Tracking Bodhidharma

by Andy Ferguson

  In the course of our discussion, the younger monk asks me if I own a gun. He is quite surprised to learn that I don’t have one. He believes nearly everyone in the United States owns firearms. I ask him, “Why should I buy a gun?” He says that newspapers say Americans buy guns to protect themselves from the rampant crime that pervades our cities. The fact that Americans without criminal records can buy guns freely seems astounding to him. I tell him that it’s likely that a minority of Americans own firearms, and most of them use them for hunting wild game. Certainly there are many people that have guns for protection, but my guess is that maybe only about 30 percent or so of the whole population do this. Most Americans feel quite safe where they live, I say. Though obviously some places have quite a bit of crime, the general situation for most people is not that way. I tell him that the media always likes to exaggerate everything to make a good story. He is quite surprised that we all don’t live in barricaded houses, locked and loaded, ready to protect ourselves from the drug-crazed criminals that would prey on us the instant we let our guard down. Finally the older monk says, “Actually, people everywhere are about the same. It’s not so different in different countries.”

  The topic turns to the situation for monks in China. The young monk says the situation for young home-leavers is quite good right now because they can travel from monastery to monastery and study under whatever teacher they like. “We’re free to come and go as we please,” he says. He pulls out a book by a well-known Chinese teacher of Pure Land Buddhism and asks me if I’ve read it. I say I haven’t, and he hands it to me to take a look. The fact is, I’ve never been interested in Pure Land Buddhism. It smacks too much of the heaven and hell scenario I heard in Baptist Sunday School as a boy. Religious that counsel people to find paradise and avoid hell are too common, and while they offer countless people hope of something in the hereafter, that is more than counterbalanced by the millions of adults and children who remain more or less permanently terrorized and traumatized by the threat of eternal damnation. Talk about terrorism! Threatening someone with eternal damnation seems to me to be rather more terroristic than getting blown up by a bomb. I peruse a few pages of the book and hand it back to the young monk.

  “I hear that Pure Land Buddhism is very strong in Japan,” he says.

  The monks are interested to learn that I know about Zen Master Baizhang, the ancient famous teacher of this place, and his importance to Chinese Zen. I tell them that even though much Zen Buddhism in the United States is derived from the Japanese Zen tradition, the traditional stories from China are widely known and studied by American Zen students. Zen practitioners in the United States know the stories of Bodhidharma, Huineng, Mazu, Baizhang, and many others through reading the Blue Cliff Record and a number of other books.

  The older monk, whose words and speech seem thoughtful and perceptive, asks me what practice I do. I tell him I’m devoted to the practice that Bodhidharma espoused, that of just observing the nature of the mind and following whatever insights that practice offers.

  For an hour or so I share the veranda of the monks’ quarters and shoot the breeze with them. The unruffled quiet of the ancient evening finds them at peace, apparently happy with their lives. I want to ask them what made them give up the world, give up on the idea of getting a job, having a family, and acquiring things. How did they come to accept the wisdom of forsaking the goofy stuff the world thinks is important for the simple practices and brotherhood of religious life? I’ve wondered whether, in a society where homosexuality is almost a forbidden subject, many gay men embrace home-leaving so they won’t be trapped in unhappy heterosexual relationships. Yet I’ve never seen any evidence that homosexual relationships commonly occur in Chinese temples. It would be naive to say they do not, for I can’t pretend to know everything that goes on in these places. Yet the monks I’ve talked to don’t, as a rule, strike me as being gay. I often meet men in Chinese lay society who have effeminate mannerisms, characteristics that make little secret of their orientation. It’s widely known that gay Chinese men often marry women because of the society’s norms, and unhappy marriages result. Maybe most of the Buddhist monks in China have really left the samsaric world (samsara means, roughly, the ordinary world of pleasure and suffering we normally occupy).

  In China, it’s considered rude to ask a monk or nun why they left home. I don’t know why this is so. Perhaps it’s because their paths have resulted from some failure or loss of face they suffered in the world that is best left unmentioned. But whatever the reason, they have not abandoned the world completely. Within the parameters of their lives, they still work together to make themselves a good place to live on a beautiful mountain. They chant their chants and practice calligraphy, poetry, and even art. Monks travel and enjoy reading. They help out in times of natural disasters, going to the aid of unfortunate victims. They express a determination to pursue the Dharma for their own and others’ benefit.

  My day of traveling starts to overtake me, and I tell the monks I think I’ll head for bed. Just then an old monk emerges from the open doorway of the building. Apparently he’s been listening to our conversation. He sits on a stool next to me and we exchange greetings. His name is Shenghui (“Sacred Wisdom”). He presents me with a piece of calligraphy paper on which there are Chinese characters. He brushed them while listening to us talk and wants to give them to me as a gift. The calligraphy is truly exquisite. It is a verse. It is a poem that says that when clouds appear in the sky, they are really just some of the infinite Buddha worlds that stretch through the universe. This is a vision from a famous Buddhist scripture called the Avatamsaka Sutra that tells of countless worlds in the cosmos, each of which has a Buddha preaching the truth. In fact, the sutra says that all these worlds are composed of atoms, and on each of them is a Buddha expounding the Dharma.

  Later I’m back in my room on a high kang, or platform, where I make use one of four available sleeping mats and thick blankets. The futons (flat cushions) supplied by my hosts are quite comfortable, and I’m ready to drop off to sleep when the temple drum begins to sound. Playing the evening drum in Chinese Zen monasteries is often an amazing percussion performance. The drummer climbs the drum tower to perform on the side of a very tall circular drum that sits inside the enclosure. His performance includes various rolling, rapid cadences that crescendo and recede repeatedly for about twenty minutes. I lie in complete darkness and listen to the sound roll across the mountain. Tonight, after ten minutes or so, there is a variation. The drum fades away, and the temple bell, from its opposite tower, replies in the darkness. Then a human voice joins the performance. There is a musical dialogue, a calling and answering between the bell and a monk who chants plaintively for the happiness and welfare of all beings. This duet continues for some time, the sound of the bell and voice calling to each other across the dark mountain.

  I lie in bed thinking about Baizhang and what this place means to Zen. There is the old argument about the Northern and Southern schools of Zen, the north represented by Shenxiu, who reportedly promoted Gradual Enlightenment, and the Sudden Enlightenment Southern school symbolized by Huineng, the monk who became the famous Sixth Ancestor. The traditional view is that the Northern school emphasized a “gradual” path to enlightenment, whereas the Southern school believed that awakening occurs in a single moment, like “remembering something you once knew but had forgotten.” Leaving that old explanation aside, it’s clear the two schools were certainly different in their relationship to the Chinese court. Bodhidharma avoided contact with Chinese emperors. His Southern school kept its distance from the country’s capital city, its teachers instead living here and on other mountains like this one, far removed from China’s aristocratic society, making a living on their own. Baizhang didn’t concern himself with what wasn’t in front of him: “Just leave home and . . .”

  The four thirty wake-up bell reverberates across the valley, and I feel the cold air on my scalp. I compare it to the warmness under the blankets and
listen to the argument that breaks out between the two places about which way I should move.

  One side finally wins out, and by 5:00 AM I am the lone lay person in the Buddha Hall. Here I participate in morning services with the temple’s monks. There are about twenty of them on the other side of the aisle, in the half where home-leavers perform their timeless morning rituals. I’m comfortable with this situation, as I’ve attended many such services before and I know I should simply bow and stand up whenever anyone else does. Also, I know how to fall last in line when, during one part of the service, the monks circle the central altar several times. Two monks come and join me on my side, apparently concerned that I be able to see what they’re doing and follow suit, and maybe so I won’t feel so lonely. I can’t recite any but a few of the words to the sutras that are chanted, but I know the drill. First they spend a long time chanting the names of scores of ancestors stretching from the seven Buddhas that existed before Shakyamuni, then his name, then all the ancestors, generation after generation, that followed, down to the present time. After that they recite one or two sutras, then they recite Namu Kwan Yin Pusa (“Homage to Kwan Yin Bodhisattva”), while we all walk in a circle around the central altar. A few more sutras and some more bows, and it’s over. When we emerge into the courtyard, dawn has broken. Breakfast will be ready in fifteen minutes.

  After breakfast I take the opportunity to take a few more photos. Then I see a monk departing with his bag. He tells me he’s on the way down the mountain and that the bus to Nanchang will leave in half an hour. I return to see Enlightened Nature and tell him I should catch the 7:00 AM bus. He checks me out of my room and, before I have a chance to refuse, tells me to keep the lay jacket he’d given me the night before to stay warm. “I have many of those,” he says. He also pulls out a very old copy of the Platform Sutra, an edition first published in 1952 that includes the original translation from early in the twentieth century by Wong Moulan. I can’t refuse it, and anyway there’s some information in that edition that I need for my own research. I thank Enlightened Nature profusely, and soon I’m weaving my way through the new temple buildings that are under construction, already alive with workers, making my way toward the village on the far side of the mountain valley.

  I soon find the bus stop in the small village by the road. Cows and chickens stand around with the village early risers, people and animals all in their morning routine. Four monks are waiting for the bus to take them down the mountain. Villagers walking along the road are surprised to see a foreigner taking pictures with them. More people line up for the bus. People smile and wave. A few moments later the bus arrives. After I board I find everyone seems to be fighting to give me their seat on the bus. They won’t let me refuse them, and I’m guided to a vacated seat. I put my backpack on my lap to make as much room as possible for other people to sit and take a last look at the landscape of Great Hero Mountain as the bus starts down toward the flatlands. We roll through the switchbacks that flank the mountain and follow the winding river. I dial in “Traveling Riverside Blues” on my MP3 player and ride toward the morning sun.

  MOUNT LU AND EAST WOODS TEMPLE

  Before my bed a moon so bright,

  I thought the ground with frost was sown,

  I gazed up to that lustrous light,

  Then dropped my head and thought of home.

  —“Night Thoughts” by Li Bai

  Li Bai is probably China’s most famous ancient poet, and the poem I’ve translated here is his most famous verse. In China it’s so widely known and loved that (if you read Chinese) you will notice it everywhere enameled on vases and embroidered onto pillow cases. Li Bai’s persona was of a wandering poet, drunkard, and nostalgic merry-maker. So the poem quoted above should not conjure an image of someone actually in a bed, but rather of Li Bai waking in a drunken hangover at midnight upon the grass of a high mountain meadow. He probably wandered away from his drinking mates to pee, tripped over a log, and passed out. When he came to, he wrote this verse. That’s my narrative, anyway.

  Hiding in high mountains away from the polluted world is an idea that united Zen Buddhism with Taoism, China’s native religion. To refer to Taoism as a “religion” is not quite right, as it is hard to separate Taoism from Chinese culture in general, so widespread is its multimillennial influence on the country. Taoist culture has even spread in little ways to the West. My dentist, with no other connection to China’s culture, likes to talk to me about his Tai Chi exercise class, something intimately Taoist in its origins.

  Taoism is the formal name of a religion with deep roots in China. On a rather high philosophical level, the religion has a certain similarity to Buddhism. Taoist philosophy idealizes the radical “nonaction” of leaving the polluted world behind to live a simple and natural life. This idea, on its face, is somewhat like the Buddhist ideal of home-leaving. But through the centuries, Taoism adopted various metaphysical ideas and philosophies that are at odds with Buddhism’s outlook. Some of these ideas came from a Taoist belief that one can prolong one’s life by living in harmony with the natural environment. This idea spawned all types of theories about “energies,” usually translated as Qi (normally written in English as Chi), that underlie theories of natural health. Qi influenced exercises like Tai Chi and Qi Gong (which in the West were once called “Chinese shadow boxing”) and Chinese medicine. Without debating the merit or truth of theories of Qi, which is a different question, it must be admitted that Taoist metaphysics also spawned a lot of quackery. Early Taoist alchemists, trying to make life longer through chemistry, mistakenly identified lead and mercury as important elements in any good long-life potion. Needless to say, the actual effect of their exotic products had exactly the opposite of their intended effect. After providing such untested elixirs to some gullible emperors, the Taoist alchemists abandoned chemistry in favor of a new theory called “internal alchemy.” That philosophy simply counseled that one should practice to align one’s “internal” Qi energies with the cosmic Qi meridians that pervade the universe, a more mysterious but also safer form of Taoist practice.

  Taoist metaphysics left a lot to be desired, but China’s mythical folklore is full of stories of people who allegedly discovered long-life elixirs or other edible means of gaining immortality. Typically, these figures left the world—due to some danger or tragic event—to take refuge in high-mountain vistas like those depicted in traditional Chinese landscape paintings. In these high mountains, they encountered old Taoist hermits or similar demigods who ultimately revealed their secrets, and so more and more lucky world-leavers joined the realm of the immortals. Partly for this reason, Taoism has an immense pantheon of gods and immortals, most of them legendarily connected to events of every tragic age of China’s long history. For example, one of the great female immortals, named Magu, is said to have been a concubine of the first emperor and unifier of China, Qin Shi Huang. When he died, custom demanded that his concubines should be buried alive along with him. Magu decided against this fate and escaped to the mountains, there learning the secrets of the Tao. Other immortals of Taoist folklore escaped similar misfortunes in the red dust of the world. Gift stores in Chinatown offer visitors a museum of figurines depicting these ancient immortals. Many of them clutch peaches or mushrooms, two foods they often prescribed to nurture an endless lifespan.

  Mount Lu, a peak in Southern China that sits not far south of the Yang-tse, is the ideal mountain setting for Li Bai’s verse. Folklore from the dawn of Chinese history tells of Taoist adepts who lived (live?) happily among its caves and peaks, concealed in the mists, and dine on its magic mushrooms. Perhaps they still come out in the early dawn to look down and laugh derisively at the benighted mortal fools who cling to the world.

  The Buddhist home-leaving ideal was more easily accepted in a China that already had the idea of these Taoist hermits. Leaving home and “attaining the Way” was not a difficult concept for the Chinese to grasp. Zen, in some respects, was the fusion of Buddhist home-leaving
with the Taoist mountain living ideal. In Chinese landscape paintings this ideal is everywhere seen where hermits or scholars are depicted taking refuge among high cliffs. Poetry also fused Zen with Taoism. Take for example this untitled verse by Zen Master Yanshou (904—975):Amid high bluffs a lonely ape cries down at the moon,

  The recluse chants, a half night candle’s lit,

  Who comprehends this place, this time?

  Within white clouds, a Zen monk sits.

  From my rock perch atop Mount Lu, East Woods Temple appears as a smallish dot on the plains below. It’s the place I mentioned before, the Buddhist temple and hub where the famous translator Huiyuan lived and taught sixteen centuries ago. I arrived atop Mount Lu last night from Nanchang by bus and stayed in the high village that caters to the throng of tourists now overrunning the mountain. They’ve all come to see the places where Li Bai and other famous poets wrote verses amid these peaks far above the dusty world. The view from Mount Lu is beautiful indeed, but nowadays, if you want to find a place with the solitary remoteness of the poetry, you’d better find a different mountain. Here on Mount Lu the tourists stream through the trails like ants, everyone seeking the immortal solitude that Li Bai and Yanshou idealized.

  I shift my position on the rock on which I’m sitting and strain to see if anything’s moving at East Woods temple.

  As I’ve said, Bodhidharma likely traveled north from South China through the mountains to Jiangxi Province, the area around modern Nanchang City. From there he would have continued north through lake country toward the Yang-tse, going directly past here, and likely stopping at East Woods Temple. That place was already famous when he passed this way and would have been his obvious stopping place. He certainly looked up at the place where I’m sitting now. Maybe he climbed up here.