But Duan did not share my sadness and regrets. ‘I am so pleased the pagoda has survived,’ he said, ‘but even that will go one day. Nothing is permanent. When you look at our monastery today, you think it is great. When I first came here, the monastery was run-down and overgrown with weeds; wolves hovered at the gates. It has been repaired a few times since then. And now it looks its best. But in Master Xuanzang’s time, this was just the monastery’s cemetery, where they buried the ashes of distinguished monks. The monastery itself was a hundred times bigger, if not more, with thousands of rooms, and any number of halls, all connected by streams like in a garden. It could even compete with the imperial palaces in beauty and grandeur. But it is all gone. So what we think of as lasting does not actually last.’ He gave me time to take in this very Buddhist view. ‘Didn’t Chairman Mao say, “Without destruction, there is no construction”? The destruction of the Cultural Revolution gave us Buddhists the opportunity to show our devotion and to accumulate merit for the next life by building new monasteries, bigger and better.’ He paused. ‘You know, when the Buddha first began promulgating the Dharma two thousand five hundred years ago, he and his disciples simply slept under the trees and begged for alms. We don’t even have to have monasteries.’
Did he ever think of resuming monastic life now religion was allowed again? Duan did not hesitate for a moment. ‘My wife was very good to take me on in difficult times and has looked after me all these years. The Dharma teaches us to show compassion for all sentient beings. She is getting old and needs me more than ever. How can I leave her? If I have no compassion for her, how can I talk about compassion for anybody else?’ He paused, and then added, looking at his wife: ‘If she passes away ahead of me, I would like to return to a monastery to spend my remaining days there: that is, if any monastery will take me.’ Mrs Duan was all smiles now.
As a Buddhist, Duan attributed his return to secular life to his bad karma. ‘I must have left some important task unfinished in my previous life, or obstructed someone unintentionally,’ he said. ‘That’s why I could only spend half of my life as a monk. You can’t escape your karma.’
I find it difficult to accept that Duan was being punished for past sins, that all those people during the Cultural Revolution had done something wrong to deserve their suffering, just as I cannot accept that Grandmother’s misfortunes were due to the wrongs of her previous lives. I am still struggling with the idea of karma, a linchpin of Buddhism. For Buddhists, the differences and inequalities in the world can not be explained as simple accidents: they are the working of karma. Why is one born a millionaire, another a pauper? How could Mozart write such heavenly melodies in his teens while others are tone deaf? The Buddha said you reap what you sow: we are the result of our karma, although we can make it better or worse through our own efforts. What I can appreciate is the virtuous effect of believing in it: instead of blaming others and bearing grudges, Duan would always look deeply inside himself and think how he could improve.
They offered me a glass of hot water, with a spoonful of sugar in it – it was all they could afford. I thought about everything he had told me. ‘You have had such a hard life,’ I said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I won’t say it has been easy. We were very poor when I was small. We lived by begging, and slept at the city gate. I often passed out with the cold; sometimes I woke up with frozen corpses around me. Then my parents died of starvation and my uncle, who could not even feed his own children, left me outside a monastery, and the monks took me in. At least I had food, clothes, a roof over my head. I survived. Life improved after the revolution.’
‘But how about everything that happened to the monasteries and the monks? Was that not suffering?’
‘We went through many painful things. But the Buddha says suffering is a fact of life. It depends on how we look at it. To me, not to have anything to eat is suffering. I haven’t starved since I became a monk, so I can’t say I have suffered.’
That night in my hotel room, I could see the pagoda from my window. Mr Duan must be doing his meditation and saying his prayer now, I thought. Before we parted, I had asked him what he prayed for. ‘To be a monk again in my next life,’ he said. I had meant to ask him about Xuanzang and his teachings and find out what exactly were the doctrines he went to India to find. I did not. But Duan’s life had given me something more to think about. Monasteries would be destroyed, but he had a shrine inside himself which was inviolate. In his room, he prayed silently, holding fast to his belief, living by it, unperturbed by all that happened to him. For him, the whole world is a meditation hall, where he put the teaching of the Buddha into ultimate practice. In my eyes, he was a real monk, though a monk without a robe.
I went back to the monastery the next day to have a closer look at it. It was hard to appreciate that what I saw was only the cemetery of the original community. There was still a group of stupas to the right of the pagoda. Originally stupas were built to house the ashes and bones of the Buddha. But gradually over the centuries, they were devoted to lesser and lesser beings, but still of great distinction: the masters who had come closest to enlightenment, the heads of Buddhist sects, the abbots and revered monks of the monasteries. Stupas are supposed not only to commemorate the departed but also to inspire future generations. They are distinguishable by their size but above all by the number of tiers on the spires above the base, with the highest being nine for the Buddha himself. According to my guidebook, Xuanzang’s relic stupa was in a separate monastery built specifically for it. The stupas here were all very similar except for one in the shape of a truncated obelisk standing on a lotus flower. The monk’s name, Pu Ci, was carved on one side, while the others bore the date of dedication and decorative flowers. It was delicately made. But there were no tiers, suggesting someone of lowly status. And unlike all the others, there was no epitaph giving information about the deceased. I was wondering what this stupa was doing here in this distinguished company when a young monk walked by. I stopped him and asked if he could tell me anything about Pu Ci.
‘You don’t know about him?’ he retorted. Then he seemed to consider something. ‘But then, why should you, I suppose? He saved us. Without him, I would not be here today. The Big Wild Goose Pagoda would have been just for you tourists. He was a brave man, a true Buddhist.’
I must have looked as puzzled as I felt, when he launched into an explanation of how the government had decreed in 1982 that any monastery with no monks in residence by the end of the Cultural Revolution would be used for public purposes. ‘Pu Ci managed to stay on here, so the Big Wild Goose Pagoda is still a monastery. Without him, it would have been turned into a park or a garden. But he suffered for it.’
If Duan had suffered so much, I could not bear to think what this monk must have gone through.
The young monk said that Pu Ci was the only one who wore his robe throughout the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards ordered him not to but he simply ignored them. They organized struggle meetings in the shrine hall and made him kneel on the floor and confess his motives for carrying on his ‘feudal practices’. He refused to say a word. What was there to say? He had been a monk for so many years and the robe was like his skin. Outraged by his silence, the Red Guards started beating him. Every time they hit him, he uttered the name of Amitabha. They did not know what to do with him. He was locked up to repent but he just meditated all the time. They thought he was mad so eventually they left him alone. I asked how he would have dealt with the blows raining down on him?
‘He probably would think of one of the ten attributes of a Bodhisattva. It is called khanti, meaning patient endurance of suffering inflicted upon oneself by others and forbearance for their wrongs. There are lots of stories about khanti in the scriptures and it is one of the qualities that monks try to cultivate. And he obviously achieved it,’ said the young monk humbly.
I remembered one of the old priests at the struggle meetings in my childhood. I could not forget how serene he was. Now I understood what kept him so calm when he was spat on, when he was made to kneel on broken glass. Deep inside, he would have prayed not for the stilling of