Tracking Bodhidharma (52 page)

At around eight in the morning, the train rolls across the long trestle above the Yang-tse River, indicating we've reached Nanjing. The couple with the little boy pick up their bags, give me a nod and a smile, and get off the train, leaving me alone in the compartment. Will it really take another seven and a half hours to reach Shanghai? It's less than two hours away if you take a high-speed train. As the sun rises, the landscape can't shake off a low fog. The train begins a slow crawl south, pausing frequently. The Chinese authorities are building superfast trains, some even have maglev technology, but you still can't buy a ticket that lets you transfer to a faster train when you reach a given station.

I settle in to pass the seven-hour trip to Shanghai. I try to read, but thoughts about Nanjing, Emperor Wu, and Bodhidharma weigh on me.

Is it fair to say that Buddhist metaphysics actually caused the aggressive imperial adventures Japan undertook in World War II? On balance, I do not think it is fair to do so. The causes of the war are naturally deeper than the propaganda used to justify it. Such causes are certainly atavistic, which is to say they are connected with deeper historical antagonisms
with social, geographical, and biological origins. One cause historians point to is the scourge of extreme nationalism, in which Japan and other nations got caught up, that has accompanied the rise of the modern nation-state. Modernization, along with the rise of resource-hungry capitalist economies, ethnic rivalries, and other causes, all create a tinderbox easily ignited by the odd case of megalomania or just plain old jingoism. Buddhist metaphysics was largely just window dressing for more fundamental forces. Ideological fanaticism of every stripe, perceived national insult, and simple arrogance and its accompanying delusions have long spurred elites to propagate hatred and violence toward other groups. The experience in Japan is not unique, nor is it even the most recent extreme example of this problem. Fanatical belief has walked hand in hand with the history of conflict of every age, and Darwinian impulses abound. Historians have noted that in the case of Japan, the very acceptance and embrace of the philosophy of social Darwinism by Japan's intellectuals helped promote
kokutai
thinking.

While Buddhist metaphysics only decorated deeper forces, it also provided excuses for some of the extreme manifestations of the tragedy. Social elites politicized the religion in a long historical process. Then, at a critical juncture, it failed its mission of offering a counterpoint or remedy for the impulse toward war and empire. Instead, it contributed to war mania. This failure must be acknowledged and understood.

The snow is gone. The train rumbles slowly along, with many long stops.

Once, when I get up to stand in the corridor, an Asian man with gray hair passes in the corridor. He's well-dressed. Later I look through the train passage into the dining car and see him sitting at a table and smoking. I close the door between the train cars to help keep his cigarette smoke from drifting my way. Twice I've caught bronchitis after breathing cigarette smoke in China.

When Shanli and Mike and Hashlik and I climbed the mountain to the Second Ancestor's hermitage, Mike said he wanted to make a movie about cigarette culture in China. He said he was talking to a man about an orphanage connected with his organization in the United Kingdom.
The project hadn't gotten funded, and the Chinese man was depressed about this. Mike said the man couldn't admit what the problem was until Mike realized that something was wrong and offered him a cigarette. Then the man opened up and talked freely. This is one part of Chinese culture in which I won't ever be able to participate.

While I'm sitting in the train compartment, the gray-haired man comes by and sticks in his head. He says something to start a conversation. He sits down. He's Japanese, and his home is in Nara, Japan's ancient capital. Even stranger, his name is Sakurai, the same name as the place near Nara where Sima Dadeng lived. He tells me his wife has a very big heart. She likes foreigners. Come and stay at our house, he says. One month. Two months. However long you like. I tell him I've been to Nara a few times. It's a beautiful place. I remember some Japanese.
“Nara wa, aki ni naru to, utsekushi desu nee!”
(“Nara! When fall comes, it's beautiful!”) He says he's in the bamboo-flooring business. He buys the bamboo material in Thailand and imports it to China for manufacture and sale. He says he can't sell it in Japan. Business is bad. We make more small talk. After a while he excuses himself and leaves.

I sit looking out at the slow-moving landscape and thinking about Nara.

I daydream. Maybe if Buddhism is to survive in the West, it should get rid of its metaphysical baggage and go back to what Bodhidharma originally stood for. Western philosophy has managed to rid itself of much metaphysics, and Bodhidharma's Zen, as it appears in the West today, might benefit from the same attitude. The West is about rationalism. In a certain sense, so was Bodhidharma. Where should the Bodhisattva Vow, a big part of Zen in the West, fit into the whole picture?

The morning drags on. Then Mr. Sakurai again appears in the door and says he wants to show me something in his train compartment. I follow him there. He has a big wooden box. Inside is a piece of Chinese pottery, heavily glazed and oddly shaped, a tall cylindrical vessel that looks like a bumpy pipe with stubby wings. Its glaze displays a twisted and bumpy amalgam of green, blue, and pink hues.

“A business partner gave me this as a present.”

I'm struck with a sudden realization that he's hoping he can give it to me.

“It's big,” I say. “You can't carry it.”

Sakurai shows me that there's a little sticky price tag on the thing that says it costs eighty thousand yuan, more than ten thousand dollars. Now I'm really afraid he wants to give it to me.

I tell him, “If you take it back to Japan, your wife won't like the color.”

He laughs. He knows I don't want it.

“Everywhere I go in China people give me big books,” I say. “It's impossible to carry them.”

I examine the thing more closely. It's awful.

“Too bad that in Japan you have sliding doors and not hinged doors,” I tell him. “You could put umbrellas in it and keep it out of sight behind the door.”

Sakurai breaks out laughing. He closes the box.

We walk back out into the train corridor together, and he suggests we have a beer in the dining car. We take the few steps to that car and sit at a table. Sakurai orders a beer, and I order a coffee. I haven't had any beer or wine, any alcohol of any kind, for a long time. He lights a cigarette. I decide I should accept the world a little more, and so I sit there uncomplaining while he smokes, hoping I won't catch bronchitis. After my coffee is gone, I order the first beer I've had since I can't remember when. We talk about the world and how hard the recession is for everyone and what it's like to try and survive in business. Finally we arrive in Shanghai. He's made me promise, and I agree, to meet him for a drink that evening. Cigarettes or not, Sakurai is really an engaging, friendly man. Nara is a beautiful place. I'd like to go there again, maybe for a month or two.

That evening I find my way to Jenny's Blues Bar near Huaihai Road to meet Sakurai. When I arrive he is already there, sitting at the bar. I pull myself up on a bar stool and order a beer, wondering if there will be a live band. I like blues and have even seen some great Chinese blues musicians perform in Hong Kong and China over the years. Two girls behind the bar take my money and give me the beer. There's no live music, they say, just recordings. They are interested that Sakurai and I can speak Chinese, and we all chat for a while. Then a young woman appears walking among the customers. She's dressed in a Tiger Beer outfit, including a bright yellow sash with the Tiger Beer logo on it. She sees that I've ordered an American beer and pitches to me that my next one should be a Tiger. I promise her I'll order Tiger next time.

Sakurai is a little drunk. We continue chatting with the bartenders, and I notice that an older woman, who appears to be managing the place, is interested in our conversation.

Sakurai frequents this place and has his own private bottle of whiskey that he drinks whenever he comes here. He talks about Thailand. He says he likes the Thai people a lot and starts talking about how polite they are. The older woman stands nearby, listening to Sakurai. She has a deeply pained expression on her face. She obviously is the boss, as she directs the girls working behind the bar about various small tasks. I wonder why she looks so aggrieved and exhausted.

Sakurai notices that one of the girls working behind the bar is new and asks her where she comes from. She says she's from Anhui Province. Then she asks me if I know where Anhui is located. I say that of course I do, for that's the place where the sacred mountain of Dizang Bodhisattva, one of the four great Bodhisattvas of Chinese Buddhism, is located.

Then the older woman chimes into the conversation. “Have you been to that place?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say. “Quite a few times.”

She's surprised I know about the mountain. “Do you know what is special about Dizang?” she asks.

I say, “He goes into hell and liberates beings that are there.”

Oddly, it seems that both the older woman and the girls tending the bar know all about this bit of Buddhist lore.

The woman's face is almost contorted in pain. Obviously she wants to talk about something. Finally she tells her story. Recently she began following a Buddhist path. She tells me this directly, as I gather that Sakurai already knows her story, as do the girls behind the bar. She has a teacher, she says. Her teacher is in the Mizong (“Tantric”) Buddhist tradition like the one Shanli follows. Then she seems to break down, and the story floods out. She's owned the bar since 1994 when she divorced her philandering husband. Her twenty-nine-year-old son, named Bao Jun, died a few months ago of a heart attack. They were eating ice cream on Huaihai Street near Shanghai's famous Cathay Theatre. She thought the pain he was experiencing was from the cold ice cream. Then he was dead. He was her only child. The woman's face takes on an incredible expression of tragedy as she speaks about her son. She describes how
his personality was outgoing and kind, and he worked on projects to help people, like a new school that she was helping him establish for poor children. She shows me his photos on a computer screen that sits at the end of the bar. He appears smiling and happy in each photo. His sudden death has caused his mother to doubt everything. Now she seeks answers in Buddhism and bodhisattvas. She tells me she asked her Buddhist teacher if she could continue selling alcohol. He said she could, but she must be very careful. Now she avoids letting any customers get intoxicated. She tells me more about her son. He managed his own coffeehouse where he made a point of paying people high wages and treating them well. He was a little overweight. She jokes that he was a
pangzi
(an endearing term meaning “fatty”), but he wasn't that much overweight, really just average on the American scale. Look, she says to me, at his open, deep eyes, that showed an acceptance of everything, nothing held back.

“When he died, I stayed in my house for five days and didn't come out. They all came to get me.”

I notice that as we are talking the girls working behind the bar have drawn near and are listening to our conversation intently, and the girl in the Tiger Beer getup is doing the same. Perhaps they hope I can offer some solace to this woman, who is their boss, whose world has collapsed and who has turned to Buddha.

“I have money. I have everything I need,” she says. Then she pauses. “I just feel that . . .” She pauses and then continues, “Everything in the world is dirty.”

We talk for a while about Buddhism. She says she will go to Jiuhua Mountain in Anhui Province and pray to Dizang, the bodhisattva that travels into hell to liberate the unfortunate beings there. She will take the precepts with her Buddhist teacher. She's not sure how much longer she will do business. She asks me, a foreigner who she thinks knows a little about Buddhism, why her son died.

During the Heyin Massacre of 528, when the general Er Zhurong slaughtered hundreds of government officials and others of the Northern Wei Court, a young military commander named Hou Jing escaped the
carnage by fleeing to a Buddhist temple and hiding out there. Said by Chinese historians to have been a crude opportunist, and sporting the nickname Little Dog, he inveigled a command in Er Zhurong's forces and then, possessing the unprincipled ruthlessness necessary to such a position, was appointed to a high rank in his army. Subsequently, along with Er Zhurong, he led marauding troops in victories over rival forces in North China. Within a short time Er Zhurong himself was killed through betrayal, but Hou Jing, ever the opportunist, parlayed his battlefield successes and reputation to become a commander of new political factions. He made a point of sharing the spoils of his conquests among his troops, especially by rounding up all the women in a defeated countryside and giving them to his soldiers for their amusement. After the establishment of the Eastern Wei dynasty in 534, the emperor ordered his general Hou Jing to occupy and govern the area of Henan, which bordered Emperor Wu's Liang dynasty to the south. During this time, Little Dog learned of the weakness and corruption that had spread in Emperor Wu's empire. He proclaimed, “I'll call on my troops to roam everyplace beneath heaven. I'll cross the [Yang-tse] river, capture that old-timer Xiao Yan, and make him the abbot of Great Peace Temple!”

The emperor of the Eastern Wei well knew Hou Jing's wide-ranging ambitions and feared that when he died his dangerous general might try to deny the emperor's son the throne and take it himself. So, prior to his death, the Wei emperor took steps to make sure his son could stop any power grab by Hou Jing. His preparations were successful, for when the emperor passed away, his son did stop Hou Jing's attempt to seize the throne. Now isolated and seen as an enemy of the Wei, Hou Jing appealed to his southern enemy, Emperor Wu, offering to turn his back on the Wei and place his territories under Emperor Wu's Liang dynasty. Although most officials in Emperor Wu's court were horrified by the idea, the eighty-three-year-old Emperor Wu decided to accept Hou Jing's offer. Suffering mental decline, the emperor claimed that he had a dream in which he took control of China's Northern Plain. Sycophants in his court proclaimed the dream was a harbinger of Emperor Wu unifying the country, and the emperor chose to follow this fateful path.