A very holy Daoist mountain, monk meetings, genuinely old Chinese temples, mountain-top marriages, and music in the night.
Dali China News Service,
WEIBAOSHAN:
We accepted the monk’s offer and stayed the night in the magnificent old Daoist temple.
The mountain we were on was Weibaoshan, one of the least known of the 14 holiest Daoist mountains in China. It is about two hours from Dali Town. The temple stood in the middle of a national park, a preserved jungle thick with old trees and undergrowth, and full of sounds and species like only a jungle can be.
This temple had stood there for three centuries, give or take a decade or two. It had beauty in every line, a fine echo of the best of the Qing Dynasty. Few of its kind stand today – genuinely old, and a treat to eye and soul.
The ravages of time, nature and man had spared it – or maybe it was simply too old, too holy. There had always been a temple in that place, since the Western Han Dynasty at least, two thousand years ago.
Monk vs. Monk
The monk was younger, thirty years of age, as we later learnt. He had long hair tied at the back in a pony tail, a fair growth of beard and rather shy eyes.
He had been in the temple for ten years and spent his time there, except to go to other temples higher up for the occasional prayer or social meeting. He had been learning tai ji from his master up the hill for a couple of years. People also dropped in on him from time to time (When we came in, a small group detached itself from a game of Chinese chess and left, throwing curious glances at us.)
We had our own monk with us, but this one was Buddhist: our friend Xiao Lin. Well, he wasn’t a monk yet, not officially until the ceremony he is to participate in a few months from now, but he had been putting a lot of preparation into it. His presence offered a sort of spiritual dimension to this meeting of minds. It was also a meeting of monks.
We sat inside the main room of the living quarters that stood off to one side of the temple. We were parked on short stools around the tea table. The monk brewed tea and poured it out for the three of us first – Xiao Lin, Sun Haibo and your correspondent – and then himself. Sometimes the caretaker of the temple joined us. The tea was locally grown – it had a strong sweet smell. Yes, he smoked, and accepted Sun’s offer of a cigarette.
Wood and wonder
Once our bodies were rested and our stomachs full of tea, he showed us around the temple.
It was called Chang Chun Dong (长春洞), which loosely but badly translates to Long Spring Cave. Even the signposts on the way there say ‘cave’ but in truth it is only a vain attempt to bridge the language gorge. There is no cave, even in Chinese – ‘dong’ could mean cave, but it could also mean a variety of things – the circle of light seen from within a cave (or anything similar), Daoist, a hermit’s abode…
The main deity was the Jade Emperor Yu Huang Da Di (玉皇大帝), the emperor of the heavens.
We took our time soaking it in, sometimes with outbursts of admiration – now the woodwork on the door, now the ceiling – other times in silent reverence. The stone lions that guard the gates of most Chinese temples today are clearly new, with the lines cut sharp. The aged lions that were the sentinels of this temple were so faded you could hardly make out their features, couldn’t tell if the men who sculpted them were masters or not – but you knew they were ancient. Surely they had been there before the Qing. The only things that clashed a bit with the antique grace were parts of the paintwork – very recent and with little aesthetic contribution.
Then it was time for the monk to have his dinner so the three of us went out to soak in the trees and bird calls (we’d already had an early meal back down in town).
The wooden gates of the temple stand overlooking a little clearing. From the main entrance gate to the mountain where we landed up that afternoon it took us a half-hour walk downhill on a stone pathway to get there. The jungle stood tall and dark green on both sides. The first sight of the temple we caught was the temple tops and wall, glimpsed through the foliage, and soon enough we were there. A few metres from the gate there was a spring. Further away was a clearing with a large pile of firewood, and a few old trees fringing it. From the right spot, you could see the high green hills beyond.
The other pilgrims
Next morning, we politely declined the monk’s offer to join him for breakfast and continued on our little pilgrimage.
The whole mountain has a generous scattering of temples, most of them old. Our walk over the mountain the next morning took us past half a dozen of them. One was called the general’s house – a local general – which also featured a temple. We had tea with the old timer caretaker – all of seventy he was, at least – while his wife brought us hot water.
It was only when we got to the top of the mountain that I realised I was not the only foreigner around. The other was a Swiss gentleman with a Chinese girl in tag. They were in the temple at the top, with the two old ladies who caretook the place. When we walked in they were taking photographs in the mandatory permutations.
The old ladies seemed intent on feeding us, and we were feeling rather empty too, so we said fine, two bowls of noodles and one of rice. Vegetarian or meat? they wanted to know. Two meat, one veg (Xiao Lin had given up meat, among other bad habits). They didn’t want money, and would take the hundred kuai that Sun offered only when we clarified that it was for the temple, not the food.
We waited, and passed the time with idle chatter with the other pilgrims. We asked what they’d been doing, and the girl turned rather shyly to the man and repeated the question. “Oh,” he laughed, “we came along yesterday, and the place is so amazing that we decided…”
On their hands shone new gold wedding rings. They had met in Rishikesh in India, a holy mountain, and it seemed an odd coincidence that when they married on another holy mountain in China far away, an Indian (your correspondent) should have been the first to wish them joy.
Ideal -isms
The pleasant irony of the meeting of the Buddhist and the Daoist monks was that it was a tongue-in-cheek metaphor for what happened to religions – or philosophies – in China ages ago.
Daoism, like Confucianism, is native to China, and had a large belief base a long time before Buddhism made its entry from India. When it did, all religions had to evolve – Buddhism to conform to local traditions of thought and worship, adopting ideas, concepts and terminology from the other two big philosophies, and Daosim and Confucianism to keep themselves up to date, at the cutting edge of tradition, to keep its share of mindspace in a climate where Buddhism was making rapid advances in popularity.
So the lines differentiating the various philosophies run slim. The walls of one Daoist temple we saw on Weibaoshan featured a painting of an Indian monk, most likely Bodhidharma, the South Indian monk who came to China and took Zen Buddhism (in Chinese ‘Chán’ 禅)to the temples of Shaolin. (Some say he brought along an ancient Indian martial art called Kalaripayattu too.)
At another of the temples on the way, we asked an old lady, and she said it was a Ru Shi Dao (儒释道) temple. It roughly means a Confucian Buddhist Daoist temple.
The right spirit
The night we stayed at the temple, we were sitting around drinking tea – this was past sundown – and the mention of alcohol came up. Our host pointed at a bottle that I’d been wondering about for a while – it looked a very pale yellow sort of water – and explained that it was highland barley alcohol, with the flavor of a fragrant flower that grew right outside.
Sun wanted to know if he drank and he said yes, occasionally, but he wouldn’t indulge today. Sun and I accepted a small cup each (it was rather strong stuff), and then were startled to see Xiao Lin say ‘yes’ too: he’d stopped drinking some time ago. He replied to the effect that he could not decline an offer from his brother monk from across philosophies. Indeed he drank with great relish, and accepted one more cup, which he downed and slapped down on the table with grunts and much smacking of lips.
(The next day at breakfast, Sun asked him, now that he’d partaken in wine, would he touch meat? He said ‘no’ very emphatically.)
Later that evening, just before we turned in to bed, the three of us took the torch we’d borrowed and went to the loo, which was in a building outside the temple walls. I finished first and came out into pitch black and the noises of the jungle at night. As I stood listening another sound broke in – a Chinese flute, the one I had seen lying on a table in the room we’d been sitting in. It was the monk making music.
The others said they had trouble sleeping because of the mosquitoes, but I slept a sound sleep that night.
by Arun Veembur
veembur@gmail.com
