DUN-HUANG was a thriving trade town, about as big and as populous as Kashgar, sitting in a sandy basin ringed by camel-colored rock cliffs. But where Kashgar’s inns had catered to Muslim travelers, those of Dun-huang made special provision for the tastes and customs of Buddhists. This was because the town had been founded, some nine hundred years ago, when a traveling trader of the Buddhist faith was beset, somewhere on the Silk Road hereabout, by bandits or the azghun voices or a kwei demon or something, and was somehow miraculously saved from those malign clutches. So he paused here to give thanks to the Buddha, and he did that by making a statue of that deity and placing it in a niche in one of the cliffs. In the nine centuries since, every other Buddhist traveler on the Silk Road has added an adornment to another of those caves. And now the name of Dun-huang, though it really means only Yellow Cliffs, is sometimes translated as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas.
The designation is too modest. I would call these the Caves of the Million Buddhas, at the very least. For there are now some hundreds of caves pocking the cliffs, some natural, some hewn out by hand, and in them are perhaps two thousand statues of the Buddha, large and small, but on the cave walls are painted frescoes displaying at least a thousand times that many images of the Buddha, not to mention lesser divinities and worthies of the Buddha’s retinue. I could discern that most of the images were male, and some just as clearly female, but a goodly number were indistinct as to sex. However, all had one feature in common: they all had tremendously elongated ears with lobes dangling to their shoulders.
“It is a common belief,” said the old Han caretaker, “that a person born with large ears and well-defined earlobes is destined for good fortune. Since the most fortunate of all humans were the Buddha and his disciples, we assume that they had such ears, and we depict them so.”
That aged ubashi, or monk, was pleased to conduct me on a tour of the caves, and he spoke Farsi for the occasion. I followed him from niche to cavern to grotto, and in all of them were statues of the Buddha, standing or lying peacefully asleep or, most often, sitting cross-legged on a giant lotus blossom. The monk told me that Buddha is an ancient Indian word meaning the Enlightened One, and that the Buddha had been a Prince of India before his apotheosis. So I might have expected the statues to be all of a black and runty man, but they were not. Buddhism long ago spread from India to other nations, and evidently every devout traveler who paid to put up a statue or a painting had envisioned the Buddha as looking like
him.
Some of the older images were indeed dark and scrawny like Hindus, but others could have been Alexandrine Apollos or hawklike Persians or leathery Mongols, and the most recently done all had unlined faces with waxy complexions and placid expressions and slanted slit eyes; that is to say, they were pure Han.
It was also evident that, in the past, Muslim marauders had often swept through Dun-huang, for many of the statues were in ruins, hacked apart, revealing their simple construction of gesso molded onto cane and reed armatures, or at the least were cruelly disfigured. As I have told, the Muslims detest any portrayal of a living being. So here, when they had not had time to destroy a statue utterly, they had chopped the head off it (the head being the abode of life) or, in even more haste, they had been satisfied to gouge out the eyes from it (the eyes being the expression of life). The Muslims had taken the trouble to scratch out even the tiny eyes of many thousands of miniature painted images on the walls—even those of delicate and pretty female figures.
“And the females,” said the old monk mournfully, “are not even divinities at all.” He pointed to one lively little figure. “She is a Devatas, one of the celestial dancing girls who entertain the blessed souls in the Sukhavati, the Pure Land between lives. And this one”—he pointed to a girl who was painted in the act of flying, in a swallowlike swirl of skirts and veils—“she is an Apsaras, one of the celestial temptresses.”
“There are temptresses in the Buddhist Heaven?” I asked, intrigued.
He sniffed and said, “Only to prevent an overcrowding of the Pure Land.”
“Indeed? How?”
“The Apsarases have the duty of seducing holy men here on earth, so their souls get damned to the Awful Land of Naraka between lives, instead of the blissful Sukhavati.”
“Ah,” said I, to show that I comprehended. “An Apsaras is a sùccubo.”
Buddhism has certain other parallels to our True Faith. Its devotees are adjured not to kill, not to tell untruths, not to take what is not given, not to indulge in sexual misbehavior. But in other respects, it is very different from Christianity. Buddhists are also adjured not to drink intoxicants, not to eat after the noon hour, not to attend entertainments, not to wear bodily adornments, not to sleep or even rest on a comfortable mattress. The religion does have the equivalents of our monks and nuns and priests, called ubashi and ubashanza and lamas, and Buddha enjoined them to live lives of poverty, as ours also are admonished, but few of them comply.
For example, Buddha told his followers to wear nothing but “yellowed garments”—by which he meant mere rags discolored by mold and decay. But the Buddhist monks and nuns obey that instruction only to the letter, not the spirit, for they are now arrayed in robes of the costliest fabrics, gaudily dyed in hues from brilliant yellow to fiery orange. They also have grand temples, called potkadas, and monasteries, called lamasarais, richly endowed and furnished. Also, I suspect that every Buddhist owns many more personal possessions than the few that Buddha specified: a sleeping mat, three rags for garments, a knife, a needle, a begging bowl with which to solicit one meager meal a day, and a water strainer with which to dip out from one’s drinking water any incautious insects or fry or tadpoles, lest they get swallowed.
The water strainer illustrates Buddhism’s foremost rule: that no creature alive, however humble or minute, shall ever be killed, deliberately or even accidentally. However, this has nothing in common with a Christian’s wish to be good so as to go to Heaven after death. A Buddhist believes that a good man dies only to be reborn as a better man, further on his way to Enlightenment. And he believes that a bad man dies only to be reborn as a lesser grade of creature: an animal, bird, fish or insect. That is why a Buddhist must not kill anything. Since every least speck of life in Creation is presumably a soul trying to clamber up the ladder of Enlightenment, a Buddhist dares not squash so much as a louse, for it could be his late grandfather, demoted after death, or his future grandson on the way to being born.
A Christian might admire a Buddhist’s reverence for life, no matter the ludicrous illogic behind it, except for two inevitable results of it. One is that every Buddhist man, woman and child is a seething nest of lice and fleas, and I found those vermin all too ready to risk their Enlightenment by emigrating onto Christian unbelievers like me. Also, a Buddhist of course cannot eat animal flesh. The devout confine themselves to boiled rice and water, and the most liberal will not eat anything more daring than milk and fruit and vegetables. So that is what we journeyers got in the Dun-huang inn: at mealtime, boiled fronds and tendrils and weak cha and bland custards, and at bedtime, fleas and ticks and bedbugs and lice.
“There was formerly here in Dun-huang a very holy lama,” said my Han monk, in a voice of reverence, “so holy that he ate only raw rice, uncooked. And to further his humility even more, he wore an iron chain clenched about his shrunken belly. The chafing of the rusty chain made a sore, and it became quite putrid, generating a quantity of maggots. And if one of those munching maggots chanced to fall to the ground, the lama would lovingly pick it up, saying, ‘Why do you flee, beloved? Did you not find enough to eat?’ and he would tenderly replace it in the juiciest part of the sore.”
That instructive tale may not have furthered my own humility, but it did diminish my appetite so that, when I got back to the inn, I was easily able to forgo that night’s meal of pallid pap. Meanwhile, the monk went on:
“That lama eventually became a walking sore, and was consumed by it, and died of it. We all admire and envy him, for he surely moved far along the way to Enlightenment.”
“I sincerely hope so,” I said. “But what happens at the end of that way? Does the Enlightened One finally get to Heaven then?”
“Nothing so crass,” said the ubashi. “One hopes, by means of sequacious rebirths and lifetimes of striving upward, eventually to be freed of having to live at all. To be liberated from the bondage of human needs and desires and passions and griefs and miseries. One hopes to achieve Nirvana, which means ‘the blowing-out.’”
He was not jesting. A Buddhist has not the aim, as we do, of meriting for his soul an eternity of glad existence in the mansions of Heaven. A Buddhist yearns only for absolute extinction, or, as the monk put it, “a merging with the Infinite.” He did admit that his religion makes provision for several heavenly Pure Lands and hellish Awful Lands, but they are—something like our Purgatory or Limbo—only way stations between a soul’s successive rebirths on the way to Nirvana. And at that ultimate destination a soul gets snuffed out, as a candle flame is snuffed, nevermore to enjoy or endure not earth nor Heaven nor Hell nor anything.
I had cause to reflect on those beliefs, as our company continued eastward from Dun-huang, on a day that was marvelously full of things to reflect on.
We departed the inn at sunrise, when all the just-waking birds were uttering their morning chirps and cheeps and twitters, so many and so loud that they sounded like grease sizzling in a great pan. Then the later-rousing doves awoke, to murmur their discreet plaints and regrets, but in such numbers that their low warbling was near a roar. A considerable karwan train was also leaving the inn yard that morning, and in these regions the camels wore their bells not on a neckband, but on their front knees. So they strode out jingling and clanging and bonging as if they musically rejoiced in being on the move. I rode my horse alongside one of that train’s wagons for a space, and one of its massive wheels had caught up somewhere a spray of jasmine in its spokes, and every time that high wheel revolved it brought the blossoms past my face and wafted their sweet scent to my nose.
The route out of the Dun-huang basin took us through a cleft in the cave-pocked cliffs, and that opened into a valley verdant with trees and fields and wildflowers, the last such oasis we would see for a while. As we rode through that valley I saw something so beautiful that I still can see it in my memory. Some way ahead of us, a plume of golden-yellow smoke rose up on the morning breeze, and we all remarked on it and wondered at it. Perhaps it came from a fire in a karwan camp, but what could the campers be burning to make such a distinctively colored cloud? The smoke continued to rise and billow, and eventually we came up to it and saw that it was not smoke at all. On the left side of the valley there was a meadow totally covered with golden-yellow flowers, and all those numberless flowers were exultantly freeing their golden-yellow pollen to let the breeze carry it across the Silk Road and away to the other slopes of the valley. We rode through that cloud of seeming smoke, and we came out the other side of it, and we and our horses shimmered in the sunlight as if we had been freshly plated with pure gold.
Another thing. From the valley, we emerged into a land of undulant sand dunes, but the sand was no longer the color of camels or lions, it was a dark silvery gray, like a powdered metal. Nostril got down from his horse to relieve himself, and climbed over a dune of the gray sand, seeking privacy, and to his surprise—and mine—the sand
barked
like a peevish dog at each of his footsteps. It made no particular noise when Nostril wetted on it, but, as he turned to descend the dune, his foot slipped and he slid the whole way down from the crest, and his slide was accompanied by a lovely loud musical note, vibrato, as if a string on the world’s biggest lute had been thrummed.
“Mashallah!” Nostril blurted fearfully, as he picked himself up. He ran all the way from the sand to the firmer surface of the road before pausing to dust himself off.
My father and uncle and the two escorts were all laughing at him. One of the Mongols said, “These sands are called the lui-ing.”
“The thunder voices,” Uncle Mafio translated for me. “Nico and I have heard them when we passed this way before. They will cry also if the wind blows hard, and they cry loudest in winter, when the sands are cold.”
Now, that was a thing most marvelous. But it was only a thing of this earth, as were the sunrise birdsongs and the common camel bells and the perfumed jasmine and the golden wild flowers so determined to flourish that they flung their seed haphazard to the wind.
This world is fair, I thought, and life is good, no matter whether one is certain of Heaven or apprehensive of Hell at the end of it. I could only pity such pathetic persons as Buddhists, deeming the earth and their existence on it so ugly and miserable and repugnant that their highest yearning was to flee into sheer oblivion. Not I, not ever I. If I might accept any of the Buddhist beliefs, it would be that of rebirth over and over into this world, though it mean coming back sometimes as a lowly dove or a sprig of jasmine between my human incarnations. Yes, I thought, if I could I would go on living forever.