Tracking Bodhidharma Read online

  The old scholar’s story is not unusual in China. Even the Chinese government and the Communist leaders have proclaimed the need to build a “spiritual civilization,” to foster new moral values. But the spiritual civilization that China wants to foster today is blocked by corruption, and that in turn is protected by a closed political system. That makes many people cynical and self-centered.

  Can a society that always took orders from the emperor, from the center, ever embrace real democracy? Some think that if the people of China seize democracy, much good will naturally follow suit. But I think this view is simplistic and doesn’t reach the real problem blocking China’s progress.

  Chinese people are smart, and they do understand the idea of democracy. What they don’t have any real experience with, however, is federalism. Modern democracies operate with layers of representative government, like the states in the United States, cantons in Germany, or provinces in Canada. Local governments operate with their own set of laws outside central government control. The Chinese understand the idea of democracy, but the idea of “states’ rights” is a completely alien concept in a country where the emperor’s rule was absolute throughout the country. My Chinese friends are quite interested when I tell them how the federal government in the United States had to arrest Al Capone on tax-evasion charges, not murder. The U.S. federal government was not set up to prosecute criminal law, and the U.S. central government’s greater role in local law enforcement is a relatively new phenomenon.

  China is a big and diverse country, with countless local dialects and conflicting interests. Some form of federalism seems necessary to keep the place from flying apart politically. But as long as there is still an “emperor” running the country, it will never take its place among democratic nations.

  I thank the old scholar for his time and make my way back toward the temple gate. Last night I invited my new friends, including Jimmy, Yaozhi, and Ruxing, to lunch at Grand Buddha Temple restaurant, and I have a few errands to do before we meet.

  Around eleven o’clock, a taxi drops me at the temple restaurant. When I called Yaozhi and Ruxin and invited them last night, they weren’t sure they could make it. So now I’m facing the Chinese “host’s dilemma”—how much food should I order? In China, it’s taken for granted that if the guest eats up all the food offered by a host, the host really loses face. It means the host didn’t care enough about the guest to make sure there was enough food (or even worse—he or she’s a cheapskate). If, on the other hand, there’s food left over after the meal, it means the food offered wasn’t good enough to eat. Either way, the host is disgraced. Being a host in China is a no-win situation.

  I’m only certain of me and two other people attending, but I order six dishes plus appetizers and noodles. You lose the least amount of face if there’s so much food they couldn’t possibly eat it all, and this is how the situation is usually handled. That’s why so much food gets wasted in China, and attempts to change the country’s wasteful culinary habits have not been very successful.

  Just when I’ve got the food ordered and everything set, Mr. He the scholar arrives, and Jimmy Lin shows up right after him. Jimmy has brought another guest, a Mr. Chen, who works in the travel business and wants to meet me. I’m happy I ordered the extra food. A few minutes later Ruxin turns up. I start to get a little nervous.

  As lunch starts, Jimmy Lin is already in fine form, regaling the table with stories about the Japanese occupation many years ago at Tianjin, about how he became a vegetarian during the occupation, and how Einstein was definitely a pacifist and a Buddhist his whole life. I’m not sure about the last bit, but I’m happy that Jimmy’s enjoying himself and everyone is pulled into the conversation.

  I compliment Mr. He on the impressive scholarship that went into his book. He and Ruxin talk about the fact that the Japanese academic community had to take up the slack in Buddhist studies for a long time (i.e., during the Cultural Revolution) when the mainland Chinese Buddhist academic world stopped working. Before World War II, China had many world-renowned scholars, most educated in famous Western universities like Harvard. Their names were household words in China. These illuminati included scholars like Hu Shi, Lin Yutang, and Tang Yongtong. Then things went south, and China’s academic community was destroyed by politics. But since the 1980s, the pendulum of Chinese history scholarship has been quickly swinging back from Japan and the West toward China.

  Then a new guest appears. A young woman enters the room and says “I’m sorry I’m so late.” She introduces herself as a friend of Jemmy’s named Everny (she says it’s a French name). I take a quick panicked look across the table and see that there’s still quite a lot of food left, but things may get tight. Everny turns out to be a devout Buddhist and says she makes a living teaching students to play the Chinese lute. While we talk, Everny sits quietly, eating an astonishing amount of food for such a small person. It’s touch-and-go, but just when I’m ready to order more dishes, she suddenly lets up and joins the conversation. She talks about a recent trip she made to Tibet where she circumambulated a sacred mountain with Tibetan Buddhists while carrying a photo of her late father. The Tibetans spoke no Chinese, and she spoke no Tibetan. Despite everything, she says (and here I think she was referring to the political situation) the Tibetans totally accepted her into their group of religious pilgrims and helped keep her going over precarious mountain terrain. I often hear Chinese say how much they respect Tibetan people and their religion.

  I mention that I intend to visit Yunmen Temple in north Guangdong Province in a few days, and Everny exclaims that it is the temple where her Buddhist teacher lives, and how when she goes there it is like going home.

  Before I know it, two hours have passed, and I can tell Ruxin needs to do other things. I thank him for coming and see him to the door of the little dining room. Then I try out a Chinese phrase that I’ve never used before. I say, “Xie xie nide shang lian.” It is a polite expression that means “Thanks for giving me face by coming.” I look carefully to see if this expression causes any reaction with Ruxin or the other guests. They don’t seem surprised, but I’m suspicious.

  When I speak Chinese or (especially) Japanese, I must sound like something out of a Monte Python bit. Decades ago on the night I first arrived in Japan, fresh out of my college Japanese classes, I asked a young man at the Haneda Airport train station about how to find my hotel in Tokyo. I used a verb form that is extremely formal and polite to address him. He looked taken aback and said, “Oh, you speak Japanese very well.” What I said probably sounded like “Good morrow, cousin!” My Japanese is very weak, but I’m pretty sure that during all the rest of the time I spent in Japan then and in subsequent years, I never heard anyone use the polite verb form I used that night.

  Soon everyone has excused themselves and made their way into the sunny afternoon. I’m left alone and am extremely pleased to find the right amount of food left on the table. The right amount is slightly more than if everyone left something out of politeness.

  8. Traveling North

  TODAY I LEAVE GUANGZHOU behind and travel north by coach to the city of Shaoguan, about four hours away. My exact destination is a famous spot called Nanhua Temple, the teaching seat of Zen’s Sixth Ancestor named Huineng.

  FIGURE 10. Bodhidharma Travels North.

  While the taxi lurches through a crush of cars and pedestrians, I again contrast the scene in the Guangzhou streets now with my first visit in 1978. The Chinese word for contrast is fancha. It’s a word applicable to the contrast between China’s urban and rural lifestyles, the new rich and the old poor, and the country’s pristine and polluted environments. China’s many fancha constitute a sort of social bipolarity. Naturally the biggest fancha is the contrast between the new and the old. Among the massive amounts of new in the city of Guangzhou, there is still an island of old that hasn’t surrendered to the modern, a place I used to find it impossible to avoid.

  The word Stalinesque may sound trite, but it aptly
describes China’s postrevolutionary train stations. Monuments to socialist triumphalism, they evoke no other suitable adjective. During the last ten years, many cities have renovated these old mausoleums, but some others, Guangzhou included, have kept them in service, at least as I write these words.

  The old train stations are showcases for the problem that Mr. Li spoke about on the train from Hong Kong, China’s massive population. His assertion that many other problems come from China’s overpopulation crisis are there revealed as understatement. The huge population places all of China’s modernization under a cloud, but the problem is most apparent in public transport.

  Even today, the wide concrete plazas in front of the old train stations serve as campgrounds for legions of peasants migrating to China’s cities to escape poverty in the countryside. They also convey masses of travelers making their way back to their family’s village during the country’s holidays. The Statue of Liberty has witnessed only a minute fraction of the number of huddled masses that cross China’s railroad landscapes on a single day.

  My experience on Chinese trains in the early ’80s made a lasting impression on me about China’s population. In those days, air flights between Chinese cities were few and infrequent, and the current highway system was still unimagined. Travel meant using the train.

  I was once in Guangzhou on business, and I needed to leave the next day for the city of Changsha, a few hundred miles to the northwest. From my hotel I made my way by taxi to the Guangzhou Train Station early on a gloomy winter evening to buy a ticket for a train the next night. I struck up a conversation with the taxi driver who was happy to talk to a “foreign friend.”

  We arrived at the square in front of the station to see a huge crowd that covered all available real estate and spilled into the streets in each direction. Lines to buy tickets were hundreds of feet long. I was worried and unsure what to do. But then the driver kindly offered to buy the ticket for me and return it to the hotel. I said I’d pay him for the service, and we came to some agreement. But when he came to the hotel hours later, I discovered he had not obtained the ruan wo (soft sleeper) ticket I asked for but instead had obtained a ying zuo (hard seat) ticket. He said the soft berths and seats were sold out. Also, the train was listed on the ticket as a “local,” not the express I’d requested.

  So the next night I joined the Chinese masses for my journey north. Ugly in the daylight, at night Guangzhou Station was hell’s maw. Milling crowds moved through the musty caverns of the place under dim lights interspersed with dark voids. About 11:00 PM we surged as one from the huge waiting room onto the train for the overnight trip. From the beginning, and for the entire journey, the train was crowded beyond belief. In the “hard seat” car, I was wedged with five other people on benches meant for four, three of us facing three others across a tiny table. The aisle was jammed tight with passengers. The train blew its whistle, the train shuddered, and we crawled north through a black night unrelieved by rural lighting.

  Every ten or fifteen minutes, the train stopped at another station where a large portion of the local masses pushed mightily against the doors in a futile attempt to get onboard. Too compressed by other passengers to keep my arms by my side, my elbows were pressed together over my stomach. As the night grew long in lurching weariness, I let my forehead drop over my hands to rest and bounce on the tiny table. When the situation is hopeless and the body exhausted, it mercifully retreats to sleep. The next thing I knew I had slept five or six bouncing hours in this position—vertical, arms tucked elbow to elbow, my forehead on the table. Dawn broke.

  As the sky slowly brightened, the train still stopped frequently and the crowds trying to get on the train got even larger. The hardiest souls occasionally managed to get aboard by squeezing people into almost comical distortions. No one seemed to want to get off.

  Despite our pitiful circumstances, the others around the little table were friendly and curious about the foreigner that rode with them. They spoke with a heavy dialect accent, but I could understand enough to carry on a conversation. We made cramped small talk. One young man, slightly heavyset and rough-hewn, asked me where I was from.

  “America,” I said.

  Without hesitation he said, “Is it true that in America people are free?”

  “It’s like everywhere,” I said diplomatically. “If you have money you have freedom.”

  He looked thoughtful for a few moments and then said loudly, “That’s right. It’s the same here! If you have money, you have freedom!” He emphasized this by nodding at the others and saying, “Right?”

  They responded with a noncommittal facial expression, common to countries with many secret police, that lies between a smile and a grimace.

  We rumbled and rocked our way north. At the next station, the crowd was somehow larger than ever. Some young men in the human tide trying to board the train started yelling “Shang che!” (“I’m getting on!”), pushing as hard as they could toward the immovable doors. It was just then that I said something in Chinese to the effect of “My God, this train is crowded” to the young man who earlier asked the question about freedom.

  “Yes, it’s crowded,” he said. “And not just this train. The whole country is crowded. There are too many people.” His raised his voice as he looked around. “Everything is crowded! There are too many Chinese! We need a big war to reduce the population! Really! I’m not kidding. We need a really big war!” He looked around again. The same noncommittal expression covered people’s faces.

  Finally, the train came to a small country station where the crowds were mercifully smaller. Here, several wheeled carts approached the train to offer little white boxed breakfasts of shui jiao, boiled dumplings that are usually stuffed with minced pork and vegetables. People opened the train windows and a brisk business ensued. Passengers near the windows bought the boxes for themselves and others and passed them into the train car.

  With some effort I managed to squeeze my arms under the table to retrieve a small bag I’d brought with me that contained an apple, some nuts, and a few candy bars. I pulled out the apple and joggled it into a position where I could get a few bites. Some moments later, a woman sitting across from me suddenly said, “This is terrible! How can they sell us this stuff?” A chorus of agreement issued from the other passengers who had sampled the dumplings. The next moment someone said, “Give it back to them!” and several people started throwing the boxes with uneaten dumplings out the window onto the train platform where they rolled every direction and scattered their contents. The passengers had had it. They were tired and miserable, packed like sardines in the train, the weather cold and gloomy, and now the dumplings were inedible. The cart vendors hid behind big cement pillars on the train platform as people hurled the shui jiao and curses at them, tumbling dumplings and detritus across the cement. “Give ’em back to them!” people yelled.

  My arms, resting uncomfortably in front of me due to the crowding, held my apple core. I considered simply swallowing the thing, then remembered something about arsenic in apple seeds. Suddenly the young man who decried China’s population spoke directly at me. “Throw it out!” Some others chimed in, “Throw it out! Throw it out!” I looked out across the field of rubbish on the platform. “Throw it out!” Hesitantly, I tossed the apple core out the window into the scattered boxes of dumplings. Several people clapped their hands, happy that I had joined the masses’ spontaneous rebellion. Chairman Mao said, “Where there is oppression, there is also resistance.” The train jolted, and in a few seconds we began to roll north into the fog.

  Back in the present, my taxi has moved past the Guangzhou Station of my memories to reach the Guangzhou bus terminal. My timing is lucky, and I’m soon on the right bus heading north on China’s modern highway system. What used to be a six- or seven-hour trip to the city of Shaoguan is now covered in less than half that time on a modern highway.

  As we leave the city, I remember the abbot Yaozhi’s quote that “Japanese Buddhism is Japanese
Buddhism and Chinese Buddhism is Chinese Buddhism.” But didn’t the Zen of both countries come from Bodhidharma?

  9. Zen at War

  THE AUSTRALIAN SCHOLAR and Soto Zen priest Brian Victoria published his book entitled Zen at War in 1997. That book and subsequent writings by the same author and others provide a shocking expose of the support provided to Japan’s WWII war effort by the Buddhist community, including the Zen community, in that country. Victoria provides evidence that Japan’s Buddhist sects were not simply passive participants in the rise of Japan’s militarism but provided foundational ideas and influence that helped the spread of fascist ideology.

  Victoria’s writings show that Japanese Buddhism embraced emperor worship, nationalism, and militarism. During the 1930s and ’40s, simply put, Zen ideas were used as a tool for promoting political extremism and imperial war. Victoria’s book reveals that the Japanese emperor assumed the status of the historical Buddha, and his likeness took a place of honor and worship on Buddhist temple altars. This relationship between Buddhism and the emperor contributed to unthinking obedience and fanaticism, much like the fanaticism the old scholar at Hualin Temple described when he talked about Mao’s status in the Cultural Revolution.

  Sugimoto Goro, a Japanese army officer who is credited with helping establish the state of Manchukuo (occupied Manchuria) was only one of many Japanese warriors who rallied the nation with Buddhist rhetoric. In a book called Great Duty, Sugimoto said, “The wars of the empire are sacred wars. They are holy wars. They are the Buddhist practice of Great Compassion.” Brian Victoria cites the following related passage from the book:The reason that Zen is necessary for soldiers is that all Japanese, especially soldiers, must live in the spirit of the unity of the sovereign and subjects, eliminating their ego and getting rid of their self. It is exactly the awakening to the nothingness (mu) of Zen that is the fundamental spirit of the unity of sovereign and subjects. Through my practice of Zen I am able to get rid of my self. In facilitating the accomplishment of this, Zen becomes, as it is, the true spirit of the imperial military ...