Tracking Bodhidharma (21 page)

After being ravaged by the Cultural Revolution, East Woods Temple sat dormant and empty for many years, waiting for political conditions to allow it to be reopened and refurbished. Like other temples, its statues and other valuables were smashed by the Red Guards, the fanatics that attacked China's cultural treasures in a spasm of violence and bloodshed during the late 1960s. Westerners don't widely understand the reasons for the Cultural Revolution, often thinking that it was an ideological struggle where Marxism was carried to extremes in its repudiation of religion and traditional culture. The truth is a little more subtle and interesting. The Cultural Revolution was much about Mao Zedong's attempt to continue holding power when others in the Communist Party felt he should step aside. The Red Guards were not members of the Communist Party. They were youths who, at Mao's urging, decided that the Communist Party was too conservative. Mao famously called on
the youth of China to “bombard the headquarters,” meaning the Communist Party itself, and overthrow the officials that threatened Mao's position. In the resulting insanity, which was intense for three years and disrupted the society for another decade, life was turned on its head as countless factions were created, aligned, and dissolved, all laying claim to revolutionary purity, the disparate groups fighting with each other throughout the country.

When I first visited mainland China in 1978, ten years after the worst days of the Cultural Revolution, no revival of religious culture was yet evident. It was not until a visit to the country in 1982 that I saw religion making a hesitant reappearance. That year I visited the recently reopened and well-known Yong He Temple in the northeast part of Beijing. In the back hall, where a colossal standing statue of the Buddhist bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara is situated, a very elderly woman was prostrating herself repeatedly on some dusty old cushions before the statue. As surprising as this brave display of religious devotion was, the reaction of bystanders was more interesting. In stunned silence a large crowd gathered around the woman, watching her intently as she kowtowed in front of the statue. The surprise on people's faces betrayed the fear haunting religious expression at that time. Happily, before long, such outward displays of faith became very common, and soon a large number of important religious sites were being rebuilt and reopened.

During my earlier China trip in 1978, the country's reforms under Deng Xiaoping had not yet begun, and normalization of relations with the United States was just in the offing. I saw the country just after the steely grip of the Cultural Revolution around the country's neck began to falter, letting in a little gasp of air. The miserable conditions under which most people were existing at that time were obfuscated by political rhetoric about the then current “great leader” Chairman Hua Guofeng and the “joy of the people due to the smashing of the ‘Gang of Four.'”

Then, like now, there was an uneasy relationship between the central government and local officials. At that time, local officials seemed nervous about anyone who came to visit from Beijing. As a member of a “U.S.-China People's Friendship Association” tour, we were accompanied throughout the country by Beijing guides. These guides appeared well-educated, spoke good English, and often offered bemused “read between the lines” interpretations of many things we saw in the country.
It took little effort to see evidence of the hardships that people endured. One guide suffered from chronic headaches that resulted from her persecution during political struggles. The other guide, an admitted Communist Party member, actually seemed very sophisticated. You might even describe him as “suave,” with a nice-fitting Mao jacket and sunglasses. He clearly had personal ideas about how China had gone haywire.

I remember how local officials, most of them unable to speak English, were uneasy when they came into contact with these central government guides. To a person, they never deviated from parroting the official line on the current political situation, saying things like “since the smashing of the Gang of Four, production has increased by threefold blah blah blah ...” We all understood that the “smashing of the Gang of Four” meant “since the end of the Cultural Revolution.” At that time the “Gang of Four,” a group close to Mao that was denounced after his death, was an acceptable target for criticism. But the Cultural Revolution was not directly denounced openly by name (a phenomenon that still lingers in China). People then were still trying to pretend that the impressive-sounding “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” was something other than a disaster. China groped for a face-saving way to deal with its aftermath. In this atmosphere, our questions concerning the real situation in China were deflected as skillfully as a
kong fu
fighter slips a blow. Local guides avoided meaningful conversation. I remember a guide in Guilin, the famous scenic city on the Li River, talking about the banal expressions Chinese use in everyday speech. “When Chinese people arrive somewhere, we say,
‘Daole'
[‘We've arrived'].” Then he would laugh at his own weak joke. This was about the deepest thing I remember him saying to us.

A gruesome parroting of the then prevailing political line extended to a kindergarten we visited. I recall a group of five- or six-year-olds greeting us warmly with expressions of
“Shushu, Aiyi, huanying!”
(“Welcome, Uncles and Aunts!”) and then performing skits where the boys happily brandished toy weapons to shoot the heads off of Gang of Four puppets that had been bound and subdued by the girls. To Western liberal sensitivities, recently affected by the violence of the Vietnam War and the nonviolent philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr., viewing kindergarteners act out a pageant of political violence was rather startling, to say the least. When they finished their bloody little skit, they
warmly sent us off with chants of “
Shushu, Aiyi, zaijian!”
(“Uncles and Aunts, good-bye!”).

Another astonishing example of the fear that our central government guides instilled in the locals occurred at a hospital we visited in Shanghai. Some of the propaganda coming from China in those times centered on the use of acupuncture and its applications in therapy. To witness this medical marvel, our tour group was led into an operating theatre in a hospital to witness the use of acupuncture as an anesthesia for serious surgery.

Apparently the hospital was originally built by Westerners and was used for education, because the operating room was a theatre where students could sit and observe surgeries. We all donned operating masks and entered the darkened theatre under poor lighting. Little did we know how accurately the term
operating theatre
matched reality.

The operating table looked like a long-overused model from the 1930s, left from when Western medicine was predominant in the hospital. Besides that and one other small table that held some instruments and acupuncture needles, there was no other furniture, not even a drug cabinet. Two buckets sat on the floor as receptacles for refuse, and there was little else. When we entered, the patient was already on the operating table, fully conscious. The guides explained that she was about to have a thyroid operation. Whether her thyroid would be removed, or perhaps have some growth excised, was not explained.

Two female nurses had erected a small stand and tiny curtain over the woman's chin. This kept her from seeing the operation that was about to be performed at the base of her neck. Then a surgeon entered with a man who seemed to be a male nurse or assistant. He picked up some acupuncture needles from the table and began applying them to some that already protruded from the woman's neck, arm, and legs. After a short time, with the woman fully conscious and her eyes wide open, the physician made an incision at the base of her neck. As he did this, a nurse placed pieces of a mandarin orange in the woman's mouth, demonstrating that she not only was not feeling any pain from the incision, but also that she was capable of enjoying a fruit snack while they operated on her. The medical miracle of acupuncture notwithstanding, the patient looked distinctly nervous.

After making the initial incision, the doctor paused and spoke some
words with the other man, as though giving him instructions. The man removed some bloody gauze from the area of the incision, putting it in one of the buckets. Both men then stood quietly, occasionally muttering a few words we could not hear. After a few minutes, the doctor left the room, and the orderly appeared to be looking at something in the bucket. The woman receiving the operation remained dutifully conscious, eating an occasional piece of fruit placed in her month by an attending nurse.

Oddly, nothing happened for several minutes. The orderly would shuffle back and forth along the operating table, first looking at the incision on the woman, then talking to the nurse about something or other, then putting a bloody piece of gauze in the bucket. This went on for what seemed a very long time. Occasionally, the man would look up into the theatre where we were sitting and then look down again. For some reason, after making the initial incision, which was not very large, the procedure stopped and nothing more happened for perhaps a total of ten minutes or so. We didn't know what the hell was going on.

All at once one of the guides jumped up from her seat and said, “It's time to go. We are late for our next place!” She jumped out of her seat so fast that it startled me, and in a few moments we were all up and filing out of the operating theatre into the hall of the hospital.

Oddly, after beating such a hasty retreat from the operating room, we walked only a short distance before the guide told us to wait. She disappeared for several minutes, apparently arranging for us to enter the children's ward, where we were directed next. Nothing seemed to urgently require our attendance. When we finally entered the children's wing, it didn't appear that anyone was particularly expecting us. Everything seemed quite normal and relaxed.

It took me a year or so for me to finally realize what had happened in the operating theatre. It appears that perhaps the visiting Beijing guides suggested to the hospital that the foreigners see acupuncture being used as an anesthetic, and the doctors simply faked an operation for us. After making a superficial incision, the doctor was clearly biding his time for ten or fifteen minutes while waiting for us so to leave so he could sew up the unfortunate “patient.” Somehow, the message that the group should leave immediately after the first incision did not get communicated clearly to the guides, and as a result we watched the
doctor depart after the first cut and then the orderly do his best to stall, stall, stall, not inflicting any more cuts on the “patient” before we got out of there. When it finally dawned on our guide what was happening, she shooed us out so fast you'd have thought the building was on fire, but then we just dawdled for the next half hour or so, visiting a nursery that didn't know we were coming. China in 1978 was straddling two eras. It was about to embark on an era of important reform. But some attitudes of the earlier era, like fear of high officials, was very pervasive at that time, and I'm sorry to say it is still lurking around today.

When I visited East Woods Temple on a recent trip to China, I tried to inquire about any connection between the place and Bodhidharma. One person in the temple bookstore seemed unclear about who Bodhidharma was, and the only available monk seemed disinterested in the whole topic. As important as East Woods Temple was in Chinese history, it appears that any connection between that place and Bodhidharma today remains only in a few books. Still, I think he was there.

Old Shakyamuni had four great vows. He said,
“Though the many beings are uncountable, I vow to save them;
Though delusions rise without end, I vow to end them;
Though Dharma Gates are limitless, I vow to study them;
Though Buddha's way is inconceivable, I vow to embody it.”
But as for me, I have my own four great vows. They are
“When I get hungry, I have something to eat; When the weather
is cold, I put on more clothes; When I get tired, I lie down and
take a nap; When it's warm, I look for a cool breeze.”

—
Zen Master Baiyum (“White Cloud,” active 1025—1072 CE) of Nengren Temple in Jiujiang City, addressing the monks in the Dharma Hall

 

THE YOUNG MAN who has just boarded the bus to Jiujiang and sat down next to me looks at me expectantly and says, “You're the first foreigner I've ever spoken to.” When he saw me sitting here, he knew it was his lucky day. Millions of Chinese are busily learning English without any native English speakers to talk to.

For the next hour or so during our trip to Jiujiang, I give English instruction to a twenty-year-old Chinese man trying to make his way in the crowded world.

“Yes, I am studying at Jiujiang Technical Institute. There I study international business, management, and marketing. I like American NBA basketball. Do you know my favorite team?”

“Is it the Houston Rockets?” I venture.

“Yes!” For someone who has never spoken to a foreigner, his English is surprisingly good. And of course, like many young Chinese, he loves NBA basketball and is devoted to the Houston Rockets, meaning he's a fan of the famous Chinese NBA basketball player Yao Ming. “I want to have a job in international business,” he says.

As our bus winds down the mountain, I try to mix English-language lessons with a few practical life lessons for an aspiring international business major. “It's good,” I say, “to learn not only a foreign language but some other skills as well. For example, you could learn to manage databases. That is an excellent business skill you can use with your English-language skills.”

The young man pulls out a dictionary and looks up
database.
“Yes,” he says. “I think this is a good idea.”