by Bill Porter
Pao T’an said, “No, not anymore. Shih-t’ou wasn’t cremated. His body was put in a large earthenware pot then placed inside a stupa on Purple Cloud Peak about two kilometers from the temple. One night three years ago, some thieves knocked down the stupa searching for treasure. They could have saved their effort. It had already been cleaned out by the Japanese in 1943. I was just a young monk then. The Japanese, you know, also venerate Shih-t’ou as the founder of their Soto Zen lineage. It’s still the biggest Zen sect in Japan. Well, the Japanese sent Shih-t’ou’s body, earthenware pot and all, back to Japan. We’ve tried to get it back. But it’s no use, the Japanese won’t give it up. But what’s strange is that they’ve conducted experiments on Shih-t’ou’s preserved remains. They’ve inserted needles and removed what they say is fresh tissue from his 1,200-year-old body.” I was glad he told us this story after lunch and not before.
But Pao T’an wasn’t done with Shih-t’ou. After we finished our tea, he led us outside the temple’s front gate and pointed to a huge sloping rock face. He said that was where Master Shih-t’ou meditated and that was why he was called Shih-t’ou, which meant “rock.” I should note that when I visited this same temple eight years later the entire rock face had been paved over to make a parking lot. So it goes.
We thanked the abbot for his kindness and for taking the time to talk with us. After saying good-bye, we continued up the trail. As we did, the dirt trail that brought us there became a dirt road. This was the road that brought all the building materials to the temple. It also led to the main road that brought pilgrims and tourists up the mountain as well. We followed it for a few minutes then stopped. There was a side trail on the right. Before we’d said good-bye to Pao T’an, he told us the trail led to the grave of Hui-ssu, and so we followed it.
Hui-ssu came to Hengshan two hundred years before Shih-t’ou. After paying our respects at his pine-encircled grave, we returned to the dirt road and continued on to his temple. It was to the left, just off the dirt road, and is called Fuyen. Along with Nantai, it’s one of the most famous Buddhist temples in China. When Hui-ssu came here in 567 ad, he brought with him more than forty disciples. Among them was a monk named Chih-yi. After Hui-ssu died, Chih-yi left Hengshan and moved to Mount Tientai, where he founded his own school of Buddhism. Along with Zen and Pure Land, Tientai Buddhism—as it has since been called—has remained one of the religion’s major schools, in China as well as in Japan. It began, though, not on Tientai, but here on Hengshan at Fuyen Temple.
Grave of Hui-ssu
In the past, people reached Nantai and Fuyen by following the old trail that came up the mountain from the south. We were told that no one took the old trail anymore. It was too overgrown. As we approached Fuyen’s front gate, we stopped to talk with a nun who was hammering the rinds off gingko nuts from trees Hui-ssu planted here fourteen hundred years ago. She stopped hammering long enough to show us a trail that led behind the temple to a cliff. The cliff was only fifty meters from the temple, but it took a few minutes to work our way through the undergrowth. Finally, we saw what she thought we wanted to see. Carved into the rock face was the calligraphy of the T’ang dynasty chancellor Li Mi. The three huge characters he wrote during his visit to the temple in the eighth century said, “Highest Light .” He was referring to the brand of Zen taught at Fuyen by Huai-jang.
Huai-jang was a disciple of Hui-neng, Zen’s Sixth Patriarch. Following Hui-neng’s death in 713, Huai-jang moved to Hengshan and finished what Hui-neng started. His disciples included the founders of most of the major Zen schools that developed in China, including Shih-t’ou, whom we met earlier on our way up the mountain at Nantai. Another disciple was Tao-yi, or Ma-tsu, as he is better known. Ma-tsu also came to Huai-jang for instruction.
One day Huai-jang saw Ma-tsu sitting just up the trail from the temple meditating. Huai-jang walked over and asked Ma-tsu what he was doing. When Ma-tsu said he was meditating, Huai-jang asked him what he expected to accomplish. Ma-tsu said he was trying to become a buddha. Huai-jang bent down and picked up a brick, and started grinding it on a rock. Ma-tsu asked Huai-jang what he was doing. Huai-jang said he was trying to make a mirror. Ma-tsu laughed and said he was crazy. Huai-jang laughed back and said, so are you, trying to become a buddha by meditating—his point being that there’s more to buddhahood than meditation.
When we walked back to the temple, the same nun was still cracking gingko nuts. Since the day was getting late, we asked her if we could spend the night at the temple. She said Fuyen was now a nunnery, and men were not allowed to stay overnight. She said to keep walking. There was a hotel up the road. We thanked her for the directions and continued on.
A few hundred meters farther on, there was a large flat boulder at the side of the road with the words Mirror Grinding Rock . I was always amazed to find places where something happened a thousand years ago that someone had commemorated with a marker. But that was the way things were in China. People remembered the past. And the past was five thousand years long. After taking a picture of the rock, we continued on for another hundred meters and stopped again. Off to the side was Huai-jang’s grave. We walked over and lit some incense. While we stood there waiting for it to burn down, I saw a brick in the bushes. I picked it up and put it in front of the grave. I figured Huai-jang would know what to do with it.
Calligraphy of Li Mi
Mirror Grinding Rock
When the incense finally burned down, we returned to the road. This time we didn’t go far. The sun was setting, and in the middle of the forest there was a hotel. The sign on the outside said MIRROR GRINDING ROCK HOTEL. We couldn’t believe our good fortune. We walked inside and asked if we could spend the night. According to the man at the front desk, we had our choice of rooms. The place was nearly empty, and rooms were only 50RMB, or $10. When we asked if there were any other hotels in the area, he said the next one was another hour up the road. Indeed, the gods had smiled upon us. After checking in, we walked up to our room. The beds were comfortable enough, and the windows looked out through pine trees at mist floating up from below. It was a lovely setting. But when we tried to take baths, we were not so fortunate. There were only three other guests at the hotel that night, not enough to warrant heating the water. We had to make do with cold showers, but at least we were able to wash off the day’s dust and sweat.
Dinner was also disappointing. With so few guests, the kitchen staff was down to one person that night, and he was not a good cook. Still, at the end of a long day, food is food. We filled up on fried rice. Afterwards, on our way back to our room we decided to walk up to the next floor to see if there was a better view. The view was about the same. But the floor attendant led us to another set of stairs that led up to the roof. He was even kind enough to bring us a small table and three chairs and a dozen bottles of beer. Sitting there enjoying the view of the clear sky and the fog-shrouded mountain below made up for the cold shower and the dismal dinner. The beer, however, did not. We liked to think we had never met a beer we couldn’t drink, but Hunan beer would have been an exception. Had it not been for the date, we wouldn’t have drunk any of it. But it was the end of September, and that night just happened to be the Moon Festival. As we watched the biggest, brightest, most beautiful moon of the year cross the sky, we drank every one of those twelve otherwise forgettable beers.
Naturally, the next morning we got up late, with Hunan beer hangovers. It was almost noon when we checked out. At least the road beyond the hotel was paved, and it was fairly level. We walked for about twenty minutes and saw a trail on the left that led to several of the mountain’s peaks. But we kept going. A few minutes later, we came to a small reservoir. Jutting up from the stream that fed the reservoir were half a dozen huge cement mushrooms. We were so surprised, we didn’t know what to think. What were cement mushrooms doing on the mountain? We didn’t have an answer and continued on. A few minutes later, we came to a side trail on the left and a sign announcing that this was the Wonderland of Ma-ku.<
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Ma-ku with deer and peach, symbols of immortality (photo by Steven R. Johnson)
Finally, we had an answer to our quandary about the mushrooms. Magic mushrooms have long been a favorite food of Taoist immortals. And Ma-ku was one of China’s most famous. She lived here two thousand years ago, and she was known for her mushroom wine. We followed the side trail to a waterfall where her statue poured her magic wine from a jug into the stream. We cupped our hands and drank the water, hoping to float the rest of the way up the mountain. But all we felt were our hangovers from the previous night’s beer.
We returned to the road, but we didn’t continue in the direction we had been walking. Less than a kilometer away, the road we were on rejoined the main road. We could hear buses honking in the distance. We decided to return to the trail we had passed earlier just before the reservoir. It was an old trail and consisted of stone steps. We followed it through a pine forest and along the lower slopes of Discarded Bowl and Sky Pillar peaks. There were side trails leading to both, but we weren’t about to climb any peaks. Besides, they were all shrouded in mist. We stayed on the main trail that skirted the two peaks. Finally, after several hours of plodding along and doubting our choice of trails, we reached Sutra Repository Temple. It was completely covered by fog, and whatever light there was in the sky was nearly gone. We were hoping to find a hostel of some kind to spend the night. Instead, we found a temple.
Sutra Repository Temple was first built by our old friend Hui-ssu in 568, the year after he built Fuyen Temple farther down the mountain. This was where Hui-ssu’s disciple Chih-yi collated his master’s works after his death before going off to Tientai to found his own school of Buddhism. Chih-yi’s fame rested on his arrangement of all the sutras in the Buddhist canon in a way that showed the progression of the Buddha’s teaching, and this was where he made his initial version of that arrangement.
Ma-ku’s cement mushrooms
The temple had fallen on hard times and was down to one solitary, very lonely shrine hall. We arrived just in time to join the temple’s three monks for evening services, which they conducted in candlelight. Afterwards, we asked if we could spend the night. They said they didn’t have any spare rooms, but there was a small hostel less than a hundred meters away. Once more, we were in luck. The hostel turned out to be a two-story stone building set around a small inner courtyard. The caretaker showed us to a room on the second floor and gave us candles. There was no electricity. Afterwards, he led us to a small hut across from the temple. The hut had a stove, and the caretaker cooked us a memorable meal, candlelit and featuring bowls of rice along with a plate of stir-fried cabbage and mushrooms and another of scrambled eggs and tomatoes. And we washed it all down with the caretaker’s last four dust-covered beers. They were also from Hunan, but they tasted a lot better than the beers we had the previous night. Maybe we were just thirsty. Or maybe they had improved with age.
Afterwards, we collapsed on our cots. The moon was just as big as it had been the previous night. But we were too tired to care. The next morning, before we left, the caretaker told us we had spent the night in the same guesthouse used by Sun Yat-sen and later by Chiang Kai-shek during their visits to the mountain. He said this was where important dignitaries stayed in the old days. He pointed out the iron tiles that covered the roof. They were stamped with the date 1937. He said the tiles were made of iron because it got windy on the mountain.
The reason we were there was that we had been sneaking up the mountain along its western ridge, visiting the only functioning Buddhist temples not destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and avoiding the crowds and buses that plied the main road to the summit. But we had gone as far as we could. It was time for us to rejoin the masses. After a breakfast of rice porridge and pickles and fried eggs, we set out for the main road. Two hours later, our trail and the road met at a place called Nantienmen, or South Sky Gate.
I had seen this same name on other mountains. The reason behind it was that the ancient Chinese associated long life with the south and with a particular star in the south, namely Canopus in the constellation Carina. Anyone seeing this star was guaranteed of living to a ripe old age. Unfortunately, Canopus is a southern circumpolar star, and even though it’s the second brightest star in the heavens after Sirius, it’s only visible in the central part of China around the Lunar New Year and then just barely. To increase one’s chances of seeing it, many people climb mountains during the Lunar New Year, and star viewing terraces were common in ancient China: hence the ubiquitous gates to the southern sky.
We stopped to catch our breath, but we didn’t linger. This was also where buses turned around, and the place was piled with garbage. In fact, it stunk. We continued on toward the summit, us and a few hundred other people. Half an hour later, just before we reached the pile of garbage that covered the top, we stopped to check out accommodations at Shangfeng Temple and at several small hostels operated by different government agencies. We thought it might be nice to spend the night at the summit.
Over a thousand people trudge to the top of Hengshan’s 1,300-meter summit every day, and many of them spend the night so that they can see the sunrise the next morning. We considered joining them. But wherever we looked, we saw trash. I’m sure people congratulated themselves on reaching the summit, even if all they did was ride the bus to Nantienmen. For us, all we could feel was disappointment. It wasn’t the fog or the cold. It was the garbage. We liked to think that mountains would be exempt, that they were above the red dust. But Hengshan was an exception. We headed back down.
On our way up, we had managed to avoid the road by following the trail along the mountain’s western ridge. We should have returned the same way or at least taken the bus down. But the day was young, and we decided to walk. Big mistake. During previous trips, I had climbed four of China’s five sacred mountains, as well as a number of scenic peaks, and I had passed through gauntlets of souvenir sellers at the country’s most famous shrines and sights. But Hengshan was unique in attracting beggars, not just a few beggars, but hundreds. Nor were they your ordinary beggars; nearly all of them were missing a body part bigger than a finger. As we approached one paraplegic, he dipped one of his stumps in a bowl of red dye to give it just the right look. It was a most difficult descent, and one we were not likely to forget. We checked “climb a sacred mountain” off our list.
3. Revolutionaries
After reclaiming our gear at the bottom of the mountain, we walked out to the highway and caught the next bus heading north. It was bound for Changsha, the capital of Hunan, but we weren’t going that far. Our destination was Hsiangtan, only eighty kilometers away. Since this was the main highway connecting Kuangchou and Beijing, we thought we might make Hsiangtan in an hour. We were wrong. It took two and a half. The bus may have been on the main highway, but like a lot of buses in China, it stopped anytime someone waved, which was about once every minute. Fortunately, I still had a half-pint of whiskey in my bag. It was gone by the time we pulled into Hsiangtan. So was the sun. But my journal now contained this poem about our visit to China’s Southern Sacred Mountain:
Shansi Guildhall
Honking buses switchback up
Hengshan pilgrims walk the road
past the outstretched bowls of beggars
to reach the garbage pile on top
Obviously, I was entering a dark phase and badly in need of a rosier outlook. The hotel where we spent the night didn’t provide much in the way of that, but at least the water was hot enough for a bath. I’m sure we had dinner too. But if we did, I don’t remember it. We were all tired from our hike up then down the mountain, and went to sleep early.
The next morning we went to see the sights of Hsiangtan, or should I say sight? There was only one thing we wanted to see. Hsiangtan was a town few, if any, tourists visited, much less spent the night in. The reason we were there was to see the Ch’i Pai-shih Memorial Hall. Along with Chang Ta-ch’ien (1899–1983), Ch’i Pai-shih (1864–1957) was one
of China’s two most famous artists of the twentieth century, and Hsiangtan was his hometown.
Unlike Chang Ta-ch’ien, who started painting seriously at the age of nine, Ch’i Pai-shih spent his early years in poverty working as a carpenter. He didn’t start painting until he was twenty-seven, and his early work was far from inspiring. Then in middle age he left Hsiangtan and began traveling all over the country meeting other artists and sketching whatever he saw. But he was still a student. It wasn’t until he finally settled in Beijing at the age of fifty-three that he became a painter with his own style. Suddenly he began painting with the vision of a child. He painted simple things, like cabbages and chickens and shrimps. And whatever he painted looked alive, even funny. Within a few years, he became China’s most celebrated artist, and it would be hard to find a serious collection of Chinese paintings anywhere in the world that didn’t include his works. What we wanted to know was, did his hometown have any?
Actually, Ch’i Pai-shih’s hometown, the town where he was born, was a small farming village sixty kilometers to the east. Hsiangtan was where he grew up and lived until he was forty. Still, when we asked, no one at our hotel knew anything about a memorial hall. We thought, surely someone would have heard about something built in honor of the town’s most famous resident. Indeed, someone had. We walked out to the street and started asking likely people, people who looked like they might be interested in art. A college student finally directed us down a lane that led to some vegetable fields and a large pond at the south end of town. Beside the pond were dozens of large lid-covered urns each containing a hundred or so liters of soy sauce. And next to the urns, there was a sign announcing the future home of the Ch’i Pai-shih Memorial Hall. The sign was outside a small building, and inside the building we met the future curator, T’ang Ch’ing-hai. Mister T’ang said the memorial hall wasn’t due to open until the following December, assuming, he said, money could be found to build it. The building where we met him was just temporary. I heard this a lot in China in those days. Everything was planned, except the money. We asked Mister T’ang how many Ch’i Pai-shih paintings would be on display when the hall was completed, assuming the money could be found. He said he wasn’t sure. It was obviously a sensitive point, and we changed the subject.