, reprint, 1971.

  Basham, A. L., The Wonder That was India, New Delhi: Rupa & Co., by arrangement with Macmillan, 3rd revised edn (1967), 34th impression, 1999.

  Bayly, Susan, Caste, Society and Politics in India: From the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, New Cambridge History of India, Vol. 4, No. 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

  Beal, Samuel, trans., Si-yu-ki, Buddhist Records of the Western World, Translated from the Chinese of Hiuen Tsiang (A.D. 629), 1884, Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corp., 2 vols, 1969.

  Beal, Samuel, trans., Hui Li: The Life of Hiuen-Tsiang, 1911, Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 2nd edn, 1973.

  Buddhist Association of Canada, The Buddhist Liturgy, Ontario, 1983

  Buddhist Text Translation Society, The Sixth Patriarch’s Sutra, San Francisco, CA: Sino-American Buddhist Association, 2nd edn, 1977.

  Ch’en, K., Buddhism in China: A Historical Survey Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973.

  Ch’en, K., The Chinese Transformation of Buddhism Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973.

  Cleary, Thomas (trans.) The Dhammapada: Sayings of Buddha, London: Thorsons (HarperCollins), 1995.

  Conze, Edward, Buddhism: Its Essence and Development (1951), New York: Harper and Row, reprint, 1975.

  Conze, Edward (ed. and trans.), Buddhist Texts through the Ages, Oxford: Oneworld, 1995.

  Coomaraswamy, A., History of Indian and Indonesian Art, 1927, Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, reprint, 1972.

  Das, Arvind, The Republic of Bihar, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1992.

  Eck, Diana L., Banaras: City of Light, London/New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1993.

  Errington, Elizabeth, and Joe Cribb with Maggie Claringbull (eds), The Crossroads of Asia, Cambridge: Ancient India and Iran Trust, 1992.

  Fitzgerald, C. P., The Empress Wu, London: Cresset Press, 1956.

  Frank, Irene M., and David M. Brownstone, The Silk Road: A History. New York: Facts on File, 1986.

  Gaulier, S., R. Jera-Bezard and M. Maillard, Buddhism in Afghanistan and Central Asia. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1976.

  Gopal, Sarvepalli, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, 1989, Delhi: Oxford India Paperbacks, abr. edn, 1993.

  Grousset, René, In the Footsteps of the Buddha, trans. Mariette Leion, 1932, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, reprint, 1972.

  Harle, J., The Art and Architecture of the Indian Subcontinent, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986.

  Hedin, Sven, The Silk Road, trans. F. H. Lyon, New York: Dutton, 1938.

  Hopkirk, Peter, Foreign Devils on the Silk Road, London: John Murray, 1980.

  Huntington, John, ‘Sowing the Seeds of the Lotus: A Journey to the Great Pilgrimage Sites of Buddhism’, Orientations, Nov. 1985, pt 1 (pp. 46–62); Feb. 1986, pt 2 (pp. 28–44); March 1986, pt 3 (pp. 32–47); July 1986, pt 4 (pp. 28–41); Sept. 1986, pt 5 (pp. 46–59).

  Huntington, Susan, and John Huntington, The Art of Ancient India, Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1985.

  Imam, Abu, Sir Alexander Cunningham and the Beginnings of Indian Archaeology, Dacca: Asiatic Society of Pakistan, 1966.

  Joshi, L. M., Studies in the Buddhistic Culture of India During the Seventh and Eighth Centuries, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2nd ed., 1967.

  Keay, John, India Discovered: The Achievement of the British Raj, Leicester: Windward, 1981.

  Klimburg-Salter, Deborah, The Kingdom of Bamiyan: Buddhist Art and Culture of the Hindu Kush, Rome:
Istituto italiano per il medio ed estremo oriente, 1989.

  Lamotte, E., History of Indian Buddhism, trans. from the French by Sara Webb, Louvain-la-Neuve: Université Catholique de Louvain, 1988.

  Le Coq, Albert von, Buried Treasures of Chinese Turkestan, trans. Anna Barwell, New York: Longmans and Green, 1929.

  Liu Xinru, Ancient India and Ancient China: Trade and Religious Exchanges, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988.

  Mallory, J. P. and Victor H. Mair, The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West, London/New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000.

  Mitra, Swati (ed.), Walking with the Buddha: Buddhist Pilgrimages in India, Eicher Guide, New Delhi: Eicher Goodearth Ltd, 1999.

  Narada, Maha Thera, The Buddha and His Teachings, reprint, Taipei: Corporate Body of the Buddha Educational Foundation, 2nd ed., 1973.

  Nickel, Lucas, Return of the Buddha, exhibition catalogue, London: Royal Academy Publications, 2002.

  Rashid, Ahmed, Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia, London: I.B. Tauris, 2000.

  Sangharakshita, Ambedkar and Buddhism, London: Windhorse Publications, 1986.

  Schafer, Edward H., The Golden Peaches of Samarkand, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1963.

  Sherring, M. A., Benares: The Sacred City of the Hindus in Ancient and Modern Times, New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2001.

  Srinivas, M. N. (ed.), Caste: Its Twentieth Century Avatar, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1996.