by Bill Porter
8. Pure Land & Zen
Our sweet dreams to the contrary, we didn’t wake up in the Pure Land. It was the same old world of red dust. But at least it was temple dust. It was so quiet. Breakfast was at six, and someone knocked on our door, but we slept on. We were on vacation. Finally, about eight o’clock we packed up our stuff and walked outside, and went to thank the guest manager for letting us spend the night. When we entered the guest hall, the guest manager was talking to a much older monk. The older monk turned out to be the abbot, Master Kuo-yi. We thanked them both for their hospitality and told them we wanted to pay our respects to Hui-yuan before leaving. It was Hui-yuan who initiated the practice of Pure Land Buddhism in China. Since then it had become the major form of Buddhism in the Middle Kingdom.
Tunglin Monastery front gate and Tiger Stream Bridge
The abbot led us to the shrine hall where Hui-yuan led the first group of devotees in the practice of chanting the name of Amita Buddha in order to be reborn in the Pure Land. Despite Tunglin’s fame as a center of Buddhist practice, it had only been returned to the monks twelve years earlier, following the government’s reestablishment of religious freedom in 1979. Since then Kuo-yi had convinced the local government to return a thousand acres of agricultural and forest land to the monastery in addition to the land on which the buildings stood. He also helped raise money to rebuild the shrine halls and monks’ quarters. The hall where Hui-yuan conducted the first Pure Land ceremonies had also been rebuilt, and we went inside and lit some incense. Afterwards, the abbot told us that Hui-yuan’s remains were in a much smaller shrine hall on the dirt path that led back to the main road. Since we wanted to return to the main road anyway, we grabbed our bags and followed his directions. Two minutes later, we were there.
Sitting outside in the morning sun was an old monk. He was fingering a long string of beads. But as soon as he saw us, he got up and waved for us to enter the shrine hall. We left our bags by the doorway and walked inside. As we did, he handed each of us three sticks of incense, which we lit and placed in the incense burner in front of Hui-yuan’s statue. While we were watching our sticks of incense burn, the monk insisted we sit down and join him for a cup of tea. He said in the old days the trail to the summit of Lushan began in front of Tunglin Temple. It took three and a half hours, he said, to walk from the temple to the top of the mountain, and hundreds of people stopped at Hui-yuan’s shrine every day to pay their respects. Now that there was a road to the top, days went by between visitors. He was glad to have someone to talk to.
He could have done better than us; we were anxious to move on. We had a long way to go and weren’t sure how we were going to get there. After chatting for as long as we dared, we thanked him for the tea and continued along the path that led to the road. Halfway there, the path also led past Hsilin, or West Grove Temple. It was a Buddhist nunnery, and next to it was a forty-meter-high pagoda. The pagoda was very impressive, and we walked over to get a closer look. There was a high wall around the base, and the gate was locked. But while we were looking for a way in, we met a nun working in the nunnery’s vegetable garden. She stopped working long enough to tell us the reason for the wall. She said during the Cultural Revolution, a group of Red Guards broke into the temple and started destroying everything in sight. One of them climbed the pagoda and started smashing the carved reliefs on the outside. She said she tried to stop him, but he wouldn’t listen. He lost his footing and fell to his death. Ever since then, there has been a wall around the pagoda to keep people away.
She, too, invited us to join her for tea, but we were in our travel mode. We thanked her and returned to the path. A minute later, we were standing at the edge of the paved road that brought us there the previous day. We put our bags down and waited for a bus heading south. Normally it didn’t take more than a few minutes to flag down a bus. There was always something heading our way. But not this time. After waiting for over an hour, it finally dawned on us that we had arrived by taxi and that buses were probably using a different road. Since it was too far to walk with our packs to the nearest road where there were buses, we started waving at trucks. We stood there waving for another hour before a driver finally stopped and gave us a ride. We threw our bags in the back and squeezed into the cab. Like truck drivers the world over, he stopped because he was bored. And like truck drivers the world over, he thought the people running his country were idiots and was glad to have someone willing to listen to his complaints. Even though we didn’t understand most of what he said, we nodded our heads often enough. He was happy, and so were we.
Two hours later, he dropped us off in the town of Te-an. It was already one o’clock, and the next bus heading south wasn’t scheduled to leave until two. At least we had time for noodles. The reason for our slow progress was due to the location of our destination. It wasn’t on a main road. But there was a bus that went nearby, and we were on it at two o’clock. But it didn’t leave at two o’clock. It sat there in the bus station parking lot for thirty minutes while the driver dealt with some personal matter. Even when it did leave, it didn’t travel for more than a minute without stopping to pick someone up or to let someone off. Three hours later, we finally got off at a wide place in the road called Chiuchin, or Dragon Crossing. It was the sort of place truck drivers stopped. The reason we got off there was because it was near our destination. But the sun was on its way down, and it was too late to try to find transportation. There weren’t any hotels either, just one building posing as a restaurant that had a room upstairs with four beds. So at least we had a place to sleep and a place to eat, not that we ate that well or slept that well. It was a port in a storm.
Hsilin Nunnery pagoda
After eating some very dismal fried rice and drinking a few warm beers, we went up to our room. As we were settling down for the night, the landlady came up with a thermos of hot water, and we asked her where the toilet was. She led us outside the door to the balcony and pointed to the pond below. Before retiring for the night, we blinded a couple of fish. What else could we do? At least it was cheap: dinner, beer, and lodging for three tired travelers was 32RMB, or less than $6.
The next morning, we woke to the sound of truck horns and walked out to the road to arrange transportation to the place we wanted to visit. Initial negotiations proved useless. The drivers of the tractors and motorcycles with carryalls wanted at least 120RMB to take us there. It was only twenty kilometers, and I was hoping to pay half that much. I had discovered that in such situations the best policy was to quote a reasonable price, then walk away. Sure enough, one of the drivers came running after us. He agreed to take us there for 50RMB.
We climbed aboard the carryall welded to his motorcycle and left Dragon Crossing in the dust. After about five kilometers, we turned onto a dirt road that led to the top of Yunchushan, or Cloud Rest Mountain. That was our destination. Yunchushan was the final resting place of Hsu-yun, or Empty Cloud, China’s most famous Zen monk of the past century. He spent his last years on the mountain and died there in 1959 at the age of 120. How could we not pay our respects?
Once we began zigzagging our way up the dirt road that led to the top, it soon became apparent why our driver had agreed to take us for 50RMB, while his colleagues wanted twice that. Whenever the slope exceeded ten degrees, we had to get out and walk. It took nearly two hours to go the last ten kilometers.
Just before the end of the road, we passed a building that claimed to be a hotel. It turned out to be closed, and we wondered what a hotel was doing up here anyway. We continued on, and a minute later arrived at the front gate of Chenju Temple. It was like nothing we had seen before. The world of red dust clearly ended at the gate. Beyond was a valley of rice fields and lotus ponds and a large temple at the end of the valley surrounded on three sides by the forested slopes of Cloud Rest Mountain. A more perfect setting for a Zen monastery would be hard to imagine. We found out later that the temple had only recently regained control of all the land inside the gate, which consiste
d of more than a thousand acres.
We got out of the carryall and paid the driver. Obviously, he wouldn’t be needing our help going downhill. Before walking through the gate, we went over to the memorial hall that housed Empty Cloud’s remains. It was a hundred meters to the left, and the archway was inscribed with Empty Cloud’s nickname: Huanyou Laojen, The Old Illusory Traveler.
After paying our respects, we returned to the front gate and followed a path of stone steps along the edge of two large ponds. Empty Cloud helped dredge one of them during his last spring. The year was 1959, and he was approaching his 120th birthday. When one of his disciples suggested celebrating the occasion, he said:
I’m like a candle in the wind. I’ve achieved nothing. When I think of this, I’m ashamed of my hollow reputation. My hundred years in this world of trouble has been like a dream, like an illusion, and not worthy of such concern. Since birth leads to death, a wise person should set their mind on the Way instead. How can I indulge in the worldly custom of celebrating a birthday? I appreciate your thoughtfulness, but I ask that you stop this plan of celebrating mine in order not to add to my sins.
Mausoleum containing Empty Cloud’s remains
He died two months later.
We followed the path past the ponds and the rice fields to the monastery where he spent his last years. Empty Cloud was credited with reviving the practice of Zen in China, and he is easily the country’s most famous monk of the past few centuries. We had come to pay our respects, but we also wanted to meet another monk we had heard about, a monk people called Ch’i-fo, the Eccentric Buddha. We had heard he was living on Yunchushan.
After we reached the temple, we made our way to the guest hall. As at Tunglin Temple, this was where visitors came who wanted to spend the night. The previous night at Tunglin Temple the guest manager whisked us through the registration process, but this time the monk in charge of receiving guests said we couldn’t stay without a letter of introduction or some proof that we were actually followers of the Way. Our saying so, he said, did not constitute proof. We were at a loss. Finally, we got out our prayer beads, the ones monks and nuns use to count their recitations. But this, too, proved insufficient. The monk said anyone could buy prayer beads. Since there wasn’t anything else we could say or do to prove that we followed the path of the Buddha (although in his dust), we had no choice but to turn and head for the door. But before we reached the door, I stopped and turned around.
I told the monk that I had proof, and I rolled up my left sleeve. The scars had faded a bit, but they were still visible: three circles where three cones of incense had burned down fifteen years earlier. I had been living in a Zen monastery in Taiwan for several years, and the abbot decided it was time I had a souvenir of my stay. It was part of a Buddhist initiation ceremony. Monks and nuns burn incense cones on their shaved heads. Lay disciples burn them on their forearms. The actual burning lasts about ten minutes, and, of course, it’s painful. But it’s what Chinese Buddhists do, and I wanted to make the abbot happy. I showed the guest manager my scars, and he showed us to a room.
Chenju Monastery Abbot, Master Yi-ch’eng with author at Empty Cloud Memorial Hall (photo by Steven R. Johnson)
After we dropped our bags in our room, the guest manager led us to the abbot’s quarters. The abbot’s name was Yi-ch’eng. When we entered his reception room, we wondered whether or not to ask him about the Eccentric Buddha, who was reportedly somewhere on the mountain. But he didn’t give us a chance. While his attendant poured us cups of tea, he told us the history of the temple. Then he took us on a tour. Normally abbots were too busy to guide people around their monasteries, but it turned out Yi-ch’eng was not your normal abbot.
He began with the new memorial hall built next to the cowshed where Empty Cloud spent his last years. When the great Zen master came here in the winter of 1953, he was 114, and the place was in ruins. The only structure with a roof was a cowshed, so that was where he lived. But because of his reputation, Empty Cloud was soon joined by several hundred other monks, and within three years they managed to reconstruct many of the monastery’s buildings. Empty Cloud, though, continued to live in the cowshed until his death in 1959.
In the center of the memorial hall next to his former residence there was a bronze statue of the old Zen master. It had white eyebrows and a white beard that made it look alive. There was also a display case that contained some of Hsu-yun’s personal items, including his patched robe and his cloth shoes. When I thought about the fine robes and comfortable accommodations of other monks we had met in China, we felt embarrassed. Their dedication to the path of the Buddha seemed so superficial compared with that of a monk like Hsu-lao, or Old Empty, as he was called by those who knew him.
After we paid our respects, Yi-ch’eng led us to the temple’s unfinished meditation hall in the monastery’s south wing. It was being built entirely out of wood without any nails—all mortise and tenon construction. Even if it had been made of cement, we still would have been impressed. Nearly all the Buddhist temples we had seen in China were devoted to Pure Land practice, which revolved around chanting the name of Amita Buddha. And such practice usually took place in a shrine hall. A meditation hall in a Pure Land temple wouldn’t make sense. But Chenju Temple was a Zen temple, and the heart of Zen practice is meditation. Hence, a meditation hall is the most important structure in a Zen monastery, and Chenju Temple’s new one was impressive.
The new hall, though, wasn’t finished, and we asked Yi-ch’eng where the monks meditated while it was under construction. He smiled and led us to the monastery’s north wing. At the end of a long corridor, he lifted a heavy blanket that covered a doorway and waved for us to follow him inside. Once our eyes got used to the darkness, we realized he had led us into the old meditation hall. Sitting on cushions on a wooden platform that lined the hall’s four walls were more than a hundred monks.
Yi-ch’eng then began circling the room and motioned for us to follow. It must have been a strange sight: the abbot of the monastery followed by three bearded foreigners wearing sunglasses. As we walked past the monks, trances cracked and eyes bulged. When Yi-ch’eng finally led us back outside, he couldn’t keep from laughing, and neither could we. Suddenly we realized we didn’t need to ask the identity of the Eccentric Buddha. We had not only met him, we had seen him in action.
After showing us the new memorial hall and scaring the monks in the old meditation hall, Yi-ch’eng led us outside past the monastery’s front steps and along a trail that skirted the far side of the two ponds. The trail ended at the temple’s cemetery. There were a dozen small stupas, and Yi-ch’eng pointed out the one that belonged to the monk who founded the monastery. His name was Tao-jung. He came here in the T’ang dynasty, 1,200 years ago. In the centuries since then, the temple had become a major center of Zen practice in China, with as many as 1,500 monks in residence. And it remained a major Zen center until the Japanese destroyed it during the Second World War.
Below Tao-jung’s grave and next to the stream that fed the ponds, Yi-ch’eng pointed to a boulder. He said the poet Su Tung-p’o often sat here with the temple’s abbot 900 years ago discussing Zen. Having shown us all he had time for, Yi-ch’eng returned to the temple. Instead of following him back to the monastery, we sat down and spent the afternoon listening to the song of the grasshoppers. Steve took out some marijuana he brought with him. It seemed like the perfect place and the perfect time to smoke a reefer. And that was what we did. It was, of course, a beautiful day.
Chenju Monastery and rice fields
Just before sunset, our reverie was interrupted when three girls suddenly came down the trail from a nearby peak. They stopped and asked us what we were doing here. We told them we were paying our respects to the previous abbots of the temple. Then we asked what they were doing there. They said they were coming back from a hike. They said they grew up at the monastery during the Cultural Revolution, when the monks were driven out and the place was turned into a farm co
mmune. They said they were just visiting, and if we wanted dinner, we’d better follow them, which was what we did. Back at the old commune, we enjoyed a simple vegetarian meal in the dining hall reserved for guests. Then we retired for the night. But we didn’t go to sleep. While we were lying in bed writing in our journals by candlelight—our room didn’t have any electricity—there was a knock on the door. A young monk entered and introduced himself and spent the next two hours telling us everything we ever wanted to know about Heidegger and Wittgenstein. Hearing about modern European philosophy in an ancient Chinese Zen monastery was as strange as meeting the Eccentric Buddha. All in all, it was a perfect day.
Chenju Monastery at dawn
Once again, we slept past breakfast. It was getting to be a habit. I’m not sure we needed the extra sleep. We didn’t stay up that late. But it was our way of reminding ourselves that we were blessed by such good fortune, why not enjoy it? Our only worry was how we were going to get down the mountain. But it wasn’t really a worry. The road was downhill, and our feet worked fine.
After we finally got up, we went to say good-bye to Yi-ch’eng and to thank him for letting us spend the night. The previous day, when he took us to the temple graveyard, he also pointed out the grave of another monk who had helped him understand Zen when he was still a young monk. The monk’s name was Hsing-fu. He served as the abbot of Chenju Temple after Empty Cloud died. After Hsing-fu died, Yi-ch’eng became abbot. Since then, Yi-ch’eng had picked up the nickname of Ch’i-fo, or Eccentric Buddha, because he used every trick in the Buddhist canon to enlighten his disciples. We had heard of him for years and expected someone wilder and crazier. He turned out to be as sweet as our grandmothers.