Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud. Sun Shuyun

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СКАЧАТЬ threats of punishment. It was just the kind of hectic scene which Duan must have become a monk to get away from. I asked an old lady who was busy chatting with her neighbour and she said Mr Duan was meditating. She was his wife. Did I mind waiting? Or could I come back in an hour?

      I asked her if she knew the monastery well. ‘My family has been living here for almost a hundred years,’ she said, ‘and I am married to one of its monks.’ We went off and sat on a bench. She pointed to the dusty square in front of the monastery and the fields in the distance. ‘All this area used to be the monastery’s land. We leased it from them and gave them grain as rent after the harvest. The monks were really kind – they let us use their mills for free and take water from their well. There weren’t many of them, only six or seven.’

      The land became the villagers’ in the Land Reform of 1950. Monasteries used to be among the biggest landowners in China and so were the first targets. Monks were told to give up their ‘parasitic’ life and work just like everyone else, growing what they ate and weaving what they wore. Mrs Duan found the turn of events puzzling. ‘Their job was to pray, meditate and perform ceremonies for the dead and the living. How could they know about growing soya beans?’ She shook her head. ‘We wanted to help them, but the village Party Secretary told us we were masters of the new China and shouldn’t allow ourselves to be exploited by them any more.’

      I asked Mrs Duan what happened to the monks. She said that her husband would know more about it. He should have finished his midday meditation. ‘Eight hours a day he does it. Three in the morning, two around now and three in the evening. He might just as well be in another world. But it’s what keeps him going,’ she sighed.

      Just then I saw a man walking slowly towards us from across the street. I told Mrs Duan her husband was coming. She looked over her shoulder. ‘Yes, that’s my old man.’ She turned back to me. ‘How did you know it was him? Have you seen him before or seen his picture?’ I didn’t know what to say, but I just knew it was him. He was thin, even stick-like. Behind a pair of dirty glasses were sunken eyes in a wizened face, and his straggling hair came down to his neck. He had on a threadbare blue Mao suit, faded from what must have been hundreds of washings, and an ancient pair of soldier’s shoes, which he wore without socks. He looked as if he were sleepwalking – perhaps he was still meditating. ‘Come on, hurry up!’ his wife shouted. ‘This lady wants to talk to you about Xuanzang and the monastery.’

      He ambled up to us murmuring, ‘I am a sinner. I am a sinner. What is there to talk about?’ As we walked back to their house, I asked him if he would tell me about his meditation.

      ‘He’s been doing it for thirty years,’ Mrs Duan said petulantly, pulling at Duan’s sleeve until he sat down next to her. ‘Nothing distracts him. Even if a bolt of lightning dropped on his head he still wouldn’t move.’

      ‘She’s exaggerating,’ Mr Duan said, looking at his wife fondly. ‘I am just a worldly man distracted by mundane thoughts. So you want to know about Xuanzang?’ He paused, then continued, his voice becoming more animated at the sound of the monk’s name. ‘Now there was a great man. He was above it all. When I worked in the monastery I used to walk around the pagoda whenever I had problems. But really, they were so trivial. Master Xuanzang was very brave to go on that journey, risking his life. He never gave up, he came back with the sutras. All I have to do is to sit and meditate in a comfortable room – I don’t call that difficult.’

      I told him I was surprised that he loved the monastery so much, yet he had given it up and returned to secular life.

      ‘It is a long story. You are too young to understand,’ Duan said, his voice suddenly sombre.

      After the Land Reform in 1950, the monasteries were left with very little land, barely enough for the monks to live on. Donations and fees for religious rituals – a considerable proportion of the monastic income in the old days – were drying up. Monks were warned against ‘making a business out of superstition’. In a monastery in northeastern China they were forced to put up this poster:

      Do not think that through the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas you can obtain good fortune, cure disease or avoid disaster. No matter how big a donation you make, they cannot grant you such requests. Keep your good money for buying patriotic bonds and you can create infinite happiness for society.

      Hunger made many monks return to secular life. By 1958, nine years after the revolution, ninety per cent of Chinese monks and nuns had left their monasteries for the world outside, or had died of starvation. The abbot of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda was forced to leave the monastery and had to make a living selling coal from a handcart. Duan was an orphan and had nowhere to go, so he stayed on where he was, barely surviving on cornflour porridge and vegetable leaves.

      His old monastery was shut down in the 1960s and the government Religious Bureau assigned him to the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. There were three other monks and also four cadres from the Xian Municipal Cultural Bureau, ostensibly to protect the pagoda but also to keep an eye on the monks. They forbade them to shave their heads, wear their robes, make offerings to the Buddha and Bodhisattvas, or conduct the morning and evening services in the shrine hall. In fact the shrine hall could be used only for political study sessions or struggle meetings. They did allow the monks to say prayers in their own rooms, but not too loudly – that would disturb other people working in the monastery.

      Normal religious life was resumed, however, when there were foreign Buddhist delegations. Buddhism helped China to develop friendly foreign relations, especially with Japan, Sri Lanka, Burma, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. The monks’ presence would show that the Communist Party, though not religious itself, respected religious freedom for its people. When there was an important visit, the cadres would collect monks from all over Xian to simulate the appearance of a functioning monastery. The monks were carefully rehearsed in the questions that might be asked.

      Duan was even trained at the Chinese Buddhist Seminary in Beijing to answer every kind of question. ‘That was when I learned a lot about Xuanzang and how important he is, not just for us monks, but for Buddhists throughout Asia,’ he remembered. ‘They told us Master Xuanzang was a trump card, very important. In fact he was our only card. We were not allowed to talk about anything but him. I guess there was nothing to say about our religious observance – we did not have any. So all we could do was to show the delegates the sutras that Xuanzang translated, which we were not allowed to read. Then we brought them to the pagoda and told them how we remembered the great man on his anniversary with special ceremonies – which of course we could not hold. Before they left, we gave them a portrait of Xuanzang from a rubbing and told them how we were carrying forward his great legacy. All the time Party officials watched us. Then the delegation left, convinced of our freedom of worship, and we returned to our so-called normal life.’

      Much of Duan’s life was taken up by relentless political studies. ‘We were asked to surrender our black heart in exchange for a red heart faithful to the Communist Party,’ Duan said. Week after week, sometimes for months on end, they studied the works of Mao and editorials in the People’s Daily. Then they had to hand in reports of what they learned from their studies.

      I asked how much he had really taken on board.

      ‘A lot of it was beyond me,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t see why we should spend weeks studying the new marriage law. It had absolutely nothing to do with us. Perhaps they knew all along we were going to be sent home and get married so it would do us good to know what our rights were as husbands.’ He gave an awkward laugh.

      Was there a lot of pressure for him to marry?

      ‘Plenty,’ he sighed. ‘Sometimes monks and nuns were put in a room together and were told they couldn’t leave until they agreed to marry.’ There was СКАЧАТЬ