Tracking Bodhidharma (10 page)

I mention that I intend to visit Yunmen Temple in north Guangdong Province in a few days, and Everny exclaims that it is the temple where her Buddhist teacher lives, and how when she goes there it is like going home.

Before I know it, two hours have passed, and I can tell Ruxin needs to do other things. I thank him for coming and see him to the door of the little dining room. Then I try out a Chinese phrase that I've never used before. I say,
“Xie xie nide shang lian.”
It is a polite expression that means “Thanks for giving me face by coming.” I look carefully to see if this expression causes any reaction with Ruxin or the other guests. They don't seem surprised, but I'm suspicious.

When I speak Chinese or (especially) Japanese, I must sound like something out of a Monte Python bit. Decades ago on the night I first arrived in Japan, fresh out of my college Japanese classes, I asked a young man at the Haneda Airport train station about how to find my hotel in Tokyo. I used a verb form that is extremely formal and polite to address him. He looked taken aback and said, “Oh, you speak Japanese very well.” What I said probably sounded like “Good morrow, cousin!” My Japanese is very weak, but I'm pretty sure that during all the rest of the time I spent in Japan then and in subsequent years, I never heard anyone use the polite verb form I used that night.

Soon everyone has excused themselves and made their way into the sunny afternoon. I'm left alone and am extremely pleased to find the right amount of food left on the table. The right amount is slightly more than if everyone left something out of politeness.

TODAY I LEAVE GUANGZHOU behind and travel north by coach to the city of Shaoguan, about four hours away. My exact destination is a famous spot called Nanhua Temple, the teaching seat of Zen's Sixth Ancestor named Huineng.

 

FIGURE 10. Bodhidharma Travels North.

While the taxi lurches through a crush of cars and pedestrians, I again contrast the scene in the Guangzhou streets now with my first visit in 1978. The Chinese word for
contrast
is
fancha.
It's a word applicable to the contrast between China's urban and rural lifestyles, the new rich and the old poor, and the country's pristine and polluted environments. China's many
fancha
constitute a sort of social bipolarity. Naturally the biggest
fancha
is the contrast between the new and the old. Among the massive amounts of new in the city of Guangzhou, there is still an island of old that hasn't surrendered to the modern, a place I used to find it impossible to avoid.

The word
Stalinesque
may sound trite, but it aptly describes China's postrevolutionary train stations. Monuments to socialist triumphalism, they evoke no other suitable adjective. During the last ten years, many cities have renovated these old mausoleums, but some others, Guangzhou included, have kept them in service, at least as I write these words.

The old train stations are showcases for the problem that Mr. Li spoke about on the train from Hong Kong, China's massive population. His assertion that many other problems come from China's overpopulation crisis are there revealed as understatement. The huge population places all of China's modernization under a cloud, but the problem is most apparent in public transport.

Even today, the wide concrete plazas in front of the old train stations serve as campgrounds for legions of peasants migrating to China's cities to escape poverty in the countryside. They also convey masses of travelers making their way back to their family's village during the country's holidays. The Statue of Liberty has witnessed only a minute fraction of the number of huddled masses that cross China's railroad landscapes on a single day.

My experience on Chinese trains in the early '80s made a lasting impression on me about China's population. In those days, air flights between Chinese cities were few and infrequent, and the current highway system was still unimagined. Travel meant using the train.

I was once in Guangzhou on business, and I needed to leave the next day for the city of Changsha, a few hundred miles to the northwest. From my hotel I made my way by taxi to the Guangzhou Train Station early on a gloomy winter evening to buy a ticket for a train the next night. I struck up a conversation with the taxi driver who was happy to talk to a “foreign friend.”

We arrived at the square in front of the station to see a huge crowd that covered all available real estate and spilled into the streets in each direction. Lines to buy tickets were hundreds of feet long. I was worried and unsure what to do. But then the driver kindly offered to buy the ticket for me and return it to the hotel. I said I'd pay him for the service, and we came to some agreement. But when he came to the hotel hours later, I discovered he had not obtained the
ruan wo
(soft sleeper) ticket I asked for but instead had obtained a
ying zuo
(hard seat) ticket. He said the soft berths and seats were sold out. Also, the train was listed on the ticket as a “local,” not the express I'd requested.

So the next night I joined the Chinese masses for my journey north. Ugly in the daylight, at night Guangzhou Station was hell's maw. Milling crowds moved through the musty caverns of the place under dim lights interspersed with dark voids. About 11:00 PM we surged as one from the huge waiting room onto the train for the overnight trip. From the beginning, and for the entire journey, the train was crowded beyond belief. In the “hard seat” car, I was wedged with five other people on benches meant for four, three of us facing three others across a tiny table. The aisle was jammed tight with passengers. The train blew its whistle, the train shuddered, and we crawled north through a black night unrelieved by rural lighting.

Every ten or fifteen minutes, the train stopped at another station where a large portion of the local masses pushed mightily against the doors in a futile attempt to get onboard. Too compressed by other passengers to keep my arms by my side, my elbows were pressed together over my stomach. As the night grew long in lurching weariness, I let my forehead drop over my hands to rest and bounce on the tiny table. When the situation is hopeless and the body exhausted, it mercifully retreats to sleep. The next thing I knew I had slept five or six bouncing hours in this position—vertical, arms tucked elbow to elbow, my forehead on the table. Dawn broke.

As the sky slowly brightened, the train still stopped frequently and the crowds trying to get on the train got even larger. The hardiest souls occasionally managed to get aboard by squeezing people into almost comical distortions. No one seemed to want to get off.

Despite our pitiful circumstances, the others around the little table were friendly and curious about the foreigner that rode with them. They spoke with a heavy dialect accent, but I could understand enough to carry on a conversation. We made cramped small talk. One young man, slightly heavyset and rough-hewn, asked me where I was from.

“America,” I said.

Without hesitation he said, “Is it true that in America people are free?”

“It's like everywhere,” I said diplomatically. “If you have money you have freedom.”

He looked thoughtful for a few moments and then said loudly, “That's right. It's the same here! If you have money, you have freedom!” He emphasized this by nodding at the others and saying, “Right?”

They responded with a noncommittal facial expression, common to countries with many secret police, that lies between a smile and a grimace.

We rumbled and rocked our way north. At the next station, the crowd was somehow larger than ever. Some young men in the human tide trying to board the train started yelling
“Shang che!”
(“I'm getting on!”), pushing as hard as they could toward the immovable doors. It was just then that I said something in Chinese to the effect of “My God, this train is crowded” to the young man who earlier asked the question about freedom.

“Yes, it's crowded,” he said. “And not just this train. The whole country is crowded. There are too many people.” His raised his voice as he looked around. “Everything is crowded! There are too many Chinese! We need a big war to reduce the population! Really! I'm not kidding. We need a really big war!” He looked around again. The same noncommittal expression covered people's faces.

Finally, the train came to a small country station where the crowds were mercifully smaller. Here, several wheeled carts approached the train to offer little white boxed breakfasts of
shui jiao,
boiled dumplings that are usually stuffed with minced pork and vegetables. People opened the train windows and a brisk business ensued. Passengers near the windows bought the boxes for themselves and others and passed them into the train car.

With some effort I managed to squeeze my arms under the table to retrieve a small bag I'd brought with me that contained an apple, some nuts, and a few candy bars. I pulled out the apple and joggled it into a position where I could get a few bites. Some moments later, a woman sitting across from me suddenly said, “This is terrible! How can they sell us this stuff?” A chorus of agreement issued from the other passengers who had sampled the dumplings. The next moment someone said, “Give it back to them!” and several people started throwing the boxes with uneaten dumplings out the window onto the train platform where they rolled every direction and scattered their contents. The passengers had had it. They were tired and miserable, packed like sardines in the train, the weather cold and gloomy, and now the dumplings were inedible. The cart vendors hid behind big cement pillars on the train platform as
people hurled the
shui jiao
and curses at them, tumbling dumplings and detritus across the cement. “Give 'em back to them!” people yelled.

My arms, resting uncomfortably in front of me due to the crowding, held my apple core. I considered simply swallowing the thing, then remembered something about arsenic in apple seeds. Suddenly the young man who decried China's population spoke directly at me. “Throw it out!” Some others chimed in, “Throw it out! Throw it out!” I looked out across the field of rubbish on the platform. “Throw it out!” Hesitantly, I tossed the apple core out the window into the scattered boxes of dumplings. Several people clapped their hands, happy that I had joined the masses' spontaneous rebellion. Chairman Mao said, “Where there is oppression, there is also resistance.” The train jolted, and in a few seconds we began to roll north into the fog.

Back in the present, my taxi has moved past the Guangzhou Station of my memories to reach the Guangzhou bus terminal. My timing is lucky, and I'm soon on the right bus heading north on China's modern highway system. What used to be a six- or seven-hour trip to the city of Shaoguan is now covered in less than half that time on a modern highway.

As we leave the city, I remember the abbot Yaozhi's quote that “Japanese Buddhism is Japanese Buddhism and Chinese Buddhism is Chinese Buddhism.” But didn't the Zen of both countries come from Bodhidharma?

THE AUSTRALIAN SCHOLAR and Soto Zen priest Brian Victoria published his book entitled
Zen at War
in 1997. That book and subsequent writings by the same author and others provide a shocking expose of the support provided to Japan's WWII war effort by the Buddhist community, including the Zen community, in that country. Victoria provides evidence that Japan's Buddhist sects were not simply passive participants in the rise of Japan's militarism but provided foundational ideas and influence that helped the spread of fascist ideology.

Victoria's writings show that Japanese Buddhism embraced emperor worship, nationalism, and militarism. During the 1930s and '40s, simply put, Zen ideas were used as a tool for promoting political extremism and imperial war. Victoria's book reveals that the Japanese emperor assumed the status of the historical Buddha, and his likeness took a place of honor and worship on Buddhist temple altars. This relationship between Buddhism and the emperor contributed to unthinking obedience and fanaticism, much like the fanaticism the old scholar at Hualin Temple described when he talked about Mao's status in the Cultural Revolution.

Sugimoto Goro, a Japanese army officer who is credited with helping establish the state of Manchukuo (occupied Manchuria) was only one of many Japanese warriors who rallied the nation with Buddhist rhetoric. In a book called
Great Duty
, Sugimoto said, “The wars of the empire are sacred wars. They are holy wars. They are the Buddhist practice of Great Compassion.” Brian Victoria cites the following related passage from the book: