Tracking Bodhidharma Page 6

  “What do you think?” he asks. “Is Christianity like Buddhism?”

  “My view is that they aren’t the same. Other religions usually seek something ‘outside,’ but Buddhism is about observing something ‘inside.’”

  Yaozhi expresses his agreement with a slight nod and smile.

  During our conversation I repeat a view that I first heard spoken by Dr. Lew Lancaster, then the head of Buddhist Studies at Cal Berkeley, many years ago. He said that the three teachings of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism are three legs of a tripod for Chinese society. Buddhism concerns the mind, Taoism concerns the body, and Confucianism concerns social relationships. The three philosophies cover pretty much everything. But Yaozhi looks as though he’s heard this idea before. Maybe this isn’t one of Dr. Lancaster’s many original personal insights, as I had thought.

  Our conversation is interrupted when we suddenly pull into the back gate of Guangxiao Temple.

  6. Guangxiao Temple

  GUANGXIAO (meaning “Bright Filial”) Temple is famous in Zen history for several reasons. Perhaps most important is that this is where the Sixth Ancestor, a pivotal figure in Buddhist history and Chinese culture, took tonsure as a monk. An old bodhi tree, a type of ficus tree under which the historical Buddha realized enlightenment, marks the spot where the Sixth Ancestor’s tonsure ceremony took place at the rear of the temple. The current tree is the offspring of the original that was planted in the fifth century.

  One very famous legend about Guangxiao Temple is that it was here the Sixth Ancestor settled a debate about a flag waving in the wind in the courtyard. According to the story, one day while the temple abbot, Yin Zong, was giving a talk, the wind came up and was blowing a flag on the temple grounds. Somehow an argument broke out about whether it was the wind that was moving or the flag that was moving. The Sixth Ancestor, who at that point was still a lay person, famously settled the argument by saying, “It’s neither the wind nor the flag that is moving. It is your mind that is moving.”

  A young attendant of Guangxiao Temple’s abbot appears as we stand beneath the famous bodhi tree. It will be a few minutes before the abbot can meet us, he says. So we decide to take a look around. He leads us to the meditation hall at the rear of the grounds and peeks in the window to make sure we don’t bother anyone before we go inside. As we pass through the canvas door at the front of the building, I first see a large statue of Shakyamuni Buddha at the center of the hall. With a bow, I follow our guide around the perimeter of the large room. It is set up in the traditional style, with an elevated bench with cushions adjacent to the wall for meditators to sit on. Here in the hot, humid south, I don’t see the usual blankets available that are wrapped around the legs up north to keep the meditators warm. I also notice that above the meditation platforms are large wooden signs with beautifully written and embossed Chinese characters that hang in a row stretching around the top of the walls. Each has a phrase, such as ATTAINING THE UNSURPASSED MIND or THE DHARMA WHEEL TURNS ETERNALLY. The guide explains that the handsome calligraphy was individually brushed and presented to the temple’s abbot by other abbots of other temples upon his installation in his position during the grand “Mountain Seat” ceremony that marks such occasions. One of the signs was made and presented by Yaozhi, the abbot with me now, to the abbot we are about to meet upon his “ascending the mountain seat” of this temple.

  Before we leave the hall, the guide shows me a piece of split bamboo about five inches wide. It’s an apparatus used by meditators in the south of China to keep cool on hot days. The bamboo is placed on the lap, hollow side down, with the hands resting on top of it. This allows the heat to dissipate much better from the body. Chinese meditation is not meant to torture its practitioners!

  The differences between the Chinese and Japanese ways of meditating tell something about each culture. While the Japanese tend to be rigid and quite formal in their meditation style and ceremony, the Chinese often appear more relaxed. Between periods of sitting meditation that are signaled by hitting a board with a wooden hammer, Japanese meditators walk slowly in a single circle, sometimes at an excruciatingly slow pace that to me is tedious beyond all reason. Chinese, on the other hand, do such walking meditation in a relaxed way, each person walking at their own pace in a wide circular area, swinging their arms and making a good healthy hike out of it.

  The individual teaching styles of some Chinese Zen teachers can approach the rigid Japanese way of teaching. But the fact that the Chinese can be less formalistic about such things was particularly revealed on an occasion when I sat with an American Zen group in a Zen meditation hall on top of a famous mountain in China. The abbot of the temple where we were visiting, a very friendly and engaging old fellow, helped us all get set up in our sitting meditation positions, carefully laying blankets over our laps and showing us how to tuck them in so that we would be comfortable. Our group, accustomed to meditating in the Japanese style, was lined up around the perimeter of the hall on the meditation platform. We faced the center of the place unlike in Japan where they sit facing the wall of the room. After we were all set, the little old abbot picked up a wooden mallet and unceremoniously whacked the wooden board signaling the start of the meditation session. As we all looked on, he then took out his false teeth, placed them next to a little statue of the Buddha next to his seat, hopped up on the platform, and sat down. We all had to stifle a laugh. This definitely didn’t seem like the Japanese way, with its intricate bowing and ceremony!

  A short stroll from the Guangxiao Temple meditation hall brings us to the Bowl Washing Well. This is the place where Bodhidharma is said to have washed his begging bowl during his stay at Guangxiao Temple. Under an otherwise unremarkable little gazebo is a screened hole where the well sits. Another place, it seems, that connects Bodhidharma to wells, sources of pure water.

  Soon the abbot Sheng Ming of Guangxiao Temple makes his appearance. He greets us in a friendly fashion and ushers us into a meeting room that adjoins the area by Bodhidharma’s well. We sit at the middle of a long conference table. The abbot seems welcoming enough, but I sense he has other important things to do, especially on a Sunday, when he might otherwise be resting. I really feel awkward about meeting such people. On the abbot’s card there are literally nine different titles and positions listed. Among his titles are “Representative at the National People’s Congress,” “Vice Chairman of the National Buddhist Association,” etc. All I offer is a card with the name of my little travel business, South Mountain. I can imagine him thinking “Who is this strange-looking lay foreigner, and why is he taking up my time?”

  I try to explain that I organize tours of foreigners to come to China and visit famous historical temples. Perhaps, I think, that is a worthy-enough activity to merit his using part of a Sunday to meet with me. Another thing I know might engage his interest is the question of how Buddhism is evolving in the West. I sense that that question is secretly a hot topic, though no one will admit to this openly.

  After an exchange of some pleasantries, the topic does indeed turn to the situation in the West. The abbot is interested to know if the Platform Sutra, a pivotal work said to have been expounded by the Sixth Ancestor Huineng, has been well-translated and widely disseminated in the West. I tell him that my friend Red Pine (Bill Porter) and others have provided excellent translations of this “sutra,” (a term normally reserved for words of the Buddha but in China also applied to this work).

  The “Platform” mentioned in this scripture’s name refers to an ordination platform where Huineng conveyed his Signless Precepts to monks and lay Buddhists. Because these precepts were sufficiently unique and central to Chinese Buddhist thought, this “sutra” is considered a sacred text, unique to Chinese Buddhism. More on this later.

  We talk about the Signless Precepts of the sutra. I ask the abbot if he is aware that some Japanese and Western scholars have claimed that the Platform Sutra was not composed by Huineng but by someone perhaps far removed from that famous
figure of Chinese religious history. The well-known Japanese Zen scholar Yanagida has claimed, for example, that the Platform Sutra was composed as a forgery many decades after Huineng died.

  The abbot’s face looks annoyed at my question. He says that he doesn’t care what scholars have to say about the subject. The important thing, he says, is the sutra’s content. Of course he’s right about that, and I tell him so.

  Anyway, there’s one thing that scholars of Zen history do agree about, and that is that virtually all the old records of Zen are at least partly suspect. At best, scholars in the field cannot do much more than make educated guesses about much of the lives of Huineng, Bodhidharma, and other early Zen figures.

  I don’t want to keep the abbot from his weekend rest, so before long I beg off and say I should leave the abbot to his important duties. After a group photo in front of the Bowl Washing Well, Yaozhi happily returns me to my hotel.

  The next morning before noon, I follow directions Jimmy Lin gave me in order to meet him at the Buddha World vegetarian restaurant, located about a hundred yards from the International Red Cross building in Guangzhou. I find Jimmy sitting at a large table on the fourth floor. The place is a typical Chinese-style restaurant, and everyone is talking at once. People at the tables around us are talking so loud that Jimmy and I have to lean close and nearly yell in order to hear one another. After living in Hong Kong, I’m pretty used to restaurants of this type, but this one is particularly bad, and I strain to hear details of Jimmy’s life.

  Elderly Chinese always have stories from the war, and Jimmy is no exception. But while many stories from the war are tinged with regret and bitterness, Jimmy seems happy that his difficulties gave him a deeper insight into how he should live his life.

  He tells me that his father worked for a British firm during the 1930s and worked his way up to became a branch manager for the company in Tianjin, a big port city on the coast not far from Beijing. In 1931, renegade Japanese officers faked an attack on a Japanese mining railroad in Manchuria (The Mukden Incident) and used this as an excuse to invade Manchuria without authorization from the government in Tokyo. Six years after occupying Manchuria under these false pretenses, Japan invaded other parts of North China, including the city of Tianjin. That time left an indelible impression on Jimmy.

  The Japanese army confiscated virtually all the food grown around Tianjin. Food prices skyrocketed, and starvation soon spread. Jimmy’s father made a good salary for his day, but it still only paid for a minimal existence when food prices soared. Only seven years old, Jimmy saw starved bodies on the street every day. The suffering made a deep impression on him. In the midst of such hardship, Jimmy’s father still concentrated on teaching Jimmy to speak English. When the war ended in 1945, it took months for Kuomintang troops to reach Tianjin. American troops, however, landed in Tianjin almost immediately and were warmly greeted as liberators. Jimmy’s dad soon got a job as an interpreter for the American forces.

  Twenty years later, during the Cutural Revolution, Jimmy suffered due to his father’s previous relationship with foreigners. Well-educated and fluent in English, he was designated one of the “stinking ninth category” and sent down to the countryside to be “re-educated” with the peasantry. Buddhist Jimmy took this in stride.

  “I liked working with the farmers. They were very nice. I liked planting vegetables and growing things. But many people from the city, especially young people, hated farming and couldn’t wait to return to their homes. They especially hated southern rice farming, where they were forced to wade in deep mud and endure parasitic bites.

  “All during that time, of course, I didn’t dare say that I was a Buddhist believer. All religions were being persecuted, not just Buddhism. We had to be quiet until the reforms came along in 1978 under Deng Xiaoping.

  “When I was eleven years old, during the Japanese occupation, my whole family took lay Buddhist vows, and we all became vegetarians. We just all went down to the local temple and took lay vows and then stopped eating meat. I think the experience of the war brought my parents to this step. At that time the Japanese had set up a phony Buddhist Association that promoted their control over Buddhist practice. But we, like everyone else, knew that the Japanese organization was phony, and we wouldn’t have anything to do with them. The temple we went to was run by an old Chinese monk we’d known a long time.

  “After the Cultural Revolution, I studied many Buddhist scriptures and more or less understood them. However I never really studied the Shurangama Sutra. In the 1980s I communicated with my Buddhist teacher Dharma Master Xuan Hua, who was then in the United States. He said that of all the sutras, the most important was the Shurangama Sutra. Of all the sutras, it was the one I really didn’t understand, but the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas [in Ukiah, California] gave me a copy of this sutra in English, and I found that although I couldn’t understand the Chinese version, the English version was very clear. I finally understood this sutra, and oh, it was like the whole universe had revealed itself to me! When I finally understood that sutra, I felt like the luckiest person on the planet!

  “In the 1980s, I got a job as an interpreter with the United Nations, and this allowed me to travel to places like South Africa. Have you been there? In the city of Durban, there’s a big population from India and many people are vegetarians. Out of a population of two hundred thousand people, about seventy thousand are vegetarians!”

  After lunch Jimmy invites me to come to his office at nearby Hai Chuang (“Ocean Banner”) Temple. The temple grounds serve as a wooded park, and Jimmy does his translation work in a small office there. He also gives lectures on Buddhism to the local community.

  Inside his sparse office, he uncovers a large pile of red books and hands me one.

  “Here is the Shurangama Sutra, I published these books myself.” It’s nice to see someone like Jimmy living his life in relative freedom and ease after so many tribulations. The government leaves people like him alone, letting him practice a religion that doesn’t hold any political threat.

  After a short visit, I return to my hotel.

  7 Another Visit to Hualin Temple

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING I walk to Hualin Temple to do some more exploration on my own. In the early morning light, a thick cloud of smoke hangs over the temple courtyard, generated from countless bundles of flaming incense. I slip past the haze to stop in front of a little stand selling bricks within the temple grounds. The bricks will be used to build the new Buddha Hall planned for construction when surrounding apartments are torn down. For ten yuan, about a buck fifty, you can write your name in ink on one of the bricks along with a bit of text that will bring you good luck. Actually, you only get half a brick’s surface to write on and must pay twenty for the whole thing. Examples of various auspicious sayings you can copy from are helpfully offered on a piece of paper. I pull out fifty yuan and write a few Chinese characters on the brick. My Chinese calligraphy is primitive, but the people selling the bricks, like Chinese people everywhere, have a bottomless reservoir of polite good will, and so they say, “Oh, how beautiful.” This is, of course, utter nonsense.

  I beat a retreat from the brick stand and continue my stroll around the temple. Nearby I enter a room open to the temple courtyard. Inside I find it is lined with small memorials for lay temple patrons that have died. A gentleman of about seventy years old sits doing calligraphy at a desk near the entrance. He greets me pleasantly, and I play the newcomer and ask him about Hualin Temple. As he explains the standard history of the place, I turn the conversation toward his personal involvement with Buddhism. “I’m a Buddhist believer,” he says. “When Chairman Mao was alive, I studied Marxism-Leninism. All of us intellectuals did that. But that doctrine was really a ‘fool-people-ism,’ a ‘harm-people-ism.’ We all studied it. But then eight or nine years ago, I retired from teaching at the university. A friend of mine had some books on Buddhism. He gave me some of them. These were old books from feudal times. We never paid them any attention
when Chairman Mao was alive. We thought those books were worthless, but such books gradually came back after Deng Xiaoping’s reforms [in 1978]. These were religious books about Buddhism, Taoism, and other traditional teachings. The central authorities had suppressed the books, but they couldn’t suppress people’s belief in these things. They couldn’t resist people’s need for these teachings, people’s demands for these teachings. The influence of these books on people was very great. They couldn’t stop this influence.

  “My grandfather was in the Kuomintang Army, so we had a lot of trouble. I tried to follow the correct political line, whatever it was. During the bad times, we first beat the landlords. Then later people would denounce each other, even their friends. Families were divided against themselves with brothers beating brothers and wives beating husbands. I beat people. I even beat my friends. We thought it was Marxism-Leninism, but really it was just ‘harm-people-ism’ that we were doing. Sometimes it was even ‘kill-people-ism.’

  “Mao was the emperor. Whatever he commanded, or what we thought he commanded, that’s what we did. In ancient times the emperor was like a god to us Chinese, and Mao was no different. Whatever he said, that’s what we did. We claimed it was scientific, but really it was just the same old thing. The emperor was giving commands. We were following them.

  “Anyway, that’s all behind us now. Now I study these Buddhist scriptures. Now, I’m retired. But I’m learning the history of this temple. We’re reconstructing the history and making it available for people. People need to know their real history. Our ancestors from thousands of years ago laid down how people should behave toward one another. Buddhism explains how people should behave toward each other. We need to emphasize this now. After that time of trouble, people don’t have anything left—just get more money! Get a better life! But after people get more money and get a better life, what do they do? What do they have? People need those old books to tell them how they should live their life, give it some real meaning—some real insight.”