Tracking Bodhidharma (43 page)

Shanli talks about what it's been like to live as a foreigner amid Shaolin's ancient traditions.

“Back in the day there weren't many people living here. Back then I knew everyone. We practiced
kong fu
every day and the food wasn't good. The toilets were especially horrible. Sometimes they were overflowing with sewage and filled with maggots. In some of them there was literally a couple inches of shit covering the ground. Conditions
were really bad. And food poisoning! I got food poisoning a lot. In fact that's probably what caused me to suffer appendicitis. The abbot saved my life. He personally got me into a hospital in Zhengzhou to have an operation. His bodyguards carried me in and made sure I got care. The facilities were unbelievable. There were buckets and rags lying around the operating theatre. The doctor asked me before the operation if I had any final messages to send to loved ones before they put me under. I told him my only request was that they don't let me be awake during the operation!”

Shanli's story reminds me about the fact that taking “final requests” seems to have been a Chinese custom at least until recently. During my early years traveling in China, I heard stories that “final messages” were collected from any airline passengers unlucky enough to be on an airplane experiencing in-flight difficulties. I didn't believe this until a Chinese business friend told me his experience. He was on a flight that had engine trouble. The flight attendants handed out paper and pens to people and then told them to put their “final messages” in a metal strongbox, apparently kept on hand just for this purpose. My friend said that the sight of the box caused many people to scream and pass out from fright.

Shanli continues, “But I woke up anyway. I was lying there, and though I couldn't feel much pain, I could feel the surgeon cutting on me. When he pulled out my appendix, I asked him to give it to me, and he did. There I was holding my appendix in my hand!”

I thought of my own experience in a Chinese operating theatre and decided not to mention it. “Have you been the only foreigner here or have there been others?” I ask.

“Early on, when living here was particularly difficult, some foreigners would come and stay for a while and then leave. The conditions were just too much for them to deal with. There was a Frenchman who came here. He was really into the mystique of the whole thing and was pretty crazy. He did the martial arts for a while but never advanced very far. There was a young Malaysian man here at the same time. A young woman was here doing research, and they were both interested in her. The Frenchman was a lot taller than the Malaysian, and he'd stand over him and say, ‘Listen to me! I am zee volf! And zis is my territory!' Later the Frenchman wanted to get a tattoo on each of his forearms, one of a
dragon and one of a tiger. But he didn't want a real tattoo, he actually wanted outlines of these animals burned into his arm using hot metal, like, what do you call it? A brand! He had two pieces of metal shaped like a dragon and tiger. He insisted that we help him do this at a bar outside the monastery. He asked me to hold him down while another friend stuck the hot iron on his flesh. We told him he was crazy, but he got some others to agree to do it, and I went along to watch. After having some drinks, they heated the brand in a charcoal burner, and he said, ‘Okay! Do it!' Someone started to press it against him, and he started screaming. The guy pressing the brand against him passed out from fright. He fell on the floor. They botched it up real bad, and the Frenchman ended up with a horrible wound that didn't look like a dragon or anything. He went back to France and had operations to repair the damage.”

Shanli looks at the top of my head and suddenly says, “I can tell you don't practice
mizong
[Esoteric Buddhism, a tradition of “secret” teachings]. There's no energy coming out of the top of your head. People who practice
mizong
can see each other's energy.”

I counter that as a Zen Buddhist I take care to be sure there are no signs associated with my Buddhist practice.

Shanli is happy to tell me about his long experience at Shaolin, and we talk through the long afternoon. Before I know it, night has fallen, and Shanli says it's time for dinner. It will be served shortly at the upper monks' dining hall.

If you visit an old temple like Shaolin on a warm summer day, you might not sense the age of the place. Even sitting in the meditation hall of some old temple may not give you the feeling that you've connected with the ancients that practiced there long ago. But if you walk on a dark winter's night through a temple's silent, icy pathways, snow on rooftops, steps dimly lit, your feet feeling your away along, then you have an intimate connection with every monk who's ever felt his way to the dining hall to get a hot meal on a frozen night. The carved stone tortoises in the silent temple courtyard bear witness.

Near the kitchen, Shanli knocks on a door where some monks reside, and one opens it to greet him. They exchange some words and invite us in. One of the monks, who looks to be no more than sixteen or seventeen years old, sits on his bed, a blanket wrapped around his neck.

“His neck is affected by the intense cold here,” says Shanli. “It penetrates the neck muscles and is extremely painful. I suffered from this myself before. You wouldn't believe how cold it can get at night in this place. What he's suffering from is almost unbearable.”

Shanli has brought some special medicine for the young monk, an herbal salve of some sort. The monk follows us to the nearby monastery kitchen, where the evening meal is being prepared. The steam from many hot water taps, large vats of vegetable soup, and steaming
mantou
buns warms the long room where the evening meal is being prepared. Shanli sits the monk on a stool out of the way of the cooks and rubs the Chinese herbal medicine on the boy's neck. The warmth and light of the kitchen and Shanli's efforts cause the boy to visibly relax. After several minutes of strong rubbing, Shanli takes a medicated patch and applies it to the boy's neck. The world of monks is a world of mutual brotherly support. On such a night in the winter, a famous temple like Shaolin is still little more than a lonely outpost, its inhabitants a mutually supportive family.

Shanli and I, as lay persons, sit on the outermost tables of the hall during the evening meal. The days of poor sanitation and poor food are clearly gone, for the mushroom and vegetable soup served by the kitchen staff is full-bodied and deliciously filling. Meals are eaten in silence. Bowls are held in the left hand and chopsticks are held with the right. I wonder if any of the monks is left-handed. Left-handedness is still thought to be sort of a defect here, and there is little or no accommodation for left-handed people.

After dinner, having crunched through the frozen snow and returned to Shanli's quarters, Shanli calls a friend to have him come and return me to my hotel. But the roads are completely frozen, and he's not sure if his friend can make it to the temple. We set out toward the side temple gate, located a kilometer or two from the temple complex, walking carefully on the frozen road. A taxi appears that has brought some monks to the temple. We wave it down, and the driver agrees to drive me to the city. When we call Shanli's friend to inform him of this, we discover his car has broken down and he can't come to get me anyway. Agreeing to meet the next day, I bid Shanli good-bye and soon emerge onto the icy road in front of Shaolin's tourist area. Four large trucks have slid and collided on the ice within a mile of the temple entrance. They block
most of the road. Emergency vehicles sit flashing. One of the cabs on a truck is smashed and twisted.

The following morning, I take another taxi to Shaolin and go knock on the door of Shanli's private room so we can make plans for the day. He's working at his laptop computer when I arrive.

“Here, take a look at this.” On the computer he brings up a digital photo of an extremely scary-looking, very large insect of some type. “I photographed that right there, in the corner of my room. There are some bugs here you wouldn't believe. Huge things that will visit in the coldest part of winter to get some of the warmth of the room. There's one bug that can run so fast I can't take its picture. You could never catch it. Its bite is extremely poisonous.”

I look warily along the rafters of the room.

“Look at these,” says Shanli. On the floor next to his computer are a pair of furry, high ankle slippers with wires running out of them. Then are plugged into the power strip by his desk. “These are my electric shoes. It's so cold here that my feet get frozen while I sit at my desk. I just bought these to try to ward off the cold.”

 

FIGURE 19. Shanli's Electric Shoes to Withstand the Freezing Shaolin Winter.

I'm starting to respect more than ever Bodhidharma sitting in his lonely frozen cave just up the hill from here.

“It's cold today,” says Shanli, “but it's nothing compared to what will come in the middle of the winter. During those times I've woken up half frozen to death and just lay there waiting for daylight to come.” Shanli turns on an electric water pot and it soon begins to hiss. “Here's my solution to the cold.”

On Shanli's desk sits a big jar of Nescafé and an equally large container of honey. When the water is boiling, he fills two coffee mugs each halfway full of coffee and honey and then pours in the steaming water. He hands one of the mugs to me. It looks like boiled sludge. I swallow a mouthful of his special tonic and can't suppress an involuntary shudder. But within a few minutes I notice that it is definitely effective. I wonder if monks of old also had some elixir like this to bolster their Qi.

I tell Shanli that I want to visit the Second Ancestor's Hut, a spot about a mile from the temple proper. He suggests we first visit the “Waiting in the Snow Pavilion” within the temple itself. That's the place where the Second Ancestor allegedly stood waiting in the snow to receive Bodhidharma's teaching. We drink some more hot coffee to steel ourselves against the cold, then walk into the courtyard and go through a passage to the center of the temple complex. At its upper reaches, past the old abbot's quarters, is the Waiting in the Snow Pavilion.

Shanli explains that, according to tradition, the Emperor Tai Zong of the Tang dynasty visited the temple sometime in the mid-600s. He was shown this spot where the Second Ancestor was said to have stood in the snow and cut off his arm to show his spiritual resolve. The emperor commanded that a pavilion be built to commemorate the spot. But didn't Bodhidharma sit in the cave that is up on the mountain? Why would Huike be standing here in the middle of the temple? My guess is that the emperor wasn't about to climb the mountain, so they just said that the legendary event happened here, a place convenient for an emperor to visit.

On the terrace in front of the little pavilion, there are a couple of young men who appear to be foreign tourists also looking at the scene. One pulls out a cigarette and starts digging in his pocket for a match. Shanli offers him his lighter and we start a conversation. The three of them light up smokes, while I rotate my position slightly to stand upwind. One of the two men, who introduces himself as Marc, says he is from the United Kingdom and is in China doing doctoral research
about the situation with orphans here. The other man, named Hashlik, says in somewhat broken English that he is from Ukraine. They are friends and have just come to Shaolin for a visit.

The conversation turns to cigarettes. Marc says that cigarettes have opened a lot of doors for him in China. Despite the increasing public-smoking bans, smoking is still a sort of social ritual that is quite pervasive. We agree. Smoking is deeply entrenched in Chinese culture, but especially its business culture. It's one especially obnoxious habit that China has imported from the West. Some people know that the English forced the Chinese to import opium grown in British India by means of the famous Opium Wars of the mid-1800s. What is less known is that in the early 1900s the British American Tobacco company (BAT) widely introduced tobacco to Chinese farmers for them to grow as a cash crop. BAT then bought the tobacco from the farmers, made cigarettes with mechanized production, and sold the product by the millions to the armies fighting in World War I. For a short time, Chinese peasant farmers prospered like never before, and their farmland was widely given over to tobacco cultivation. But when the war ended and demand suddenly ceased, the economy of the Chinese countryside collapsed almost overnight just as other natural disasters came about that hurt the food supply. The situation turned grave. Millions died of starvation during the following years. After that tobacco became a widespread and permanent part of China's social fabric.

We invite Marc and Hashlik to join us on a hike to the Second Ancestor's Hut on a nearby mountain. Under Shanli's lead we all set off.