Voice of the Elders

by Greg Ripley

  Sure enough, after a few minutes they turned a corner and the river came into view, first below them, cascading down into a narrow canyon carved out over eons, then directly ahead where the source of the Rou Shui appeared to be a waterfall plunging down into a series of cataracts. It was a beautiful sight. But what was most remarkable about the waterfall was the rock formation from which it flowed. Its appearance was unmistakable. In a quirk of nature, the rock had eroded such that the falls appeared to be flowing over the rear half of a turtle’s shell, complete with an overhang which looked uncannily like two legs and a tail.

  The trail brought them right next to the falls where they paused for a moment, taking in the view. Raising his voice to be heard over the roar of the falls, Guangming said, “This is called Turtle Tail Falls. The river flows out of a cave above called Turtle Tail Pass. This is thought to be the origin of the name Western Turtle Mountain.”

  They continued to take in the natural beauty of the scene for a few more minutes, enjoying the falls as well as the vast panoramic view their vantage point afforded of the cascades churning down the mountainside, and the row upon row of ridgelines which gradually gave way to the lowlands far below.

  After a few minutes enjoying the expanse, they resumed their climb. The trail skirted the left side of the turtle shell in a series of steps carved into the rock. As they stood on the upper banks of the river above the falls, Rohini noticed something in the water, something familiar. She wasn’t sure what it was at first until it suddenly struck her. Under the water on the back of the turtle shell which formed the riverbed, was the Bagua, the same design they had seen in the gardens in Jinchang. “Look,” she said, pointing into the water.

  “Fascinating, isn’t it?” Guangming said. “No one knows if it is naturally occurring or carved by man. In the society there are some that say this is the true source of the Bagua. It is usually thought to have originated in the Yellow River Valley to the east. This could have been carved later, once the turtle rock was found, but no one knows.”

  The cave which had been hidden from their lower vantage point was now visible, though it could easily have been mistaken for a shadow on the rocky cliff were it not for the river flowing from it. The mouth of the cave was about fifteen feet wide, the river taking up much of that, with a bank of stone about three feet wide leading into the cave. Perhaps that explains the name Black River, Rohini thought. The cave was certainly black up here, as was the stone it was formed from. She thought it might be basalt, though it had been awhile since she’d been in a geology class. As they walked into the cave she let her hand trail along the black stone. It felt cool under her fingertips.

  The grotto grew darker as they continued walking deeper into the mountain, the path along the rocky bank narrowing as they progressed. Guangming warned them to watch their step. A plunge into the river here would mean a quick trip over the falls. Following Guangming’s warning they kept a hand on the wall as the cave grew increasingly dark and the path continued to narrow.

  When the cave appeared to reach its narrowest point, Guangming drew their attention to a chain attached to the wall of the cave. “Grab this. We’ll need to turn sideways and hang onto the chain to get past this narrow section.”

  Following Guangming’s lead, they each grabbed the chain in turn, shuffling sideways for about ten feet, their packs hanging out over the water behind them. The cave was almost pitch-black at this point, the only light the glimmering reflections from the rippling surface of the river. After passing the narrows, the tunnel turned abruptly to the left as the trail began to widen again and the way ahead brightened.

  When they approached the end of the tunnel, the light outside shone so brightly it was difficult to make things out, but as their eyes adjusted to the light, they began to see what lay on the other side.

  Rohini’s breath caught as she scanned their surroundings. The tunnel exited into a verdant hanging valley. They couldn’t help but be momentarily dumbfounded by the sight.

  “Zhe wuyi shi yige fudi,” Guangming whispered.

  “What did you say, Guangming?” Rohini asked.

  “He said this is definitely a fudi, a blessed place,” Jimmie explained.

  “It’s like Shangri-La up here,” Jane said.

  “This is just the kind of place those myths come from,” Rohini said. “In Tibet they call these kinds of places ‘hidden lands.’ My aunt told me about the legends of Shangri-La and Shambhala. Those stories were probably based on real places like this, beautiful lush valleys tucked away in the Himalayas. She told me of one called Pemako where many of the Tibetans fled in the 1950s, hoping to avoid having to leave the country altogether. It’s somewhere around the border of Nepal and Bhutan. They are supposed to be places which have a potent spiritual energy or allow for easier spiritual cultivation because of their ideal surroundings.”

  “Yes, that is like the idea of fudi,” Guangming said.

  One of the first things they noticed was a small lake, which appeared to be about a third of the way up the valley, its color a vibrant azure blue, its appearance so similar to the sky above, Rohini wondered if it was simply reflecting it like a mirror. The river they followed into the valley appeared to flow from there. Along the right side of the valley was a narrow, rocky ridgeline which rimmed the western side of the valley.

  She could see that the trail leading out of the cave forked as it neared the lake, one branch leading around the lake to what looked like a small village on the far side. Some of the structures were free standing, but many appeared attached to the slope below the ridgeline. The other branch turned towards the ridgeline before the lake. Scanning the ridgeline with her eyes, it looked like the trail must follow the ridgeline, leading into the mist-shrouded peaks at the southern end of the valley.

  They followed the path as it worked its way through an alpine meadow, keeping left towards the village when it split. As they ventured farther, Rohini began to notice other things. The path leading to the ridgeline crossed the river over a small wooden bridge. Just upstream from the bridge was a waterwheel on the other side of the creek. It was also wooden and appeared quite old, but showed signs of more recent repairs. Some of the wood was obviously newer, the difference in color apparent even from a distance. The water wheel was connected to a small building which looked as though it was made of adobe, again reminding her of New Mexico.

  They passed the small lake—Rohini realized, to her surprise, it was that azure blue color—and headed up towards the village. Downslope from the village there appeared to be a few larger and smaller cultivated fields, though from a distance it was hard to tell what the crops might be. I’ll have to spend some time here later, she thought, curious to see what they grew. There were a few figures in the fields, focused on their work. They hadn’t yet noticed their new visitors. As they followed the path farther up the gradual slope towards the village, some heads turned their way, and a few hands waved in greeting.

  Past the fields were groves of trees on either side of the trail. These weren’t evergreens, so Rohini wondered what they might be at this elevation. There was some variation in the color of the leaves and some were shinier as well, glittering as they fluttered in the gentle breeze blowing through the valley.

  They reminded her of the orchards at her uncle’s farm in New Mexico, something she certainly wasn’t expecting here. But then she recalled the Colorado peaches she’d come to love while staying with her uncle and realized they could well be orchards after all, even at this high altitude. As they grew closer, she noticed the peaches first. They were on one side of the path, while there were apples on the other, and beyond these were dark purple plums as well as what she guessed were Asian pears.

  Passing through the orchards they met a man walking down the path towards them. He greeted them in Chinese first, “Wuliang shou fu. Huanying. Women yizhi zai deng ni.” Then in English. “May you be blessed with endless happines
s and longevity. Welcome. We’ve been expecting you,” he said, bowing in greeting, his hands clasped in an unfamiliar way. Rohini was more used to the traditional style of greeting in India and the Himalayas—or the ubiquitous yoga studios on practically every corner in New York, she thought, smirking to herself—the hands pressed palm to palm in front of the heart. But this was something different, the man’s palms faced inward and his hands overlapped, the thumb of one hand tucked inside the other fist. Guangming and Jimmie returned the gesture, while Jane and Rohini simply bowed slightly, unsure of the appropriate protocol.

  “Greetings Long Daozhang,” Guangming said. “It is so good to see you, it has been too long.”

  “This must be Rohini, Jane, and Jimmie. It is a great pleasure to meet you all,” said Long Daozhang.

  “This is Long Daozhang,” Guangming said. “He is the abbot of the temple here. He is also my mentor. I knew him as a child when he was a priest at the local temple in Jinchang.”

  Abbot Long was an older bespectacled gentleman. He had a long beard that had not quite turned fully gray, and he wore the work clothes of a Daoist priest which were quite different than what Rohini would have expected. In her mind, monks, nuns, and priests wore robes like the Buddhist lamas she was more accustomed to.

  This priest wore dark blue pants with long white socks or leggings which came up to the knees. They reminded Rohini of uniforms she had seen in old photos of World War I infantrymen. The doughboys, she thought, remembering their nickname. He also wore a matching dark blue jacket-like robe which came to just above the knees, and a black hat which had a hole in the top through which his long black hair, tied into a topknot, protruded.

  Long Daozhang led the party up the path, past the orchards to the group of buildings they’d seen from across the valley. What Rohini had taken as a village from a distance, now appeared more like a combination of a monastery and a farm with several outbuildings. To the right, she saw chickens scratching and pecking in the yard in front of their coop. On the left, a corral was attached to a small barn, containing a few of the sheep typical of the region. She saw one ram with its long spiraling horns, and several ewes with shorter ones.

  “What kind of sheep are these? Rohini asked. “They’re quite different than the ones I know from my uncle’s farm.”

  “These are called Gansu Alpine Finewool. They are quite well-adapted to this environment, but also have high quality wool,” Long Daozhang replied.

  “They’re beautiful. Do you have the sheep just for wool or do you use them to make cheese?”

  “We make cheese too, which is unusual for this area. Cheese is certainly not typical of the Chinese diet, though it is more common among the nomads. They were bred for their wool, but since we try to live sustainably here, we realized it made sense to try this several years ago.”

  “Sheep are a good choice. Their milk has a lot more solids than cow or goat milk. You can get twice as much cheese from it,” Rohini said, enjoying the farm talk. She hadn’t realized how much she missed it.

  As they continued towards the monastery proper, passing a few more outbuildings, Rohini noticed that the larger buildings had solar panels on their roofs. There was something that seemed strange about them.

  Rohini looked to the sky, then back at the panels; she realized they were all pointed in the direction of the afternoon sun, not due south, as she would have expected this far north. They must be set up to track the sun across the sky for greater efficiency. It was a pretty sophisticated system. They had to be off grid so far into the mountains, so judging by the number of panels they had, they must also have placed a battery storage system somewhere.

  These put our installations in Nepal to shame. The solar systems she and her aunt Shanti installed had been quite basic in comparison, but they had still been highly appreciated by their new owners, giving them access to a small amount of electricity in areas which had previously had none.

  “Do you have batteries for your solar panels, or do you only use power when the sun shines?”

  “Oh yes, we have quite a large storage system. We also have other sources of power, so we have no shortage in the evenings. Did you see the waterwheel on your way up the valley? It was originally built for grinding grain long ago, but we’ve converted it to produce electricity. It gives us a steady source of power twenty-four hours a day, although we don’t need a great deal of electricity here.

  “If we couldn’t get this much power in a sustainable way, we would find other ways to meet our needs without it. Humans receive all we need from Dadi Muqin, the Great Earth Mother. It is unnecessary to resort to the destructive excesses of the past.”

  “So, you limit your consumption of resources then. We will all have to follow your lead if we’re going to be able to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, Elders or not,” Jane said.

  “You are right, of course,” Abbot Long replied. “But we go one step further here. We have tried to find ways to go beyond simply minimizing our damage, to actually regenerating the Earth. As it was said by Tai Shang Lao Jun, The Most High Laozi, ‘Returning is the movement of Dao.’ In ancient times, farmers in China understood this. They placed great emphasis on returning vitality and nutrients to the soil, using the various constituents and processes of the farm to complement each other.

  “Much of this knowledge was lost in the last century during the Great Leap Forward. In our rush to modernize we threw out the wisdom that allowed farmers to grow intensively and continuously on the same land for thousands of years without destroying the soil. Modern industrial agriculture follows a strictly extractive model, destroying the soil that supports us and all other beings. Nothing else in nature works this way, so there is no reason we should have expected it to work.”

  “But things are changing in China, as they are in the rest of the world. I remember hearing about the regeneration of the Loess Plateau several years ago,” Rohini said.

  “Yes, precisely. That is a perfect example of what needs to be done everywhere,” Long Daozhang said. “They showed what a difference could be made. I have been to that area, both before and after, and seen the transformation with my own eyes. In the years before the restoration project, the Loess Plateau—the heart of Chinese civilization—had degenerated into a veritable desert, nothing would grow and the hillsides were being swept away by erosion. By reverting to traditional techniques with modern adaptations, they have returned the area to its past glory, it is once again bursting with vitality. The Gu Shen, the Valley Spirit, has returned.”

  “The Valley Spirit is also from the Daode Jing, isn’t it?” Rohini asked.

  “Quite so. Tai Shang Lao Jun described this attribute of the Dao as the ‘Valley Spirit’ and the ‘Mysterious Feminine’; all beings draw upon it continuously, and yet it never runs out, its creative power of transformation is endless. This refers to the cyclical patterns found in nature. If we follow the example of nature, it will provide for us indefinitely, but if we draw upon it without the movement of return, without thinking about regeneration, we will wither and die.”

  “We certainly will,” Jane replied. “I saw it first-hand in the Middle East. That’s one of the sources of instability in the region getting little attention. At the heart of the Syrian Civil War and the refugee crisis was a long-term drought—brought on by climate change—in an already extremely dry region.”

  “Yes, but it was also their farming practices which set up the perfect storm for their agricultural sector to collapse, from what I understand,” said Jimmie, joining in the conversation. “They pumped their aquifers dry and overgrazed the land which left them in a much more precarious position when the droughts came.”

  They continued to the monastery grounds, entering through the front gate. Seeing the monastery’s sign above the archway, Rohini asked the Abbot the name of the temple. He replied that it was called Huanyuan Guan, ‘Return to the Source Hermitage.’
How appropriate, she thought, even the name of the monastery pointed towards the idea of regeneration.

  The monastery’s layout was quite irregular, appearing to follow the natural contours of the landscape. The main gate and front wall were straight, but upon entering the grounds it was clear that the rear of the monastery was anything but. The right side was much smaller, being closer to the rocky slope above, while the left side was much deeper with most of the monastery’s buildings located there.

  “This is so different from the temple in Lanzhou,” Rohini said. “I imagine it’s quite a bit older, other than the solar panels.”

  “Yes, the farm as it exists now is fairly recent, but the monastery itself is quite ancient. No one is sure how old it is,” Abbot Long said. “It was originally built around a grotto where an Immortal was said to reside. It is still there in the heart of the grounds. It is said that the grotto leads to the Abode of the Guanzi, but if there was a tunnel, there is no sign of it now. Perhaps there was a cave-in at some point in the past.”

  “The Abode of the Guanzi? But I thought the Guanzi lived here. Isn’t that why we came, to see the Guanzi?” Rohini asked.

  “Yes, the Guanzi is here, but not in this temple. The Abode of the Guanzi lies farther up the mountain. You will go there soon enough. First you should rest. You must be tired from your journey. You can rest and relax here for the time being. You will be summoned when the Guanzi is ready for you. I will show you to the guesthouse.”

  As they walked through the grounds towards the guesthouse, they were struck by the natural beauty of the place. All the various structures of the hermitage were interspersed with different kinds of fruit trees as well as small gardens and fishponds. Rohini felt like she was in a botanical garden as they passed through round moon gates into hidden courtyards and up stone steps past small pavilions.

  Through one courtyard, a small group of monks and nuns were practicing martial arts of some kind, while an older monk, presumably their instructor, looked on, his hands clasped behind his back. It reminded Rohini of Tai Chi, but not any she had seen before. The priests moved in a slow flowing manner like Tai Chi, but it was much more intricate than forms she was familiar with. The forms the monks and nuns were practicing had much lower stances and more dynamic movements.