by Linda Jaivin
On the other hand, there’s something to be said about Buddhist or Daoist temples, especially if you need to pass some time before your train leaves. You can hang out as long as you like and the agreeable architecture provides plenty of shade. A sign inside the arched entrance of this one reminded visitors that it was a place of worship. It asked that they dress appropriately, not take photos and that they greet the monks with respect. So far as I was aware, I had never dressed inappropriately in my life, I didn’t own a camera and I believed that all people should be greeted with respect. I entered.
The first hall contained large, gaudily painted icons of guardian deities. The room was cool and deliciously scented by both burning incense and the fruit ripening on the altars in the late summer heat. I stood before the first icon and closed my eyes, worshipping the air. The sweat coursing down my neck and limbs tingled as it cooled and evaporated. I felt calm settle over me. When I opened my eyes, an elderly monk with an unruly grey topknot and moon-sliver eyes was standing to one side of me. He was stroking his wispy grey beard; his well-washed blue robe hung as tentatively on his thin body as if he were a wraith. I wondered how long he’d been there, how long I’d stood there. My sweat had dried, leaving snail-trails of salt down the insides of my arms.
The monk rounded the icon to exit that first hall into the courtyard. A minute or two later I followed. I drew in a sharp breath at the sight of a particularly lyrical array of pavilions for prayer and meditation. When I chanced upon that temple, I hadn’t imagined what grace lay beyond its humble gate. I looked back towards the hall from which I’d come. The old monk was standing by a large standing brazier in which was planted a forest of burning joss. From his sleeve, he produced a wad of gilded spirit paper and applied it to the tip of a stick of burning incense until the whole lot burst into flame. Immediately, a breeze lifted the scraps of burning gilt and tossed them into the air above the uptilted, charcoal eaves. There they frolicked in a glittering, manic dance of golden joy, before drifting gently back to earth as dark ash. Somewhere inside me a window was flung open, and the sadness and anger and guilt that were weighing me down grew wings and flew out to chase those sparkling shards of reflected sunlight. My head opened like a flower. A blue, cloudless sky melted into the infinite. I felt formless as water, light as air. There were tears on my cheek and I was surprised to realise they were my own. I cannot explain any of this.
The monk appeared to be waiting for me. Beckoning for me to follow him, he turned on his heel. I followed, pulling my head along on a string like a balloon – at least that’s what it felt like. We arrived at a back section of the temple that I guessed was the monks’ living quarters. A handful of monks sat in the shade of the buildings or under the trees in groups of two or three, some talking quietly, some reading. It must have been about eleven. A few were eating lunch from plain ceramic bowls.
Coming to a halt outside a small, simple room, he glanced inside. ‘Come,’ he said, urging me in before him with a flap of his papery hands. The whitewashed walls of the room smelled of lime. They were covered with meditation maps of the human body and posters with illustrations of Daoist medicinal herbs. Two younger top-knotted monks were seated in wicker chairs at a small card table over which a man with a civilian haircut presided. There were two empty chairs. The elderly monk eased himself into one. ‘Sit down,’ the layman said, as though expecting me. I did. The three monks smiled at me. One was skinny, young, dark, eager, and present; another around my own age – almost thirty-five – and palely ethereal.
As for the layman, he was at the softening stage of middle age. His cheeks were relaxing into jowls, and he had a smile that seemed childlike one moment, canny the next. His nose was long and his tobacco-stained bottom teeth crossed like the legs of a man at ease. Under a pompadour of thick, shoe-polish-black hair, his eyes shone small and bright. He wore quiet cotton trousers and a loud Hawaiian shirt that paraded hula-ing maidens with gaily coloured tropical flowers in their hair across the tidy mound of his belly. What is he here to sell? I thought.
He handed me his card, which I studied as he poured fragrant, honey-coloured gongfu tea into a tiny terracotta cup, the inside of which was glazed the nostalgic blue of a Beijing autumn sky. On the table was a saucer of roasted sunflower seeds and before each of the monks lay a small pile of shells. The card read: Master Happy Fish, Vice-director, XX Provincial Daoist Association, XX Township Chief Daoist Adviser and Daoist Physician. It gave the temple as his residence and said consultations needed to be arranged in advance. It listed a phone number.
‘First, we will eat,’ he announced. Another monk entered, as though on cue, with five bowls containing rice, pickle, chilli, spinach and tofu. I realised with a shock that I hadn’t eaten since the previous evening. I wondered how the messenger-monk had known to bring five bowls.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’re very kind.’ I hadn’t spoken to anyone that whole day. I wondered if my words were slow or slurred; I felt strangely high, like I had smoked a bit of weed, something we all did back then. It grew wild and was the one bit of fun the authorities hadn’t yet worked out that we were having.
‘One day soon,’ said Master Happy Fish, as though answering a question, ‘I will retreat to the mountains. That phone number on my card will no longer work. My forwarding address will be at the end of the rainbow.’ He roared with laughter at this obscure joke. I smiled politely, and nodded as he leaned forward, tapped my knee, looked into my eyes and assured me, ‘But if you want to find me again, you’ll know how.’
By any rational reckoning, this was the charlatan I’d spent my life avoiding. And yet I made no attempt to leave. Maybe I was tired of rationality. Or maybe I was just ready for a charlatan.
‘Bazi?’
I told him the date and time of my birth – my bazi, ‘eight characters’. He did some calculations on his fingers and then reached for my hand. He laid three fingers flat across my wrist and stared off into an upper corner of the room. Mental calculations played across his drifting features like arctic lights on snow. ‘You won’t marry,’ he told me cheerfully, ‘and if you do it won’t last. But you’ll be fine. Anyway, you don’t like being tied down. Do you want some pills for that?’
A laugh shot out from my throat, like a burst of machine-gun fire. If I hadn’t cried in a long while, neither had I laughed. ‘For what?’ I gasped, recovering. ‘Will the pills make me want to be tied down?’
He chuckled. ‘There are no pills for that. No. I’m talking about your urinary tract infection. The pissing problem. Although to be honest, I’d see a Western doctor for that one.’
He got me.
Q, I thought, would love this story. Would have loved this story. I blinked.
After a few minutes, Master Happy Fish, who’d been observing me, took my tea, which had cooled in its cup, and tossed it onto the cement floor. He poured hot water into the teapot and freshened the tea in my cup before attending to the others. After a minute or two he took out a pack of cigarettes and pressed one on me. Every so often, one of the monks slurped his tea. Outside, in the temple grounds, birds sang. A slanting shaft of sunlight crept into the room from the window, illuminating a sleeping ginger cat. It opened one eye, yawned and lazily stretched out one paw, extending its claws and then retracting them. I thought of Mimi Four, my black-and-white cat, whom I’d left with neighbours. Trustworthy ones. Not the ones who, I was quite certain, were responsible for the disappearance of Mimis One to Three and the subsequent, heartbreaking, cooking smells that thickened the air in the publishing house dorm where I was living at the time.
Master Happy Fish patted his pompadour and gave his riot of a shirt a jaunty tug where it had surfed up over his exuberant belly. The old monk fingered his beard like he was playing a harp; the young skinny monk straightened up, rotating his head and then his shoulder blades in a way that set off a succession of sounds like a string of distant firecrackers. With a few slow blinks, the ethereal one gave the impression that he had spr
ead his wings to flutter back earthwards for a visit. Master Happy Fish laughed for no reason and said, ‘There are many different types of Daoism. You see these three monks?’
I nodded.
‘They don’t eat meat. They don’t shop for nice clothes. They don’t look at pretty women.’ A quick smile flashed from monk to monk at the phrase pretty women. ‘They meditate every day. It’s necessary for them at this stage.’ Subtly, they appeared to arrange themselves as though for my inspection. I had a vision of my mind as a bucket, collecting rain water. ‘Me,’ Master Happy Fish continued, ‘I eat meat. I like nice clothes.’ He indicated his shirt. ‘And I look at pretty women. At the level I am at it is okay to look. It will be okay for them to look too when they reach that level. They will know when they get there. It will not be when they no longer think to look. Nor will it be when they look but no longer think.’
‘When will it be?’ I asked.
‘When they look and are able to see, and when they think and are able to know.’
The skinny, eager monk leaned forward. Speaking in a stage whisper, he told me, ‘That is why he is a master.’
‘Have some more tea,’ said Master Happy Fish, as if the monk hadn’t spoken. ‘It is high-grade leaf from Yunnan. Delicious and good for the digestion. A devotee brings me reels of it every time he comes.’
He gestured towards a corner of the room. Stacked there were perhaps a dozen tightly packed discs of tea, the shape and size of film reels. Later, pu’er tea, packed like that, would become a fetish and status symbol for the moneyed classes in Beijing and elsewhere. At that time, we didn’t have moneyed classes. There were just officials, some of whom had a lot more money than they ought to have had, the odd successful ‘individual entrepreneur’ and the rest of us. In fact, the student demonstrations of the first half of the year had started as a reaction to the rising corruption: ‘Sell the Benzes and Save the Nation’. It was only when the Benz-driving leadership used the press to denounce the students and raw power to try to shut down their protests that a free press and democracy jumped to the top of the agenda. (Thinking about all this now, it wasn’t that the students, or any of us, had been naïve, exactly, but we hadn’t even known what corruption was, what it could be, the altitudinal heights it could reach. We never could have imagined the eczema-spread of corruption that disfigures our nation’s face today – tea reels were, back then, simply something to marvel at.)
‘All religion attempts to answer one question. Do you know what that is?’
I thought about it, recalling what ought to have struck me the moment that Master Happy Fish had told me his name. The Daoist sage Zhuang Zi, with whom I share a surname, once asserted that fish were happy. His interlocutor challenged him as to how he could know this: ‘You are not a fish.’ Zhuang Zi replied: ‘And you are not me. How do you know that I do not know if fish are happy?’ I looked at Master Happy Fish and asked cheekily: ‘How do you know the fish are happy?’
‘Ha ha ha!’ Master Happy Fish slapped his thigh as his laughter streamed out like a progression of musical notes. ‘That is a very important question.’
‘It’s not the one you were looking for, though.’
Master Happy Fish shrugged. ‘It wasn’t, but it could be.’ He poured more tea. I was afraid he wouldn’t go on, that I had stopped him in his tracks. I waited.
‘Where do we come from, what path should our lives follow while we’re here, and where do we go when we’re gone?’
For a moment, I thought he was asking me. I was still pondering the answers when I realised that was the question.
‘A Christian believes our origins are in original sin. In this life we should do our best to expiate this sin. How well we do determines where we go – heaven or hell. A Buddhist believes we come from a previous life. We spend this life trying to accumulate good karma to add to or balance the store inherited from the previous life. How well we do determines how we are born into the next cycle of life. The Daoist –’ and here he paused for effect ‘– the Daoist says we come from Nature, while we’re on earth we should shunqi ziran, follow the flow of Nature, and after we die we return to Nature. On a practical level, all religions instruct their believers to do good things. Charity, for example, is one of the five pillars of Islam. Daoism is no exception. We say, do good deeds, be a good person and leave the world at least as good a place as you found it. Daoism is very simple, really. You are a poet.’
A beat.
‘Me?’ I felt like I’d been snapped out of a trance by a hypnotist. ‘Yes, I –’
‘A poet of sadness. You feel sorrow over life’s impermanence.’
My throat thickened with emotion. Maybe he called everyone a poet, maybe everyone thought of themselves as a poet. And perhaps we were all given over to sorrow over life’s impermanence, or at least all of us whose wanderings led us to pass through the gates of temples and drift within their perfumed courtyards. Yet, though I cannot explain it, I had the feeling that he knew everything about me, and understood me better, perhaps if only at that moment, than I did myself. For the second time I thought of Q, the one friend who could explain anything, and regretted that he was not there with me to share in my wonder. On the other hand, in this Daoist temple in this provincial town in the southwest, I felt Q was as present by my side as he’d ever been since I met him that first electric year at university.
‘There’s an American boy who teaches English in the university here,’ said Master Happy Fish. ‘His Chinese is very good. He comes here every Saturday to study Daoist philosophy and kung-fu with our young monk here.’ He indicated the ethereal one, who nodded in his vague fashion. ‘Afterwards, he comes in for tea and we talk. The American’s name is Ruosi.’
‘Ross,’ said the ethereal monk, with, so far as I could tell, flawless pronunciation.
‘Exactly. Ruosi. Ruosi has told us about a woman author from his country whose name is Rice. I thought this strange. Surely an American author would be called Bread! Ha ha!’ The monks chuckled with the tolerant air of listening to a familiar joke retold. Master Happy Fish continued. ‘Ruosi said that this Rice writes about vampires. You know vampires?’ I nodded. ‘For her vampires, Ruosi told us, the great sorrow is the permanence of life. So you see? If you stand in one place the moon looks brighter in the other place. But if you stand in the other place, the moon looks brighter in the first place. As a Daoist, of course, it’s particularly interesting to contemplate the existential dilemma of the vampires. We are famous, as you know, for our pursuit of the elixir of immortality. I would like to read these vampire novels one day. Unfortunately, they are not translated and all I can manage in English is “hello” and “thank you”, and according to Ruosi, when I say “thank you” it sounds like I have put someone to the bottom of the sea. Sank you. But should I be unhappy that I cannot read these novels by this Miss Rice?’ He didn’t look particularly unhappy.
‘No,’ I guessed. Master Happy Fish clapped twice, economical but enthusiastic applause, and the monks beamed.
‘Correct! You see, unhappiness is the distance between what you desire and what you can or do have. Put another way, it is the space between what you wish to be true and what is true, the gap between what you hope to achieve and what you are capable of achieving. You are a poet. If you yearn for the Nobel Literary Prize, chances are that you will be unhappy. If you write poetry, the most beautiful poetry you can possibly write, you will be happy. Striving for perfection, for improvement and progress, is a good thing. Of course, I could strive to learn English but in this case, I think it’s more sensible to adjust my expectations. I don’t want to be forever sending people to the bottom of the sea.’
I liked this jovial, pot-bellied, flamboyant explainer, charlatan or not; if I had meandered into his realm by accident, it was – pardon the pun – a very happy one indeed.
Master Happy Fish proceeded to answer many other questions I hadn’t yet asked. At least I don’t recall asking them. I can’t honestly remember. There
are many things that are difficult to remember that I wish I could remember more easily, and other things that are hard to forget that I would prefer never to have to think about again.
These are some of the other things Master Happy Fish told me that day:
‘You don’t live in a house or apartment or even any city on earth. You live in your head. You should get out a bit more.’
‘Be. Know. Do. And don’t forget to dance.’
‘Dance, but wear the right shoes. Which may be no shoes at all.’
‘A line is the shortest distance between two points. A line is a succession of points. Look at the line and see the points. Stand on a point and see the line. If it’s a fishing line, then go fishing.’
‘Leave and come back. Come back and leave. Always write postcards. If you can’t write postcards, write poems.’
I asked him if I should learn to meditate.
‘Don’t meditate if you think it will make you smarter; meditate if you think it will make you less smart.’
‘Wear less black and more white and yellow.’
This, I told him somewhat apologetically, would be difficult. I wore white shirts but was otherwise wedded to black and grey and navy. I couldn’t see myself in yellow.
‘Get a scarf,’ he shrugged. ‘You’d look good in a scarf. And socks. Yellow socks are good. Sunlight for the feet.’
Finally, he advised me to wake up at dawn every day and exchange breaths with the trees. I told him that dawn was usually when I went to bed. I asked if the advice still held under those circumstances, and if the trees would be offended if in exchange for their pure green exhalations I occasionally gave them alcohol-tinged vapours. He said the advice still held. The trees could deal with it. He also suggested that if I was ever at a loose end I should open a bar.