Do not think that through the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas you can obtain good fortune, cure disease or avoid disaster. No matter how big a donation you make, they cannot grant you such requests. Keep your good money for buying patriotic bonds and you can create infinite happiness for society.
Hunger made many monks return to secular life. By 1958, nine years after the revolution, ninety per cent of Chinese monks and nuns had left their monasteries for the world outside, or had died of starvation. The abbot of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda was forced to leave the monastery and had to make a living selling coal from a handcart. Duan was an orphan and had nowhere to go, so he stayed on where he was, barely surviving on cornflour porridge and vegetable leaves.
His old monastery was shut down in the 1960s and the government Religious Bureau assigned him to the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. There were three other monks and also four cadres from the Xian Municipal Cultural Bureau, ostensibly to protect the pagoda but also to keep an eye on the monks. They forbade them to shave their heads, wear their robes, make offerings to the Buddha and Bodhisattvas, or conduct the morning and evening services in the shrine hall. In fact the shrine hall could be used only for political study sessions or struggle meetings. They did allow the monks to say prayers in their own rooms, but not too loudly – that would disturb other people working in the monastery.
Normal religious life was resumed, however, when there were foreign Buddhist delegations. Buddhism helped China to develop friendly foreign relations, especially with Japan, Sri Lanka, Burma, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. The monks’ presence would show that the Communist Party, though not religious itself, respected religious freedom for its people. When there was an important visit, the cadres would collect monks from all over Xian to simulate the appearance of a functioning monastery. The monks were carefully rehearsed in the questions that might be asked.
Duan was even trained at the Chinese Buddhist Seminary in Beijing to answer every kind of question. ‘That was when I learned a lot about Xuanzang and how important he is, not just for us monks, but for Buddhists throughout Asia,’ he remembered. ‘They told us Master Xuanzang was a trump card, very important. In fact he was our only card. We were not allowed to talk about anything but him. I guess there was nothing to say about our religious observance – we did not have any. So all we could do was to show the delegates the sutras that Xuanzang translated, which we were not allowed to read. Then we brought them to the pagoda and told them how we remembered the great man on his anniversary with special ceremonies – which of course we could not hold. Before they left, we gave them a portrait of Xuanzang from a rubbing and told them how we were carrying forward his great legacy. All the time Party officials watched us. Then the delegation left, convinced of our freedom of worship, and we returned to our so-called normal life.’
Much of Duan’s life was taken up by relentless political studies. ‘We were asked to surrender our black heart in exchange for a red heart faithful to the Communist Party,’ Duan said. Week after week, sometimes for months on end, they studied the works of Mao and editorials in the People’s Daily. Then they had to hand in reports of what they learned from their studies.
I asked how much he had really taken on board.
‘A lot of it was beyond me,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t see why we should spend weeks studying the new marriage law. It had absolutely nothing to do with us. Perhaps they knew all along we were going to be sent home and get married so it would do us good to know what our rights were as husbands.’ He gave an awkward laugh.
Was there a lot of pressure for him to marry?
‘Plenty,’ he sighed. ‘Sometimes monks and nuns were put in a room together and were told they couldn’t leave until they agreed to marry.’ There was a nunnery on the outskirts of Xian. One day the abbess came to see Duan and asked if he would take care of one of the novices. ‘The nuns suffered more than us monks. Officials spread rumours about them, saying the nunnery was a den of vice and the nuns were prostitutes. Many could not bear it and left, and the nunnery had only two novices and the old and weak staying on,’ Duan said. He told the abbess that he would think about it, and eventually he agreed. But then the girl died suddenly. He thought it might have been suicide. ‘I felt very guilty; maybe if I had agreed sooner, I would have saved her life.’
Under the unremitting pressure from the government, two of Duan’s fellow-monks finally gave in and got married. Then officials badgered him daily, asking him when he would make up his mind. There was a woman, a water-seller outside the monastery, whom Duan had seen around for ages. She was a widow from the village, with four children to support. He thought, why not?
By then he had been a monk for nearly thirty years. That was the only life he knew: simple, quiet living, with just enough to eat and three items of clothing; content and secure, sheltered by the high monastic walls. Now the routine and the structure were gone – no drum to wake him up in the morning, no services and prayers to shape his day, and no beautiful chanting and great masters to reinforce his belief. He must have found it terribly hard in the real world. I looked round the room we were sitting in – it was antiquated, as if it had not been touched for decades. There was practically no furniture, just a saggy, torn sofa and a refrigerator standing in a corner. Next to it, a small rickety altar with a tiny statue of Guanyin. The bare walls held only a huge Mao portrait dominating the room.
‘He was born to be a monk,’ Mrs Duan interjected before her husband had a chance to say anything more. ‘When we got engaged, a dreadful woman in the village started slandering us, saying we weren’t really man and wife because monks are like eunuchs. I begged him to do something.’
‘What did you do?’ I asked.
‘What’s there to explain? What does it matter?’ Duan said.
Their honeymoon was hardly over when the Cultural Revolution began. Duan still remembered the day when the Red Guards stormed the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. It was early one evening in the summer of 1966 and they were about to have supper. Suddenly there was a thunderous noise outside. Before they realized what was happening, a group of Red Guards broke in, shouting, ‘Smash the old world, build a brand-new one!’ Two of them came into his cell and grabbed the scriptures from his table and threw them on the floor. They ordered him to tread on them to show his support. ‘How could I? They were the holy words of the Buddha. I would incur so much wrath, I would be condemned to hell for ever.’ He refused.
The Red Guards stamped on the sutras themselves. ‘Confess, and we will deal with you leniently; resist, and we will punish you severely. Think carefully. We will come back for you tomorrow.’ With that warning, they left the cell.
Outside, some Red Guards were putting up Mao’s portrait and posters in large characters, while others were throwing ropes on to the big Buddha and Bodhisattva statues in the shrine hall. The cadres from the Cultural Relics Bureau rushed in to stop them, saying those and the Big Wild Goose Pagoda were not feudal objects but the nation’s treasures, from the time of the Monkey King – they had a certificate from the State Council to prove it. The Red Guards were caught by surprise and stood there, not sure what to do. Then one of them started pulling down the silk banners that were hanging from the ceiling. ‘These cannot possibly be state treasures,’ she said harshly. In a few minutes all the banners were thrown outside, joined by the monastery’s precious collection of sutras, many of them Xuanzang’s own translations, and other ancient manuscripts. They asked the monks and cadres to come out and stand around the pile, as witnesses to their revolutionary action. Amid mad shouting and clapping, they set the lot on fire. The fire went on all night.
The Big Wild Goose Pagoda survived, but the loss for the whole country was unbelievable. In 1949, there were some two hundred thousand Buddhist monasteries throughout China. One campaign after another accounted for many of them – they were either demolished or turned into schools, factories, houses and museums. By the time the Red Guards finished their work and the Cultural Revolution was over, barely a hundred remained intact. In Beijing, there were, once, more than a hundred monasteries and temples, and now only five belong to the monks. Grandmother