Stone Bell Temple lay ahead. I had hoped my friends might learn about the importance of its holy grottoes and their carvings, many created in the Song and Tang dynasties, with the more recent ones completed in the Ming, several hundred years in the past. By seeing a medley of ancient Nanzhao, Bai, Dai, and Tibetan images, they might have sensed how streams of minority tribes’ religions had joined the dominant—and often domineering—Chinese river of thought. The Han Chinese have always been good at absorbing motley beliefs yet maintaining their own as paramount. Even the Mongols and Manchus, who had conquered and ruled them since the thirteenth century, had assimilated Chinese ways and had virtually become Chinese themselves. Think about this, I would have said to my charges: as we go into this temple, think about the influences of tribes, invaders, and rulers upon one another. You see remnants of their effects in both religion and art, in essence those areas that are expressions of the spirit.
The bus rumbled on. The tribe they were about to meet was the Bai, and my twelve friends would have a profound effect on them, and vice versa.
“Hey, Dad,” Rupert called out, holding up the page from my notes, “get this.” He began to read what I had written: “‘One of the shrines is most aptly named the Grotto of Female Genitalia.’” Rupert snickered through his nose in an unattractive way and neglected to read further, where I had written the following: “Many tribes in this region believe that creation begins from the womb of darkness and death. Thus, there is a profound reverence for grottoes. This particular grotto is unspectacular but delightful, and contains a rather plain and small shrine, about twenty inches in width and twenty-four in height, and carved simply in the shape of a vulva surrounded by labia onto which have been inscribed tributes over the centuries to fertility. The grotto symbolizes fertility, and fertility is fervently worshipped in China, for to lack fertility is to lose one’s family line, and a family without heirs is consigned to oblivion, darkness, and the permanence of death.”
No, sad to say, my queasy friends did not read this, although their imaginations had become quite fertile. The Grotto of Female Genitalia: What could such a curiously named place look like? Collectively, the women envisioned a primordial cave emanating warmth, mystery, comfort, safety, and innate beauty. The men pictured a cleft in the mountain with overgrown bushes behind which was a tiny entrance that led into a moist cave, and Bennie’s imagination further embellished is as dark, slimy, and filled with screeching bats.
Before they reached their destination, however, the travelers saw large domed ovens on the left side of the road, smoke spewing from their vents. What were they baking? Miss Rong made rectangular shapes with her hands, and pointed to homes and walls. Loaves of bread? Oh, bricks and tiles! Marlena suggested a photo stop, Wendy agreed, and Vera, ignoring the groans of the men, who believed a shopping spree was about to take place, raised her palm to order the bus driver to pull over.
Esmé was the first to see the water buffalo on the right side of the road. It appeared to be stuck, with mud up to its belly. Why was it blindfolded? And why were those men whipping it? Wendy began scribbling madly in her journal. Bennie sketched a quick impression.
Miss Rong happily explained that this was how the mud was “smashed” so it would be soft enough to place in the molds. And the buffalo’s eyes were covered so the beast did not know it was going in circles. All twelve travelers were now transfixed as the buffalo plowed its wretched Sisyphean route. ’Round and ’round he stumbled and lurched, haphazardly and endlessly, his great body heaving to take another breath, his nostrils flaring with fright as the whip came down across his hindquarters.
“Man, that is one miserable existence,” Roxanne said. The others echoed similar sentiments.
Esmé was close to tears. “Make them stop.”
Miss Rong tried to ease their discomfort. “This is karma,” she tried to explain in her rudimentary English. “Past life this buffalo must be doing bad things. Now suffer, so next life get better.…” What she was trying to say was this: Your situation and form in life are already determined before you are born. If you are a buffalo suffering in mud, you must have committed wrongs upon others in a previous existence, and thus, you deserve this particular reincarnation. Perhaps this buffalo was once a man who killed an innocent person. Maybe he was a thief. By suffering now, he would earn a much cushier reincarnation in the next go-round. It’s an accepted way of thinking in China, a pragmatic way of viewing all the misfortunes of the world. You cannot change a buffalo into a man. And if a buffalo does not mash the mud, who else would do this job?
Miss Rong blithely continued her philosophical talk: “So family must having a house, house must having bricks, buffalo must having smash mud. Do not be sad, this the way of life.…” She enjoyed the opportunity to inform her charges of Buddhist ideas. She had heard that many Americans, especially those who travel to China, love Buddhism. She did not realize that the Buddhism the Americans before her loved was Zen-like, a form of not-thinking, not-moving, and not-eating anything living, like buffaloes. This blank-minded Buddhism was practiced by well-to-do people in San Francisco and Marin County, who bought organic-buckwheat pillows for sitting on the floor, who paid experts to teach them to empty their minds of the noise of life. This was quite different from the buffalo-torture and bad-karma Buddhism found in China. Miss Rong also did not realize that most Americans, especially those with pets, have great sympathy for animals in misery, often more so than for miserable humans. Animals, with their inability to speak for themselves, the pet lovers believe, possess innocence and moral purity. They do not deserve cruelty.
If only Miss Rong could have posed the situation in better English and with more comprehensible cases of comparison: For a man who rapes and murders little girls, what is a satisfactory punishment? Should he not be turned into a beast of burden who lives in mud and is whipped every waking hour so that he might learn what suffering is and thus become a better being in his next incarnation? Or should the villain be paraded about town to the jeers of a crowd, as they do in some countries, placed in a burlap bag, tossed over a cliff, and then dismembered so that he will have to walk sans penis in hell? On the other hand, as has been described in both Christian and Chinese hells, would it be more just if he were consigned to a vat of oil, one that boils eternally and in which each moment is as unbearable as the first dip of the toe, so that his horror is endless, without any hope whatsoever of redeeming himself? Given my present state, I weighed which of these various hells was least horrific and thus most appealing, and I hoped that my current state of limbo would not lead to my learning which was true. I hoped I would not come back as a mudsmashing water buffalo.
Thus saddened by this tour of Buffalo Torture, the travelers continued their bus journey to the grottoes. As the road climbed into the mountains, Marlena and Harry were interested in taking note of the scenery. It was an excuse to lean their faces together and make small talk. “Those are poplars, I believe.…” “Look, eucalyptus.” “What are those?”
Moff, who was sitting behind them, answered in a bored voice: “Willows.”
“Are you sure?” Harry said. “They don’t look it.”
“Not all willows are the grand weeping variety.”
He was right. These willows were a scrubby, fast-growing kind that can be cut back often for kindling. Higher up, the willows gave way to long-needled pines, and trudging along the road was a phalanx of Naxi women collecting the fallen needles.
“What do they use those for?” Marlena called out to Miss Rong.
Miss Rong struggled to say it was for the animals. Everyone assumed she meant that the animals ate the needles, which is not so. In the winter, the animals nest in the needles to stay warm, and in the spring, the Naxi women use the manure-soiled needles as fertilizer when they plant the new crops. With a limited diversity of life, there is greater diversity of purpose.
“Where are the men?” Wendy demanded to know. “Why aren’t they out there breaking their backs?”
“Yes, very lazy,” Miss Rong joked. Then she added, “They play outside, do poetry.” She was partly right. The rest she knew but didn’t know