Tracking Bodhidharma (13 page)

Fa Qi is indeed like other young Buddhist monks I've met in China. He tells me he was a businessman, but in his late twenties decided to become a monk. Now, despite his age, he has a position of considerable responsibility in one of China's most important temples. He seems enthusiastic about the task the lies before him.

After two cups of tea, I excuse myself. I know Fa Qi has a lot to do. In the afternoon the main ceremonies of the Water and Land Festival will be under way. He thanks me for coming and tells me he will be happy to welcome any groups that I bring to the new guesthouse.

Back in that guesthouse, I get my camera and make ready to observe
the main ceremony that will start soon. I make my way to the big Buddha Hall once again and find that things already seem to be in full swing. The Buddha Hall is full, and the onlooking crowd is surrounding the place. Once the monks and lay practitioners are inside, no one is allowed to enter or leave until the ceremony is finished. But the front doors of the big hall remain open, and so I join the spectators who are all standing there taking photographs, pointedly ignoring signs that say no pictures are allowed.

The chanting and bowing in the main Buddha Hall proceeds for a long while. The sounds of sutra chanting and prayers are broadcast through speakers with terrible acoustics, and even though I speak Chinese, I can't understand what's being said. This goes on for nearly an hour, and I'm getting tired of standing on the pavement listening to what I don't understand. Then I hear a traditional Chinese band start to play near the Heavenly Kings Hall a distance away. I go over to investigate and find a line of people and objects preparing for the final procession that will be the culmination of the ceremonies. Hundreds of lay Buddhists are gathered around a traditional instrument band that is making a ruckus. The music and chanting all crescendo for another twenty minutes, until it finally and suddenly stops. Then the monks who were leading the ceremonies in the Buddha Hall emerge in a procession that moves toward the front of the temple. At the front of the procession, paper-mache figures of the Heavenly Kings on horseback and a big paper boat with a statue of Kwan Yin at its helm are held aloft by lay people. The senior monks, dressed in bright yellow robes and special hats, trail behind the statues that are lifted aloft. As the colorful figures and monks proceed, the other monks of the temple and crowds of lay people fall behind them in a parade, myself among them.

The procession of three hundred or so monks from inside the Buddha Hall, along with the crowd of lay people, move south toward the temple gate. Generally, monks in China do not wear hats. But for this ceremony, the leading monks wear the same crown as that worn by Dizang, the bodhisattva that has specially vowed to liberate beings from hell. They also walk under large yellow umbrellas festooned with auspicious Chinese characters held by their assistants. The Chinese band has fallen in and now serenades the scene with the din of Chinese funeral music.

Cymbal and drum players punctuate the squeal of the brass
suona,
a trumpetlike instrument, as the spectacle marches along. We all pass to the far side of the wide plaza that stretches a couple of hundred feet in front of the temple gate, arriving at the highway that runs past the front of the area.

At the front of the parade is the paper-mache boat, about twenty feet long, that carries Kwan Yin. The idea is that she will captain the craft on its mission into the lower realms and ferry the benighted beings there across the bitter sea to the shore of happiness. The Heavenly King figures precede the boat to protect it. There is also a statue of Guan Gong, China's most famous historical army general from the Three Kingdoms era. I know that the Taoists long ago deified Guan Gong, but I don't remember seeing him around many Buddhist temples. He probably shows up for special occasions. Today, all the gods are pitching in for a good cause.

The high squeal of the
suonas
sends a message to denizens of the hell realms that we're coming to set them free. At the highway the long line turns right and makes a short trip alongside the road. It then crosses the road at a place where all traffic has already been stopped by a police barricade and enters a large field that contains a long, wide cement slab. Hundreds of people in the long line file into the area, and the paper boat and figures of the gods are placed on the cement area and made ready for their send-off to the lower realms. People scramble back and forth taking pictures of the spectacle. A lot of people in the crowd come up and heap “hell money” on and around Kwan Yin's ferry boat. That special printed money is meant to be conveyed on the craft to hungry ghosts and others on the other side who can use it for whatever essential goods and services are for sale in hell.

As the statues are made ready, the leading monks beneath the big yellow umbrellas bless messages that are also placed on the boat. When the boat is full to the point of capsizing, additional boxes of more hell money get placed next to it, along with personal messages of good will to deceased relatives. Finally everyone steps back and a flame is produced. Within seconds, the boat, figures, money, and messages are emitting flames that shoot skyward, conveying the compassion of this world to the other five realms. The bodhisattva Kwan Yin, for a few
moments, stands tall amidst the fire and smoke that consumes the boat, then is consumed in the conflagration to rise in the big column of smoke into the sky.

I'm standing fairly close to the flaming boat trying to get some good photos. Suddenly a blast of heat strikes me like a wave, and I'm forced to jump back so as to avoid being an inadvertent offering. To add drama, someone has placed a long string of very loud firecrackers in the ship. Reaching a more distant vantage point, I turn to watch a massive cloud of smoke rise over the picturesque farmlands in front of Nanhua Temple. A timeless ceremony in a timeless valley.

Ceremonies like this have probably gone on here since before recorded history. People of the assembled crowd, having seen it all before, begin to retreat before the last of the firecrackers have popped under the afternoon autumn sky.

The taxi driver in Shaoguan City is perplexed. I've told him the hotel I'm looking for is called the Handy Economic Hotel and its address is at the corner of Feng Cai (“Graceful Bearing”) Street and Xin Zhonghua (“New China”) Street. He knows Feng Cai Street well enough, since part of that road is the main pedestrian shopping street in Shaoguan City. But New China Street seems to be a mystery. We ask another cab driver who points us down a side street called Feng Du (“Wind Passing,” but not in its pejorative sense) Street. There we find a tiny
paifang
over an alley that says NEW CHINA STREET on top. However, there's no hotel called “Handy Economic” to be seen. Maybe my source for this information was an Internet dead end, a Web site abandoned years ago. I decide to hop out of the taxi and look around and then notice a big greeting sign over the door at a different building that says NANA EUROPEAN-STYLE HOTEL and decide to check it out. It turns out to be a smallish but clean and respectable-looking place, with scores of European art prints framed on the walls and a campy Romanesque nude female statue prominently displayed on the second-floor landing. There's no lift, but the price is right. A decent double room, Internet-ready computer included, is about $23 a night.

An hour or so later, I get the call I'm expecting from Everny, the music
teacher who crashed the lunch at Great Buddha Temple. She had sent me a message through Jimmy Lin that she was going to visit her Buddhist teacher at Yunmen Temple and asked if I wanted to go there with her. Yunmen Temple is about an hour from Shaoguan. I'd like to visit there again, so I agreed to meet her at the bus station where we can take the local fourteen-seat minibus directly to Ruyuan City, a short taxi ride from the temple.

ZEN MASTER YUNMEN was among the most uncompromising of all the old Zen masters. He adamantly rejected metaphysical and mystical thinking among his students. He even scolded people for hanging around temples, criticizing them for searching out any religious claptrap that some teachers have “chewed on and spit out” and then “putting it in their own mouth.” Here's an example of how Yunmen talked:

Of course some people might think that chasing the monks out of the hall with his monk's staff is a bit over the top. Much is made about such seemingly erratic behavior by old Zen masters like Yunmen. Scholars use a fancy word to describe such strange behavior, calling it
antinomian.
The word describes the behavior of religious people who think their understanding of the truth entitles them to act with disregard toward religious convention or conventional morality.

But I think the word
antinomian
doesn't really apply to the behavior of the old Zen masters like Yunmen. While they sometimes flaunted convention, their behavior seldom rose to the level of violating Buddhist vows. In thousands of pages of the old Chinese Zen records, I've never seen passages where the old Zen masters counseled their students to violate their vows of chastity or vows against harming life, telling lies, or encouraging other transgressions that run counter to the basic precepts of the religion. What I
have
encountered, quite regularly, is a studied indifference to religious symbolism, a near total disregard of holy representations. The old Zen masters were true iconoclasts—breakers of icons; their Dharma Halls were devoid not just of religious statues but also of any manner of special signs or metaphysical speech. The old Zen masters even ridiculed such talk. Zen Master Huanglong pointedly rejected such fancy talk. One day he did so like this:

Everny yells to me from across the plaza in front of the Shaoguan station, and a few minutes later we've boarded the bus that leaves every half hour for Ruyuan City.
Ruyuan
literally means the “milk's source,” and I've always thought the name must have been derived from the great Zen masters that lived in the place.

As we sit on the bus waiting to leave, I chat with Everny about a famous nature park not far from Shaoguan. It's called Danxia (pronounced
Doe-sya
) Mountain. The name
Danxia
can be translated as “red-hued.” Mountains that are red-hued, whether due to iron in their soil or for some other reason, are not so rare, and there are several places in China that are named Danxia. My interest has been to visit the home temple of an ancient monk named Danxia Tianran (738—824). His name means the “Natural from Danxia.” I've long wondered if the scenic mountain recreation area not far from Shaoguan City was connected to that monk, and whether he lived there or not. Danxia was one of the most famous iconoclasts of Zen. His legend says that when he first entered the famous Zen Master Mazu's temple, he went into the Buddha Hall and climbed up to sit atop the statue of the Buddha, his legs straddling its neck. This caused a stir, and so the old master Mazu entered the Buddha Hall to see what the commotion was about. When he looked up and saw Danxia perched on the Buddha's shoulders he exclaimed, “Oh! My natural disciple!” Thereafter Danxia's Dharma name was Tianran (“Natural”). Another story about Danxia Tianran tells how he once stayed at a temple in the cold north of the country
on a winter's night, and began to burn the temple's Buddha statues to stay warm, much to the chagrin of that temple's abbot. “Why are you burning the holy icons!” said the abbot. “Oh,” said Tianran, “I didn't know there were any real Buddhas inside them!”