Zhenru Monastery -- Part one

In February 1987 I was backpacking around China for the first time and found my way to Zhenru Si (Jenru Temple) in Jiangxi Province. I learned about this place from an article by Stephen Batchelor which appeared in the Middle Way magazine in 1985, a publication of the Buddhist Society in Britain. Stephen had heard that this temple existed, and that the monks were doing zen meditation on a daily basis, but he had not yet himself visited it.

I decided to do so, and arrived in Nanchang, the capital of Jiangzi. In those days there was barely a tourist infrastructure in place in China, which had only opened to foreign visitors in 1979. As in Russia, tourists had to first report to the local Intourist office to show their papers and get assigned a hotel room. At that time I hadn’t learned any Chinese yet, and almost no one in China spoke English—unbelievable, only 20 years ago—so I hired the services of a translator and a driver, and a government cadre had to come along too to make sure I was up to nothing subversive.

We drove for two hours out into the countryside and up into the mountains and eventually arrived at our destination. Aside from the fact that no one in the West at the time really understood to what extent Buddhist practice still existed in China, there were two important reasons to visit this remote place. First, it was unknown if there were Chinese monks still doing chan (zen), since it was commonly supposed that the practice had disappeared from Buddhist temples during the period of syncretism and the disappearance of the Five Houses (chan sects) in the 14th century. The second reason was to see if the existing zen meditation practice bore any resemblance to the school of Soto Zen introduced by Dogen Zenji to Japan after he learned studied it at Cao-Dong sect’s Tiantong temple near Ningbo in the early 1200’s.

If this subject is of interest to you, please read my interview with Abbot Chen in the white box below. Be sure to click on the following pictures for a closer view.

Zhenru from a distance on a bleak February day. The temple was savaged during the Cultural Revolution and rebuilt mainly with money from Taiwan. Nevertheless, according to Abbot Chen, zen meditation has continued here without interruption for over 1000 years.

Zhenru is surrounded with rice fields. The imperial government never allowed monks to do perform ritual alms-gathering as is still done today in Southeast Asia.

Venerable T Guang, Guest Manager (l.), and Venerable Yi Chen (r.), Abbot of Zhenru monastery. Below a statue of Manjusri, the Perfect Wisdom Boddhisattva, found typically in his glass box at the entrance to a chan  meditation hall.

 

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Zhenru Monastery -- Part two

The meditation hall is also the dormitory, as traditionally so in Japan.

The monks sit on the benches facing outward during meditation, and sleep on the platforms up above them.

This is the altar in the center of the meditation hall, which reminds me of the news stands on the U-Bahn platforms in Berlin. The figure inside is that of Buddha's uncle, who according to the legend taught Buddha how to meditate. Note the thermos bottles to the left, and smoke marks above the niche. It seems indicative of the earthy quality of Chinese zen, compared with its highly-polished presentation in Japan.

This is the Chinese version of the kyosaku, or wake-up stick. There are two versions: one for an offense against the chan sect, the other (with different Chinese characters) for an offense against the rules of the monastery.

The traditional fish drum and meal bell, brought also to temples in Japan.

Chinese Buddhist temples commonly have a Paradise Wall in a narrow hallway behind the meditation hall, an opportunity for local people to splurge on folk art. In addition to all the Arhats and Lohans and Boddhisattvas, Guanyin is seen pouring out libations of mercy through a plastic garden hose.

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Zhenru Monastery -- Part three

My interview with Abbot Yi Chen of Zhenru monastery was much briefer than I hoped, mainly because the government cadre who had been appointed to watch over us insisted that it not last longer than an hour. Another problem arose that such commonly understood Buddhist terms as Heart Sutra or Prajnaparamita in English aren't the same in Chinese, so unless the translator is knowledgeable, it takes a bit of jockeying around to discover what is meant.
Despite its brevity my article was published in several places in the U.S. and Europe, including San Francisco Zen Center's Windbell magazine. It showed perhaps for the first time that chan monasteries exist in modern China. I interviewed three more temple abbots in the early 1990's, but none of these conversations had the same effect.

Open publication - Free publishing - More china

The Shanghai Show at the Asian Arts Museum

I fought my way bravely through the rains yesterday to enjoy Target Free Sunday at the Asian Arts Museum and see the Shanghai show. The advantage of this was that the place was practically empty, which of course was super.

I’ve already written about my experience of Shanghai. In my imagination it compares with Cairo as one of the two most fascinating cities in the world. But unlike Cairo, Shanghai for me is a historical locality which existed mainly during the Chinese Republic 1912-1949. Like Berlin in the 20's and 30's, Shanghai was a metropolis of the imagination that reached mythological proportions.

The great advantage of the current museum show is that it includes several drawings and paintings from the mercantile concessions and settlements of the 19th century. Buying and selling was handled largely by the compradors—wealthy Chinese middlemen. In this environment China and the West confronted each other culturally for the first time, and the art it produced is often fascinating.

Chinese artists discovered the joys of perspective, painted panoramic views of the big trading houses overlooking the Huangpu River, and made pictures of comely comprador wives, displaying pendulum clocks on their walls and Victorian sewing machines in their spacious living rooms.

After that, the show became progressively sparser. The glass case with the marvelous display of qibao—those slender silk dresses that young women wore—and the sexy poster art from the 30’s were great. A few fine paintings from the early years after the Revolution, but then it was pretty much over. Although you could go upstairs to the auditorium and see a couple classic Shanghai films.

There were surprisingly few photographs in the show, which seemed completely odd to me, since there must exist many thousands. Mao’s brilliant effort in organizing the Shanghai workers starting in the 1920’s was just barely indicated, and life during the Japanese occupation not at all.

In short, the show was little more than a quick stab into the dark heart of Shanghai—great at that level, and special fun on a rainy Sunday afternoon in San Francisco.

[Photo from http://woollymammoths.org/Mark/.] 

Out of Shanghai

I've written three posts recently relating to Shanghai, and I’ll conclude by describing my final departure in 1990 from that fabled city. (I doubt if I'll go there again, as I can't bare to think what's become of the place.)

The overnight boat to the Buddhist island of Putuoshan left its downtown dock on the Huangpu River at the Bund promptly at 8pm. It probably still does so today, since the Chinese concept of a vacation has been since time immemorial to go off for a visit to a Buddhist temple, and Putuoshan is famous as one of the “four sacred mountains” in Chinese Buddhism.

Western visitors and Lonely Planet hadn’t yet caught on to this, so I was the only waiguo-ren on board. I booked passage in the cheapest possible cabin, being afraid that by traveling in steearage I might wake up in the morning to find my gear gone, hard for any backpacker to replace while en route in any developing country.

The boat turned out to be not a modern ferry, but rather a pre-WWII south seas freighter converted into a sort-of passenger ship. My cabin on this floating turd-bucket was a small space whose every surface was composed of rusting white-washed cast iron, except for the small cot with a single worn wool blanket. The interior stank of urine, and the latch and hinges of the single, oval-shaped port-hole had rusted shut years before. The smell of urine and the incessant growling of the ship’s engines that vibrated through the walls made any hope of sleep impossible.

But I was transported mentally. Here I was, reenacting the same scene found in numberless Hollywood movies, travelling in a south seas tramp-steamer along the coast of China. I pressed my head against the dirty port-window and could make out the moon flittering across the waves of the East China Sea. I felt very happy.

The vessel released its human cargo onto the dock at Putuoshan around 5am, sufficient time to race to the Puji Temple for morning service. I put on my Soto zen rakasu and joined in with the monks.

Chinese ceremonies are huge fun, since if it’s a large temple, the monks march around the Buddha Hall in concentric circles, sort of like a Buddhist conga line, and there are wonderful Chinese percussion instruments that punctuate the chanting, sounding occasionally like Beijing Opera. (So much more congenial than the formality of morning services I attended at Ehei-ji in Japan, where kneeling motionless in seiza for 45 minutes or more left you worrying if the circulation to your legs had been cut off permanently.)

I poked around the sacred island, dedicated to Guan-Yin (aka: Avalokiteshvara), for a few hours, but found it the least interesting of the four holy mountains in China, due in part no doubt to my profound lack of sleep. Consequently I took the afternoon ferry to Ningbo, before moving on to Dogen’s temple at Tiantong.

[Picture of Puji Temple by James Johnson. More pictures of Putuoshan by James Johnson are posted here.]

My Shanghai

I first discovered Shanghai in 1986, travelling first from South Korea to Hong Kong, since direct travel to Shanghai was forbidden in those days. It had been only since 1979 that China under Deng Xiaoping had opened to the West, and an infra-structure for tourists was still in its infancy. A whole generation of Chinese had grown up without having seen a Caucasian person in vivo, so that a backpacker hiking about town was an instant sensation. If you paused for even a moment from walking down the street, you were quickly surrounded by a small crowd of curious Chinese who wanted to feel your nylon jacket, or have a look at your digital watch, novel at the time.

Of course no one spoke English, and the streets were full of cyclists on "Flying Pigeon" fat-tire bikes and empty of cars, since private ownership of automobiles was still prohibited—which seemed to me like an intelligent, postmodern solution to the air- and noise pollution problems afflicting urban environments in the West. There was certainly no indication then that the industrialized P.R.C. would become the world's greatest air-polluter two decades later.

Entering Shanghai was like travelling back in time to the 1930’s, since little had changed long before the Communist takeover in 1949. The Bund looked about the same as in the picture above taken in 1928; capitalism hadn’t yet taken hold in China, and the run-down blue-gray buildings lining the Nanjing Road were void of modern shops. It was a city was frozen in time, and the effect was absolutely uncanny.

The two main attractions were the Shanghai Museum, then quite literally the only museum in the P.R.C. dedicated to traditional Chinese art (and funded by the Taiwanese), and the Jade Buddha Temple. The temple furnishings would have been familiar to anyone from San Francisco, since the temple was built in the late Qing period, when temple décor quite unhistorically relied heavily on elaborate red, gold and black coloration.

Best of all, rooms at the famous Peace Hotel at the corner of the Bund and the Nanjing Road were available for a reasonable price. The legendary Peace Hotel swing band, now composed of older men who had somehow survived from the 1930’s, also played from time to time.

The whole experience was like a dream. After an erotic episode at the Peace Hotel, I wrote:


Shanghai

in a city of cold blue stone
we awoke like two Celestials

fallen from Heaven onto silken
bedsheets at the Peace Hotel,

our arms and legs curved into
each other like yin and yang,

later we lay on the bed smoking
and looking up at the ceiling,

listening to bicycle bells,
motor scooter horns and the rain
streaming down endlessly

outside in the Bund

 

40th Anniversary of the P.R.C.

Watching on tv the 60th anniversary celebrations of the People's Republic of China in Tianmen Square last week put me in mind of my participation in the PRC's 40th anniversary. I'd arrived in Beijing ten days previous to start teaching at Foreign Ministry's College of Diplomacy. Because foreign diplomats were boycotting the celebration due to the recently and brutally crushed Tianmen riots, we “foreign experts” were rounded up and urged to take their place, which meant we got to sit in the reviewing stands permanently installed over the Gate of Heavenly Peace, from which Mao proclaimed the P.R.C. in 1949.


Mini-buses arrived at our institute in the early afternoon to carry us in the evening. (In 1989 there were no private vehicles allowed in China: the few that existed belonged exclusively to the government.) The vehicles were parked in lots that lined the east side of the Forbidden City, and we proceeded through a side entrance to walk down to the entrance gate. That was my first visit to the Forbidden City: viewing those immense courtyards and palaces, empty and absent of any visitors, under moonlight—an eerily fascinating experience.
The viewing stands above the Gate of Heavenly Peace were not large: they might accommodate a couple hundred persons at most, and we “experts” were placed less than a stone’s throw away from China’s top leadership, at the time Li Peng and Jiang Zemin. From there we could look out across the world’s largest public square, which was filled with close to nearly two million people—the largest herd of seething humanity I’d ever seen in one place before or since.
The spectacle began with the obligatory military parade, was followed by throngs of marching flag-waving socialists of one tribal affiliation or another, and climaxed with the inevitable mega-display of fireworks. It reminded me of the triumphal processions and arena spectacles put on by the ancient Romans, and of the huge fireworks show I saw in 1981 from the foot of the Eiffel Tower in commemoration of the 2000th anniversary of the city of Paris. I couldn’t help but wonder if the Chinese socialist state would last that long.

[Photo by Peter Morgan, Wikipedia, "Tianmensquare."]

To Ürümqi

I left Beijing in August 1993 at the conclusion of my U.N. job, where for two years I had taught English to students at the Wai Jiao Xue Yuan, China’s school of diplomacy, run by the Foreign Affairs Ministry of the P.R.C. The trip took to me to Urumqi in Xinjiang Province, from there by bus to Kashgar, over the Karakoram into the north of Pakistan, and across the Punjab to Dharamsala in India.
The train trip from Beijing to Urumqi lasted three days, the Chinese version of the Mongolian Express, but without the Western tourists out for a good time. Indeed there was hardly anyone on the train at all, excepting some military officers and local cadres who would get on and ride minor distances and then get off. Most of the time I had a whole compartment to myself, secure in my little bubble since no one spoke English in the provinces in those days, settling comfortably into the well-worn blue cushion seats with little white lace doilies on the headrests. I sank into my usual travel trance, accepting helplessness and tedium the way one does when flying for 14 hours across the Pacific to San Francisco from Tokyo. I roused myself every couple hours when the train service brought round tea and jiaozi (dumplings) and read for awhile afterwards.
We passed through or near Turfan, Bezelik, Jiaohe, places on the northern Silk Road desert I had examined and photographed in detail on previous trips. The train line crosses the Taklamakan Desert, on the north side of the Tarim Basin. The area is not known for stunning desert scenery, but is rather nondescript in most places. It suddenly comes alive in the red sandstone hills in the Tian Shan mountain range near Turfan. They are mentioned in Journey to the West, the marvelous 16th c. Chinese novel which describes the journey of Xuanzang, the priest of Great Tang, who is off to India to fetch the Buddhist sutras, accompanied by Monkey and Pig. What a journey that must have been overland.

Urumqi proved to be yet another grey Chinese city with absolutely nothing to see, despite an ethnic mix of half Chinese and half Uyghur, each side apparently canceling out the cultural accomplishments of the other. There is some fine mountain scenery in the Tianshans near Urumqi: alpines lakes and green meadows populated with nomadic tribespeople living in yurts.

Photo from http://www.synaptic.bc.ca