Tracking Bodhidharma (12 page)

The Signless Precepts ordination ceremony Huineng conducted was likely performed outside during daytime, because the number of people taking part seems to have been very large indeed. Chinese historians have pointed out that such large public ordination ceremonies were fairly common in ancient times, with participants numbering in the thousands. The Platform Sutra's ceremony was apparently just such a grand convocation.

As important as the Platform Sutra is to Chinese Zen, I've found that properly translating that work into English is problematic. Translations of this “sutra” have long suffered from this problem. The tricky part is translating words like
signless,
a key word that echoes the origins of Zen in Buddha's legendary teaching at Vulture Peak, in a way that makes sense to Westerners while remaining true to the original meaning. Many translators use the term
formless
instead of
signless.
But I think the word
formless
falls short, since it implies that there is something that has no form. Signlessness, on the other hand, is what is found in things just as they are.

THE SHAOGUAN BUS STATION lies on the east side of the Zhe River in downtown Shaoguan City. I emerge into the clear fall day and walk down the steps to the boulevard next to the river. There I hail a taxi to travel the six miles or so to Nanhua Temple, outside the city's southeast corner. The first indication of the temple is a broad cement plaza that sits in front of its entrance gate. I direct my taxi past the front of the plaza and then to turn left on a small road that passes some shops selling giant sticks of incense and souvenirs for the many pilgrims who come here. The taxi lets me out by an electronic gate where the attendant on the other side, seeing me with luggage, pushes the button to open the apparatus. He then invites me to come into the guardhouse for a cup of tea. While he calls the monk in charge, named Guo Zhi (pronounced
Guo-jer
), I drink Iron Kwan Yin tea and watch flashy scenes of Chinese opera on the guardhouse TV set. Presently a monk appears and motions me to follow him. A short distance away through a grove of trees and across a large pond rests the newly completed Nanhua Temple Guesthouse. It is a big building indeed and built in traditional Chinese architectural style, with a paved courtyard surrounded on three sides by imposing wings of the building.

Nanhua Temple was established in the year 502. It existed before Huineng came here and gained fame as a Zen master. The place still has a special position of importance in Bodhidharma's tradition. Moreover, the place promises to reveal, in the next few days, an important aspect of Emperor Wu's influence on Chinese culture. I've arrived in time for the annual Water and Land Festival, a traditional event directly traced to Emperor Wu and with important implications for understanding the object of my trip.

I'm led to my accommodations. Set amid the quiet trees of a hill near
Nanhua Temple, the guesthouse is a comfortable if somewhat overbearing building. But the environment around the place is serene, broken only by occasional construction noises nearby where a new guest meditation hall is in the making. A long covered walkway stretches up the hill through the trees leading to the temple proper.

My guide Guo Zhi doesn't seem too overjoyed to see me. I don't know if this is just his personality or whether he's simply bored with dealing with visitors. At China's most famous temples, there's an endless stream of tourists showing up to disrupt the spiritual practice of the occupants. Now, while preparations for the Water and Land Festival are in full swing, it's especially understandable that he may be impatient. Everyone is probably overworked and stressed out, even here at a Zen temple.

Emperor Wu, the same emperor famous for meeting Bodhidharma, created the Water and Land Ceremony that is at the heart of the festival. Most Zen students know that Wu built many Buddhist temples and promoted Buddhist scriptural study, but the full impact Emperor Wu had on Chinese history is still not well-known. This important part of Bodhidharma's story offers colorful sights and sounds that stretch from Emperor Wu's time until today.

Chinese Buddhist tradition says that Emperor Wu started the Water and Land Ceremony after having a dream in which a monk advised him to call on spirits in the higher realms to assist those who suffer in the lower realms of existence. At the emperor's request, the ceremony was designed by a monk named Baozhi, one of the most famous of Emperor Wu's Buddhist teachers. It was first held at Jinshan Temple, a very old temple near Zhenzhou City in Jiangsu Province, east of Nanjing. Jinshan Temple still exists and is very active today.

The ceremony is a highly elaborate and expensive undertaking in which Buddhist monks do prayers and rituals that beseech gods and bodhisattvas in the higher realms to journey into the lower realms to give succor to the inhabitants there. The Buddhist “Six Paths” of existence figure into the ceremony. Those paths, comprised of different realms of beings, include the (1) heavenly or godly realm, (2) the realm of asuras (highly evolved beings), (3) the human realm, (4) the animal realm, (5) the “hungry ghost” realm, and (6) the hell realm. Days of purifications, special offerings, and rituals lead up to the biggest ceremonies on the final day of the festival. That day, things get especially interesting.

Lots of people come to the temple to take part in the grand event or just to see the spectacle. Previously when I've witnessed this ceremony in China, I've noticed people from the lay Buddhist community taking an active support role for the proceedings, performing all types of services like preparing vegetarian banquets, making decorations and floats for a parade, playing music, and so on. Guo Zhi tells me that the main ceremonies will occur tomorrow. Yet many activities are already under way.

Guo Zhi leaves me to my own devices with instructions about where and how to join other lay people for meals at the temple dining hall. He promises to give me a tour later, but right now he's preoccupied with other jobs.

Flagship temples like Nanhua, in relatively rich Southern China don't lack financial support. Rich patrons who have made fortunes in export trading have lavished funds on some of them, and Nanhua, due to the fame of the Sixth Ancestor, may be the richest temple in all of China. The new guesthouse suggests this. With more than two hundred rooms, it is the size of a big hotel. Yet even during the current big celebration there are not more than a handful of people staying here. Most of the crowds of people at the temple are local day-trippers.

I settle into my new digs and pull out a bag of ground coffee beans. I'm surprised to find that my guesthouse room is new and equipped with a Western bath and new furniture. It's hardly different from a hotel room, with two comfortable beds instead of the usual four or more typical of Chinese monastery guestrooms. Most amazing, the room has an Internet connection. I spend a half hour or so trying to get connected, eventually appealing to the building attendant to help me. She claims it's all working fine, but finally she realizes that she's turned off the server in a different part of the building.

An hour or so later, Guo Zhi returns and offers to give me a tour of the temple. I'm interested to see what's new, so we set off.

Nanhua Temple holds perhaps the most sacred relic of Chinese Zen, the “True Body” of the Sixth Ancestor himself. It's traditional for devout Buddhists upon arriving at the temple to first go to the hall of the Sixth Ancestor at the rear of the temple and bow to him before going back to the central Buddha Hall and bowing to the Buddha or any other statues. Even on a normal day, the temple is crowded with visitors from near
and far, but special occasions like this make the crowds exceptional. Not that many foreigners come to Nanhua, so I get the requisite number of stares from people who hardly ever see a
lao wai
, literally “old outsider.” (Don't get the wrong idea from these words. The word
old
in China is always meant as a compliment, a sort of honorific that is analogous to the word
honored
.)

I'm happy to note that the statue of Ji Gong (I mentioned this figure during my visit to Hualin Temple) remains in front of one of the windows inside the Buddha Hall. He's still showing up late for morning services! I manage a surreptitious photo in violation of the sign against photo taking.

Guo Zhi tells me that the temple abbot won't be able to meet me, as he is caught up in activities related to the ceremonies at hand. But I'm happy that I'm offered a chance to meet the temple superintendant, a young monk named Fa Qi (pronounced
Fa-chee
) at a reception room in the new Zen Academy located on the temple grounds. Such academies are all over China, both connected and unconnected to major temples. It's not clear exactly what the curriculum is in these places. Some, like the one at Cypress Grove Temple in North China, publish books of old Zen records, or at least they used to before the Internet became the preferred medium for disseminating Buddhism in the country.

The meeting will be first thing the next morning, so I spend some time writing and researching from the Chinese Internet.

The Chinese Buddhist Internet is a lively place with thousands of related Web sites and galaxies of information about events, Buddhist history, scholarly papers, sutras, and an array of related information. If someone invents high-quality automatic translation software for Chinese to English, then Western practitioners are in for a shock about how big the Buddhist electronic community in China really is and what a vast information ocean it offers.

The next morning Fa Qi welcomes me very warmly, and I can see he's a different sort than Guo Zhi. On the table in the reception room, there is a traditional Chinese tea set up, a slotted bamboo tea basin, on which sits a Yixing (pronounced
Yee-sing
) tea pot and two cups. Yixing tea pots are made with special clay from the city of Yixing in Jiangsu Province. Though plain and unglazed, when properly fired this clay is ideal for making tea pots because it retains heat very well. The material
is also slightly porous, and if a pot is used for a long time to brew one type of tea, the residue in the clay can be used to brew tea even if you have run out of tea leaves.

Fa Qi draws hot water from an electric water bottle and performs his tea
kong fu
, the traditional way of pouring tea for a guest. He is about thirty-something years old, well-spoken, and obviously well-educated. I give him a short introduction about my purposes on this trip. He then goes into a fairly long recitation about the role of Nanhua Temple in Chinese Buddhism, the importance of the Sixth Ancestor, and how this place is “representative” of the essence of Chinese Buddhism. At one point he says that in the Chinese Buddhist world there are still very many people who are hazy on this issue. I reveal some surprise at this idea and relate how in the first college class I ever had on the subject of Chinese Buddhism, the main thing taught was the importance of the Sixth Ancestor Huineng. I also say that it's my impression that North American practitioners of Zen would be unanimous in recognizing the importance of Huineng in the tradition. At some point he realizes that I didn't just fall off the rice wagon, and he pauses for a thoughtful moment. Then he says, “During the Cultural Revolution, this tradition was completely wiped out. Now it's fallen to us, the younger generation, to find whatever pieces are left and put the tradition back together. You can say we're still
”mo shitou guo be,“
(literally, ”probing the rocks to cross the river”).

I sympathize with his problem. I once met a famous Buddhist master named Tiguang (“Body of Light”) who lived at the ancient Dharma seat of Zen Master Qingyuan (Japanese: Seigen; died in 740), one of the main students of Huineng. I asked him, “Wasn't the persecution of Buddhism during the Cultural Revolution like that that occurred in the Northern Zhou dynasty, or during the suppression that occurred in the late Tang dynasty?”

“Not the same!” he glowered. “Back then there was not the complete destruction of the religion. During the Cultural Revolution, everything was destroyed, and all monks and nuns were laicized. They didn't just come once to the temple and close it down. They repeatedly came and destroyed everything they could lay their hands on. Nothing like that had ever happened before.”

At Nanhua Temple, the destruction was like what Master Tiguang
described to me. However, through courage and luck, certain temple treasures were saved. The “True Body” of the Sixth Ancestor, according to a story I've heard a few times, was dragged through the streets of nearby Shaoguan City by the Red Guards, who decried it as a fake. Someone threw rocks that hit the lacquered body, breaking off a piece of its shoulder and damaging its stomach. A piece of bone was exposed. This scared even the Red Guards, who realized that this was an actual body that had apparently remained intact for fifteen centuries. Even they were superstitious about what might happen for damaging a real corpse, so they dragged it back to the temple and left it there. Secretly, a senior monk named Foyuan retrieved the body and hid it in a cave on the mountain behind Nanhua Temple. After the Cultural Revolution had passed, the body, along with the hidden lacquered bodies of two other historic abbots of the temple, were again brought out and put back on public display.

Perhaps the fact that Chairman Mao had once praised the Sixth Ancestor Huineng influenced the Red Guards' decision to not destroy the body. According to old records, Huineng lived among and highly praised the common people. Chairman Mao once quoted Huineng as having taught a leftish-sounding teaching: “Among the lowest people is the highest wisdom.” (
) Foyuan and other monks saved other famous Nanhua Temple relics as well. Among them was a large sign over the monk's dining hall that was famously painted by “China's Shakespeare,” a Song dynasty poet-statesman named Su Dongpo, about eight hundred years ago. A monk quick-wittedly retrieved the sign when the Red Guards came, saving it by using it as a bed board under his thin mattress during those times of chaos.