Tracking Bodhidharma (14 page)

Everny assures me that the park in question was the home of Danxia Tianran. I seem to recall that his place of practice was not here, but rather in the north of the country, somewhere near Nanyang City in Henan Province, but she claims he lived at a temple in the nearby national park that is called Bie Chuan (“Separate Transmission”) Temple.

I find the name of the temple appealing. “Separate Transmission” is an obvious reference to the “special transmission outside the teachings” and indicates the temple has some affinity with Bodhidharma's Zen. When Everny tells me the exact location of Danxia Mountain, I realize it is near the likely route that Bodhidharma traveled when he came through this area. From Shaoguan, Bodhidharma probably set out toward the northeast, traveling along the Zhe River toward its headwaters near Danxia Mountain and then across more mountains into what is now Jiangxi Province. Ultimately, his northern journey would take him to the south bank of the Yang-tse River. He may have purposefully been making his way to East Woods Temple, a famous center of Buddhist worship and translation near the confluence of the Yang-tse and some other river systems. That temple was already widely famous well before Bodhidharma came to China. A famous scholar and translator monk named Huiyuan (334—416 established East Woods Temple and translated Buddhist scriptures there. When Bodhidharma traveled from here toward the north of China, he almost certainly would have stopped and stayed at the famous landmark that lies at the crossroads of many travel routes.

In that light, Bodhidharma's going past Danxia Mountain would be axiomatic. Anyway, Everny claims that mountain was home to one of his most famous spiritual descendants, so it seems a worthy stop along his ancient path.

The late afternoon bus ride to Yunmen Temple near Ruyuan stops frequently at designated places to take on passengers. It also stops at nondesignated places, including the shoulder of the road, picking up whoever successfully waves it down and can then be crammed onboard. Now that China buses are no longer publically owned and must make
a profit, every fare is a good fare, and every empty space on the bus represents lost revenue. The trip is especially slow until we finally reach the edge of Shaoguan and get into more open country.

By the time we get to Ruyuan, it's late afternoon, and immediately Everny starts looking for a bus that will take us to Yunmen Temple. However, I'm aware that if we don't get to the temple soon, we'll miss dinner, and there's no village near that temple where a restaurant can be found. I hail a taxi and call on Everny to jump in. The temple is, after all, only a $2 ride away. Soon we're passing through the picturesque mountains on the north edge of Ruyuan. Then we reach an intersection where a wide road branches left toward a high mountain that backdrops the temple itself. As we approach the temple main gate, I notice a cluster of new buildings that sit on the hill behind a high wall on our left. It is a Zen nunnery, recently rebuilt and with a gleaming new pagoda nestled on the mountain behind it. We proceed past the nunnery to the main gate of Yunmen Temple, a new big
paifang.
The high mountain, after which the temple is named (Cloud Gate), has eclipsed the late afternoon sun.

We send off the taxi and approach the entrance office of the temple. Normally, visitors must pay an admission fee, but Everny's lay ordination certificate at this temple, called a
guiyi zheng
, is a passport for us to enjoy the temple's hospitality. We walk past the temple's scenic front square and a large pond (the “Liberate Life Pond” found in many temples where monks release fish and turtles saved from the market) to enter the Heavenly Kings Hall. With an immediate right turn we reach the dining room, arriving just as dinner is being served.

As I mentioned above, Chinese monastics are full-fledged vegans. Despite this they usually seem in ruddy health. Chinese temple food is usually good and satisfying. Vegetables dominate, but protein in the form of tofu, legumes, and gluten dishes are plentiful. They also offer a
zhuchi,
the foundational starchy dish that accompanies every Chinese meal. In the north of China, noodles and bread made from wheat or millet serve this purpose, while in the south of China, rice plays this starchy role. Still, Chinese monastic diets are not always low fat, since a lot of oil is typically used for cooking.

After dinner, we arrange for our guestrooms in the men's and women's guest quarters. Then Everny wants to pay her respects at the burial monument of Foyuan, the late abbot of the temple who was a disciple
of Empty Cloud. He's the same person who bravely saved the remains of Zen's Sixth Ancestor Huineng from destruction during the Cultural Revolution. We climb the hill behind the guesthouse to light incense and bow before Foyuan's photo that sits before his stupa (monument). As the unusual heat of the autumn day starts to subside, Everny shows me some of the other old stupas that mark the lives of famous abbots and monks. We then walk down the hill from these burial sites and go up a separate wide path toward an area nestled at the base of Cloud Gate Mountain, a place lushly surrounded with timber bamboo. On the hill high to our left is a meditation hall. To our right the bamboo droops over ornamental ponds populated with fish and turtles. In the midst of the forest we arrive at a memorial hall dedicated to Empty Cloud. No sooner do we arrive than an old monk from the temple appears whom Everny recognizes and greets. He's carrying a big bag of peanuts and immediately starts scooping them into our hands under a beaming, nearly toothless grin. After filling our hands with peanuts he reaches into his bag to scoop out more and try to pile them on us. We jump back to keep him from stacking more peanuts on our already-full hands, and with a toothless cackle he swirls around and dances down the path we've just come up. We stuff our pockets full of peanuts, then Everny circumambulates Empty Cloud's stupa before we climb the steps to its entrance. About twenty-five feet square, it's a traditional style Chinese hall decorated in a subdued fashion, suitable for the crypt of China's most famous modern-era Buddhist teacher. In front of the hall we encounter two monks sitting in arm chairs to the left of the main door of the shrine. They seem to be shooting the breeze, talking a little animatedly about some other monk and some incident in the temple. After we have paid our respects and emerge from the small hall, Everny pauses, staring at the monks. As I walk away, I hear her criticizing them for what is to her unseemly behavior. They've been talking loudly about mundane worldly matters around Empty Cloud's shrine, a place, she says, that should remain quiet and peaceful out of respect. I'm a little shocked by this. Here's a lay woman criticizing some home-leavers. I look around and notice that they look as shocked as I am, and they immediately fall into a sullen silence. Everny is obviously very devout and takes her religion seriously. The tone of her voice toward the monks is highly critical, leaving no room for any face-saving excuses for their behavior.

I'm pretty surprised at Everny's boldness in criticizing the monks. I'm acutely aware that I would not have the courage to speak up about the monks' behavior as she did, especially as a foreigner. Anyway, at least they were sitting outside and not inside Empty Cloud's shrine as they chatted away. I remember an experience I had long ago when I was in Japan. On one occasion I visited the shrine of a very famous monk named Dogen at Eiheiji Temple near Japan's North Sea. Dogen is credited to be the founder of a line of Zen that flourished in Japan and then spread to America and other countries. His memorial shrine sits on a mountain outcropping at the back of Eiheiji Temple. I well knew, when I visited the place, about the honor his memory commands in Japanese and American Zen circles. So I was quite shocked when I first looked past a wooden guardrail at the front of his burial shrine, a place where signs said KEEP OUT to commoners like me, to see a group of resident Japanese monks horsing around inside. One was balancing a long pole on his finger and running back and forth in front of the altar, trying keep it upright in the air. Others were laughing and talking. Some Japanese lay Buddhists, standing outside the guardrail along with me, stood with shock on their faces at the monks' behavior. Was what they were doing some strange object lesson, something like the “natural” monk's behavior with the Buddha statues at Mazu's temple? That would be a generous interpretation.

Everny and I stroll down the mountain on a different path than the one we came up on. As we pass the other side of the ornamental ponds, I spy the old monk we encountered before, a broad smile on his face, standing beneath the tall bamboo, happily tossing peanuts to the fish and turtles of the murky ponds. Night begins to fall. I tell Everny that I'll be returning to Shaoguan early the next day, so we say our good-byes.

The next morning, I get up with the sun, brush my teeth, and make my way to the temple gate. The guard tells me that a bus passes every fifteen minutes or so at the main road, so I walk down the road past the nunnery and position myself at the intersection where the temple's approach road branches from the main highway.

After five minutes or so, no bus has come. A motorcyclist going my way appears and glances at me as he goes by. Suddenly he slows down and pulls over. I have only a small backpack with me, so riding on the rear of a motorbike would be no problem. Within a few moments we agree
on a price for a ride to Ruyuan City, about fifty cents, and a moment later I'm holding onto my hat as we speed through the countryside.

An hour or so later I've managed to return to Shaoguan by bus, and I go directly to buy a ticket for the night train heading north. In the ticket hall there is a huge bulletin board with all the trains listed by departure time and the stops they visit. After some searching, I find there's only one train that travels to my destination, Nanchang City, five hundred miles away, and it doesn't go there directly, instead passing through intermediate and out-of-the-way places. The train departs at nine in the evening and arrives at Nanchang early the next morning. Without a better option, I get in line and buy a ticket, then go out and hop on the back of a motorcycle taxi to return to my hotel. After a breakfast of instant oatmeal mixed with nuts and dried fruit and a brewed coffee, I check out and leave my bag with the desk. Grabbing another motorbike taxi to the country bus terminal, within a half hour I board a bus traveling to Ren Hua County, the location of Danxia Mountain and Separate Transmission Temple.

CHINA'S GEOGRAPHY IS quite different from the geography of North America. In the United States, traveling from west to east, the mountains, valleys, deserts, and plains are pretty well-defined. For example, traveling from San Francisco to New York, there'd be a valley (Sacramento), mountains (the Sierras), desert (Nevada/Utah), mountains again (the Rockies), the Midwest plain, mountains again (the Appalachians), and after some hills and rolling country you'd reach New York. In China, the mountains and hills are far less orderly. Aside from certain places like the “northern plain,” an area stretching south from Beijing, mountains and valleys occur much more at random, especially in the south of the country. The same goes for unusual geographical features. Danxia Mountain is just such an unusually featured place. Located near agricultural areas in the south, Danxia Mountain is composed of a group of fantastic wind- and water-carved peaks and bluffs. A wide area there is now set aside as a recreational nature preserve, inaccessible to automobiles. At its center is a series of hiking trails that visit various strange rock formations and historic places. One such place is the temple I'll visit today.

“When you go there, you'll understand better about Danxia Tianran's personality,” Everny had told me.

Traveling northeast out of Shaoguan, we follow the river and soon break into open agricultural land. Here again are small farms common to Southern China composed of rice paddies, vegetable gardens, banana palms, and lychee. The bus stops periodically to let passengers get off and on along the way. Interspersed with the small farms, there is the usual collection of motorcycle and tire repair shops, brick and gravel piles, small cement factories, and murky ponds. Anywhere a body of water may be large enough to support aquatic life, there's usually a casual angler trying his luck.

Before long there are some startling-looking mountains in the distance. They rise abruptly from the earth and are oddly flat on top, a little like the mountain mesas of the American Southwest.

Within an hour, the bus travels the thirty miles that separate Shaoguan from Renhua. We've barely entered the town when a wide avenue opens to our left that leads to a huge, blockade-like gate, the entrance to the Danxia recreational area. The bus lets us off, and I walk toward the huge edifice. I buy an admission ticket at the nearly deserted ticket building at the side of the street. Passing through one of many rows of deserted turnstiles, I come to a waiting area empty except for a few seated old women. They're delighted to see a foreigner come along and smile big toothless grins at me as I sit to wait for one of the small buses that ferry people into the park.

Presently, a man appears who tells us all to come with him. He's a driver, and soon we are bumping our way along the road into the mountains in an electric touring car, a sort of long golf cart with five rows of seats. The car stops at an intersection that appears to branch to a village. The old ladies jump out and give me a friendly smile and a wave as I continue alone into the park.

I examine my ticket. It is a high-quality, plastic affair adorned with the photo of an odd, very phallic pinnacle rock formation. I'm not sure what to make of the picture. A descriptive brochure I got with the ticket explains how Danxia Mountain was considered a candidate to be a World Heritage site by UNESCO, though apparently this did not ever come to pass. (Note that in China the word
mountain
can be ambiguously either singular or plural, and Danxia Mountain, like many other such places, is actually composed of many separate mountains.)