Tracking Bodhidharma (9 page)

Elderly Chinese always have stories from the war, and Jimmy is no exception. But while many stories from the war are tinged with regret and bitterness, Jimmy seems happy that his difficulties gave him a deeper insight into how he should live his life.

He tells me that his father worked for a British firm during the 1930s and worked his way up to became a branch manager for the company in Tianjin, a big port city on the coast not far from Beijing. In 1931, renegade Japanese officers faked an attack on a Japanese mining railroad in Manchuria (The Mukden Incident) and used this as an excuse to invade Manchuria without authorization from the government in Tokyo. Six years after occupying Manchuria under these false pretenses, Japan invaded other parts of North China, including the city of Tianjin. That time left an indelible impression on Jimmy.

The Japanese army confiscated virtually all the food grown around Tianjin. Food prices skyrocketed, and starvation soon spread. Jimmy's father made a good salary for his day, but it still only paid for a minimal existence when food prices soared. Only seven years old, Jimmy saw starved bodies on the street every day. The suffering made a deep impression on him. In the midst of such hardship, Jimmy's father still concentrated on teaching Jimmy to speak English. When the war ended in 1945, it took months for Kuomintang troops to reach Tianjin. American troops, however, landed in Tianjin almost immediately and were warmly greeted as liberators. Jimmy's dad soon got a job as an interpreter for the American forces.

Twenty years later, during the Cutural Revolution, Jimmy suffered due to his father's previous relationship with foreigners. Well-educated and fluent in English, he was designated one of the “stinking ninth category” and sent down to the countryside to be “re-educated” with the peasantry. Buddhist Jimmy took this in stride.

“I liked working with the farmers. They were very nice. I liked planting vegetables and growing things. But many people from the city, especially young people, hated farming and couldn't wait to return to their homes. They especially hated southern rice farming, where they were forced to wade in deep mud and endure parasitic bites.

“All during that time, of course, I didn't dare say that I was a Buddhist believer. All religions were being persecuted, not just Buddhism. We had to be quiet until the reforms came along in 1978 under Deng Xiaoping.

“When I was eleven years old, during the Japanese occupation, my whole family took lay Buddhist vows, and we all became vegetarians. We just all went down to the local temple and took lay vows and then stopped eating meat. I think the experience of the war brought my parents to this step. At that time the Japanese had set up a phony Buddhist Association that promoted their control over Buddhist practice. But we, like everyone else, knew that the Japanese organization was phony, and we wouldn't have anything to do with them. The temple we went to was run by an old Chinese monk we'd known a long time.

“After the Cultural Revolution, I studied many Buddhist scriptures and more or less understood them. However I never really studied the Shurangama Sutra. In the 1980s I communicated with my Buddhist teacher Dharma Master Xuan Hua, who was then in the United States. He said that of all the sutras, the most important was the Shurangama Sutra. Of all the sutras, it was the one I really didn't understand, but the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas [in Ukiah, California] gave me a copy of this sutra in English, and I found that although I couldn't understand the Chinese version, the English version was very clear. I finally understood this sutra, and oh, it was like the whole universe had revealed itself to me! When I finally understood that sutra, I felt like the luckiest person on the planet!

“In the 1980s, I got a job as an interpreter with the United Nations, and this allowed me to travel to places like South Africa. Have you been there? In the city of Durban, there's a big population from India and many people are vegetarians. Out of a population of two hundred thousand people, about seventy thousand are vegetarians!”

After lunch Jimmy invites me to come to his office at nearby Hai Chuang (“Ocean Banner”) Temple. The temple grounds serve as a wooded park, and Jimmy does his translation work in a small office there. He also gives lectures on Buddhism to the local community.

Inside his sparse office, he uncovers a large pile of red books and hands me one.

“Here is the Shurangama Sutra, I published these books myself.” It's nice to see someone like Jimmy living his life in relative freedom and ease after so many tribulations. The government leaves people like him alone, letting him practice a religion that doesn't hold any political threat.

After a short visit, I return to my hotel.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING I walk to Hualin Temple to do some more exploration on my own. In the early morning light, a thick cloud of smoke hangs over the temple courtyard, generated from countless bundles of flaming incense. I slip past the haze to stop in front of a little stand selling bricks within the temple grounds. The bricks will be used to build the new Buddha Hall planned for construction when surrounding apartments are torn down. For ten yuan, about a buck fifty, you can write your name in ink on one of the bricks along with a bit of text that will bring you good luck. Actually, you only get half a brick's surface to write on and must pay twenty for the whole thing. Examples of various auspicious sayings you can copy from are helpfully offered on a piece of paper. I pull out fifty yuan and write a few Chinese characters on the brick. My Chinese calligraphy is primitive, but the people selling the bricks, like Chinese people everywhere, have a bottomless reservoir of polite good will, and so they say, “Oh, how beautiful.” This is, of course, utter nonsense.

I beat a retreat from the brick stand and continue my stroll around the temple. Nearby I enter a room open to the temple courtyard. Inside I find it is lined with small memorials for lay temple patrons that have died. A gentleman of about seventy years old sits doing calligraphy at a desk near the entrance. He greets me pleasantly, and I play the newcomer and ask him about Hualin Temple. As he explains the standard history of the place, I turn the conversation toward his personal involvement with Buddhism. “I'm a Buddhist believer,” he says. “When Chairman Mao was alive, I studied Marxism-Leninism. All of us intellectuals did that. But that doctrine was really a ‘fool-people-ism,' a ‘harm-people-ism.' We all studied it. But then eight or nine years ago, I retired from teaching at the university. A friend of mine had some books on Buddhism. He gave me some of them. These were old books from feudal times. We never
paid them any attention when Chairman Mao was alive. We thought those books were worthless, but such books gradually came back after Deng Xiaoping's reforms [in 1978]. These were religious books about Buddhism, Taoism, and other traditional teachings. The central authorities had suppressed the books, but they couldn't suppress people's belief in these things. They couldn't resist people's need for these teachings, people's demands for these teachings. The influence of these books on people was very great. They couldn't stop this influence.

“My grandfather was in the Kuomintang Army, so we had a lot of trouble. I tried to follow the correct political line, whatever it was. During the bad times, we first beat the landlords. Then later people would denounce each other, even their friends. Families were divided against themselves with brothers beating brothers and wives beating husbands. I beat people. I even beat my friends. We thought it was Marxism-Leninism, but really it was just ‘harm-people-ism' that we were doing. Sometimes it was even ‘kill-people-ism.'

“Mao was the emperor. Whatever he commanded, or what we thought he commanded, that's what we did. In ancient times the emperor was like a god to us Chinese, and Mao was no different. Whatever he said, that's what we did. We claimed it was scientific, but really it was just the same old thing. The emperor was giving commands. We were following them.

“Anyway, that's all behind us now. Now I study these Buddhist scriptures. Now, I'm retired. But I'm learning the history of this temple. We're reconstructing the history and making it available for people. People need to know their real history. Our ancestors from thousands of years ago laid down how people should behave toward one another. Buddhism explains how people should behave toward each other. We need to emphasize this now. After that time of trouble, people don't have anything left—just get more money! Get a better life! But after people get more money and get a better life, what do they do? What do they have? People need those old books to tell them how they should live their life, give it some real meaning—some real insight.”

The old scholar's story is not unusual in China. Even the Chinese government and the Communist leaders have proclaimed the need to build a “spiritual civilization,” to foster new moral values. But the spiritual civilization that China wants to foster today is blocked by corruption,
and that in turn is protected by a closed political system. That makes many people cynical and self-centered.

Can a society that always took orders from the emperor, from the center, ever embrace real democracy? Some think that if the people of China seize democracy, much good will naturally follow suit. But I think this view is simplistic and doesn't reach the real problem blocking China's progress.

Chinese people are smart, and they do understand the idea of democracy. What they don't have any real experience with, however, is federalism. Modern democracies operate with layers of representative government, like the states in the United States, cantons in Germany, or provinces in Canada. Local governments operate with their own set of laws outside central government control. The Chinese understand the idea of democracy, but the idea of “states' rights” is a completely alien concept in a country where the emperor's rule was absolute throughout the country. My Chinese friends are quite interested when I tell them how the federal government in the United States had to arrest Al Capone on tax-evasion charges, not murder. The U.S. federal government was not set up to prosecute criminal law, and the U.S. central government's greater role in local law enforcement is a relatively new phenomenon.

China is a big and diverse country, with countless local dialects and conflicting interests. Some form of federalism seems necessary to keep the place from flying apart politically. But as long as there is still an “emperor” running the country, it will never take its place among democratic nations.

I thank the old scholar for his time and make my way back toward the temple gate. Last night I invited my new friends, including Jimmy, Yaozhi, and Ruxing, to lunch at Grand Buddha Temple restaurant, and I have a few errands to do before we meet.

Around eleven o'clock, a taxi drops me at the temple restaurant. When I called Yaozhi and Ruxin and invited them last night, they weren't sure they could make it. So now I'm facing the Chinese “host's dilemma”—how much food should I order? In China, it's taken for granted that if the guest eats up all the food offered by a host, the host really loses face. It means the host didn't care enough about the guest to make sure there was enough food (or even worse—he or she's a cheapskate). If, on the other hand, there's food left over after the meal, it means the food
offered wasn't good enough to eat. Either way, the host is disgraced. Being a host in China is a no-win situation.

I'm only certain of me and two other people attending, but I order six dishes plus appetizers and noodles. You lose the least amount of face if there's so much food they couldn't possibly eat it all, and this is how the situation is usually handled. That's why so much food gets wasted in China, and attempts to change the country's wasteful culinary habits have not been very successful.

Just when I've got the food ordered and everything set, Mr. He the scholar arrives, and Jimmy Lin shows up right after him. Jimmy has brought another guest, a Mr. Chen, who works in the travel business and wants to meet me. I'm happy I ordered the extra food. A few minutes later Ruxin turns up. I start to get a little nervous.

As lunch starts, Jimmy Lin is already in fine form, regaling the table with stories about the Japanese occupation many years ago at Tianjin, about how he became a vegetarian during the occupation, and how Einstein was definitely a pacifist and a Buddhist his whole life. I'm not sure about the last bit, but I'm happy that Jimmy's enjoying himself and everyone is pulled into the conversation.

I compliment Mr. He on the impressive scholarship that went into his book. He and Ruxin talk about the fact that the Japanese academic community had to take up the slack in Buddhist studies for a long time (i.e., during the Cultural Revolution) when the mainland Chinese Buddhist academic world stopped working. Before World War II, China had many world-renowned scholars, most educated in famous Western universities like Harvard. Their names were household words in China. These illuminati included scholars like Hu Shi, Lin Yutang, and Tang Yongtong. Then things went south, and China's academic community was destroyed by politics. But since the 1980s, the pendulum of Chinese history scholarship has been quickly swinging back from Japan and the West toward China.

Then a new guest appears. A young woman enters the room and says “I'm sorry I'm so late.” She introduces herself as a friend of Jemmy's named Everny (she says it's a French name). I take a quick panicked look across the table and see that there's still quite a lot of food left, but things may get tight. Everny turns out to be a devout Buddhist and says she makes a living teaching students to play the Chinese lute. While
we talk, Everny sits quietly, eating an astonishing amount of food for such a small person. It's touch-and-go, but just when I'm ready to order more dishes, she suddenly lets up and joins the conversation. She talks about a recent trip she made to Tibet where she circumambulated a sacred mountain with Tibetan Buddhists while carrying a photo of her late father. The Tibetans spoke no Chinese, and she spoke no Tibetan. Despite everything, she says (and here I think she was referring to the political situation) the Tibetans totally accepted her into their group of religious pilgrims and helped keep her going over precarious mountain terrain. I often hear Chinese say how much they respect Tibetan people and their religion.