Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud. Sun Shuyun

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СКАЧАТЬ I had food, clothes, a roof over my head. I survived. Life improved after the revolution.’

      ‘But how about everything that happened to the monasteries and the monks? Was that not suffering?’

      ‘We went through many painful things. But the Buddha says suffering is a fact of life. It depends on how we look at it. To me, not to have anything to eat is suffering. I haven’t starved since I became a monk, so I can’t say I have suffered.’

      That night in my hotel room, I could see the pagoda from my window. Mr Duan must be doing his meditation and saying his prayer now, I thought. Before we parted, I had asked him what he prayed for. ‘To be a monk again in my next life,’ he said. I had meant to ask him about Xuanzang and his teachings and find out what exactly were the doctrines he went to India to find. I did not. But Duan’s life had given me something more to think about. Monasteries would be destroyed, but he had a shrine inside himself which was inviolate. In his room, he prayed silently, holding fast to his belief, living by it, unperturbed by all that happened to him. For him, the whole world is a meditation hall, where he put the teaching of the Buddha into ultimate practice. In my eyes, he was a real monk, though a monk without a robe.

      I went back to the monastery the next day to have a closer look at it. It was hard to appreciate that what I saw was only the cemetery of the original community. There was still a group of stupas to the right of the pagoda. Originally stupas were built to house the ashes and bones of the Buddha. But gradually over the centuries, they were devoted to lesser and lesser beings, but still of great distinction: the masters who had come closest to enlightenment, the heads of Buddhist sects, the abbots and revered monks of the monasteries. Stupas are supposed not only to commemorate the departed but also to inspire future generations. They are distinguishable by their size but above all by the number of tiers on the spires above the base, with the highest being nine for the Buddha himself. According to my guidebook, Xuanzang’s relic stupa was in a separate monastery built specifically for it. The stupas here were all very similar except for one in the shape of a truncated obelisk standing on a lotus flower. The monk’s name, Pu Ci, was carved on one side, while the others bore the date of dedication and decorative flowers. It was delicately made. But there were no tiers, suggesting someone of lowly status. And unlike all the others, there was no epitaph giving information about the deceased. I was wondering what this stupa was doing here in this distinguished company when a young monk walked by. I stopped him and asked if he could tell me anything about Pu Ci.

      ‘You don’t know about him?’ he retorted. Then he seemed to consider something. ‘But then, why should you, I suppose? He saved us. Without him, I would not be here today. The Big Wild Goose Pagoda would have been just for you tourists. He was a brave man, a true Buddhist.’

      I must have looked as puzzled as I felt, when he launched into an explanation of how the government had decreed in 1982 that any monastery with no monks in residence by the end of the Cultural Revolution would be used for public purposes. ‘Pu Ci managed to stay on here, so the Big Wild Goose Pagoda is still a monastery. Without him, it would have been turned into a park or a garden. But he suffered for it.’

      If Duan had suffered so much, I could not bear to think what this monk must have gone through.

      The young monk said that Pu Ci was the only one who wore his robe throughout the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards ordered him not to but he simply ignored them. They organized struggle meetings in the shrine hall and made him kneel on the floor and confess his motives for carrying on his ‘feudal practices’. He refused to say a word. What was there to say? He had been a monk for so many years and the robe was like his skin. Outraged by his silence, the Red Guards started beating him. Every time they hit him, he uttered the name of Amitabha. They did not know what to do with him. He was locked up to repent but he just meditated all the time. They thought he was mad so eventually they left him alone. I asked how he would have dealt with the blows raining down on him?

      ‘He probably would think of one of the ten attributes of a Bodhisattva. It is called khanti, meaning patient endurance of suffering inflicted upon oneself by others and forbearance for their wrongs. There are lots of stories about khanti in the scriptures and it is one of the qualities that monks try to cultivate. And he obviously achieved it,’ said the young monk humbly.

      I remembered one of the old priests at the struggle meetings in my childhood. I could not forget how serene he was. Now I understood what kept him so calm when he was spat on, when he was made to kneel on broken glass. Deep inside, he would have prayed not for the stilling of his pain but for the heart to conquer it. He perhaps would think that the spit was raindrops and they would dry up when the sun came out. Or would he think that the attacks on him might be the result of his bad karma? If so, they were the outcome of his own actions and he should not harbour bitterness towards his attackers. He was in a different world from us, in the midst of pain, yet above it.

      I looked at the stupa again, next to the giant Big Wild Goose Pagoda, not even the size of its foundation. Dappled sunshine fell on it through the thick pine trees. I stared at it, thinking of the story I had just heard. I had the sensation that the stupa was expanding, billowing out into a larger dimension, until it was huge. The Big Wild Goose Pagoda embodied Xuanzang’s spirit, and the Buddhism he disseminated. It could still be a Buddhist institution carrying on the propagation – because of this ordinary monk. He did not despair perhaps because of a simple belief: if the monks were alive, Buddhism would live on, despite the total destruction of monasteries, statues and scriptures. Xuanzang built the pagoda, Pu Ci preserved it. The spirit they stood for, the faith that sustained them, the spreading of the Dharma they carried out determinedly – the hope of Chinese Buddhism.

      But the young monk said there were monks who totally despaired. He showed me a stupa next to Pu Ci’s, which looked no different from the half dozen standing there, but with an inscription longer than any of the others. It read as follows:

      Lang Zhao, Secretary of the Xian Buddhist Association, was born in 1893 into a wealthy family in northeastern China, came to Xian and took vows at the age of eighteen; abbot of Wolong Monastery; made donations for the aeroplane that was used to fight against the Americans and supported the Korean people; did farming and built a commune for monks and nuns who lived on their own products and wore their own woven cloth; suffered maltreatment during the Cultural Revolution in 1966 and took his own life on August 18 of that year, at the age of seventy-two, after fifty-five years as a monk.

      There is something strange about this – it simply is not how a Buddhist master’s epitaph usually reads. It seems only to refer to his patriotism, not to his contributions to Buddhism. But what I found even more bewildering is the remark I have italicized near the end: he actually committed suicide – a cardinal sin, a capital offence in Buddhism. Why did he do it?

      The first rule of Buddhism is not to kill any living creature, not to take one’s own life, and not to help with any killing. ‘Rare is birth as a human being. Hard is the life of mortals. Do not let slip this opportunity,’ is the advice of the Buddha. I had read that the Vinaya, the Buddhist code of conduct, forbids monks to commit suicide, in any form and for any reason. Those who do forfeit the possibility of a good rebirth, let alone that of entering the Western Paradise. What made Lang Zhao do it?

      The young monk explained. Lang Zhao was a very good man. He left home out of compassion for the poor, searching for a way to end suffering. He supported the Party for the same reason – to bring about a better life for millions of Chinese. He raised money for ‘Chinese Buddhist’ – the fighter plane that Buddhists throughout China had been asked to contribute to the Korean War effort – and he went to the front line to comfort the troops. He tried hard to help the Party realize the Communist ideal of ‘paradise on earth’. He was rewarded: he was made the head of the Xian Buddhist Association, the most senior monk in the city.

      But for all his efforts, СКАЧАТЬ