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But Xuanzang was far from content. The more he studied, the more dissatisfied he felt. Chan masters, or Zen as the world now calls the school, would tell him that we all had in us the purest, unspoiled mind, the Buddha-nature, but it was defiled by erroneous thoughts; if only we could get rid of them, we would experience awakening. This could happen any time, at any place – while you were drinking tea, hearing a bell ring, working in the field, or washing your clothes. But Zen placed much emphasis on meditation that enabled one to go beyond logic and reason, the stumbling-blocks to enlightenment. How do you get a goose out of a bottle without breaking the bottle? This was the sort of question, or koan, that Zen masters would ask their disciples to jolt them out of their analytical and conceptual way of thinking, and to lead them back to their natural and spontaneous faculties. Reciting the sutras – the teachings of the Buddha – and worshipping his images were no use at all. As a famous Zen master said, ‘If you should meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.’
But Xuanzang was told by masters of the Pure Land School that practising Zen was difficult and laborious, like an ant climbing a mountain. Instead he should simply recite the name of Amitabha Buddha, who presided over the Pure Land of the Western Paradise. The Bodhisattva of Compassion, Guanyin, is his chief minister. Often portrayed in Chinese temples with ten thousand hands and eyes, Guanyin is ever ready to go anywhere and lead the faithful to the land of purity and bliss. Once there, in the company of Amitabha, anyone can swiftly achieve enlightenment. Guanyin became Xuanzang’s favourite deity and he would pray to her whenever he was in difficulty. She was also Grandmother’s favourite, and that of all Chinese Buddhists.
The followers of the Tiantai School, based in the Tiantai Mountains in eastern China, claimed, however, that they had found the true way. Buddhism was introduced into China in the first century AD and with the help of Indian and Central Asian monks, most of the major sutras had been translated into Chinese by Xuanzang’s time. The Tiantai School made the first comprehensive catalogue of the large number of sutras and synthesized all the various thoughts and ideas. They came to the conclusion that the entire universe was the revelation of the absolute mind, that everyone possessed the Buddha-nature, and that all truth was contained in the Lotus Sutra alone. You could forget about all the others.
Xuanzang never ceased to examine the different schools, but he told Hui Li that despite all his efforts, he was never free from doubts. Each of the schools claimed to know the quickest way to enlightenment, but he found them wildly at odds with each other. Was it because the sutras they read were in different translations? The early Indian and Central Asian monks did not speak Chinese and the sutras they had translated were not always accurate. But what troubled him even more was whether all the schools were authentic. The Chinese were very practical and down-to-earth, not given to abstract concepts and metaphysical speculation, and had no time for abstruse doctrines and convoluted logical debates. This was why they preferred the instant enlightenment of Chan or winning a place in paradise through recitation. It seemed all too easy. Xuanzang knew well that the Buddha’s path to enlightenment was long and arduous. He was far from sure that everyone had the Buddha-nature, and he could not believe enlightenment was to be reached without fundamental understanding of the nature of reality and the mind.
Xuanzang decided to go back to Chang’an where the head of the rebels, Li Yuan, had crowned himself the emperor in 618 and established a new dynasty, the Tang. He thought he might find some masters there who would help him clear the doubts in his mind. He was particularly keen on Yogacara, the most abstract and intellectual school of Buddhism which held that everything in the world was created by the mind. But no one could shed light on it. His brother did not want to leave: they had already acquired a reputation for themselves and he thought they should stay put. So without telling him, Xuanzang left with some merchants.
Back in the capital, he studied with two masters ‘whose reputation spread beyond the sea and whose followers were as numerous as the clouds’. But even their interpretations differed and he told Hui Li that he was at a loss to know whom to follow. One day he met an Indian monk, who told him that Yogacara was very popular in India, particularly in Nalanda, the biggest monastic university. Xuanzang’s interest was aroused. He had long sensed there was a vast ocean of Buddhist wisdom, which he could perceive only dimly. A pilgrimage to India would give him direct knowledge of Buddhism and clear all his doubts. Once he set his mind on the journey, he started making preparations: taking Sanskrit lessons from Indian monks, gathering information about the countries along the way from the Silk Road merchants in Chang’an, reading accounts of early pilgrims to India, looking for fellow-travellers, and exercising to make himself fit. Meanwhile he sent a request to the imperial court for permission to go abroad, but in vain. There was a coup in the imperial palace: the young Emperor Taizong had just come to the throne after killing his brothers and forcing his father to abdicate. People were not happy; there was the threat of more rebellions. Everything was in flux and nobody was allowed to travel.
But Xuanzang had to leave, imperial approval or not. One day he had a dream in which he saw Mount Sumeru, the sacred mountain at the centre of the universe in Indian and Buddhist mythology. It was surrounded by sea but there was neither ship nor raft. Lotus flowers of stone supported him as he crossed the waters, but so slippery and steep was the way up the mountain that each time he tried to climb he slid back. Then suddenly a powerful whirlwind raised him to the summit where he saw an unending horizon. In an ecstasy of joy he woke up; he believed he had been shown a vision of what he must do – he must go to India and learn the teaching of the Buddha at its source.
I returned again and again to reading about Xuanzang. It was as if a new person was entering my life, someone to whom I was strongly drawn, wise and calm, brave and resourceful. He did go to India, but on his own, with no magical protector. The more I learned about him, the more extraordinary I found him, and the more puzzled I was. Why had I known so little about him? After all, my education was full of the emulation of one hero after another. What was it that had kept him away from me, and from most Chinese? I had to find out. I had to separate fact from fiction. Gradually I realized all the clues were in my own family. Only I was part of it, and could not see them.
My father was an ardent Communist. He joined the People’s Liberation Army in 1946, when he was sixteen, and marched from northern China to the southern coast, helping to bring the whole country under Communist control. Then he saw duty in Korea for eight years. In the process, he joined the Communist Party, rose through the ranks and became a firm believer in Marx, Lenin and Chairman Mao. When he came back from Korea in 1958, he divorced the wife arranged by his parents, and fell in love with and married my mother, a beauty twelve years his junior.
My maternal grandmother was a Buddhist, the only one in our family. Most men and women of her generation believed in Buddhism one way or another. Mao’s own mother did, and under her influence the young Mao worshipped the Buddha too, even attempting to convert his father. Ever since Buddhism spread to China in the first century AD, it had struck a chord in the hearts of the Chinese. They had their indigenous beliefs, Confucianism and Daoism. While Confucianism emphasized the order and harmony of society where everyone had their place, with the emperor at the apex, Daoism concentrated on the search for the eternal, unchanging nature that unifies the individual with the universe, with the ultimate goal of achieving immortality in this world. Neither said anything about the question most of us wanted answered: what would be waiting for us after we departed from this world? The Buddhist doctrine of karma and paradise allayed Chinese anxieties about the afterlife, and satisfied their desires for longevity, for justice, and also for compassion. In the end, in this land already possessed of a long history and strong culture of its own, Buddhism adapted, survived and blossomed, despite opposition and frequent persecution.
Father had a deep affection for Grandmother. He never talked about it but he was full of regret and remorse about abandoning his own parents – he never saw them again after he joined the army; his mother went mad missing him and drowned herself, and his father died too while he was in Korea. He treated Grandmother with enormous respect and kindness. She had bound feet and it was very hard to buy shoes for her. Every time he went on a work trip somewhere, he would search all the department stores and always came back with a few pairs. Grandmother was very grateful; she would say to my mother: ‘How lucky you are to have such a wonderful husband! Kindness and prayer do pay.’
For all his affection, Father found Grandmother’s behaviour embarrassing. She made no secret of her faith and was kind to people who were in political trouble and shunned by everyone else. Father asked my mother to talk to her about the matter. My mother worked in the nursery of my father’s regiment and she was very aware of the political pressures. She had seen too many people being denounced for an innocent remark or for no reason at all. Grandmother was a potential threat to Father’s career in the army. The Party had its eyes and ears in the neighbourhood committees, which knew exactly what went on in every household. Father could get into trouble for not ‘keeping his house in order’ and not taking a firm stand against feudal practices and the enemies of the people. Long before I was born, my parents had persuaded Grandmother not to go to the temples, or burn incense at home. My father even sold her ‘superstitious article’ – a little bronze statue of Guanyin and her most precious possession – to the rag-and-bone man.
Grandmother was deeply hurt. The statue was her amulet. She thought her prayers had been effective: her children and grandchildren were healthy; her daughter was lucky to have found a good husband; her son-in-law was safe from political persecution. Perhaps she got the point from my mother’s explanation. Particularly at that time, when my father’s job in military supply was keeping the family fed while so many were going hungry. The great famine which began in 1959 and claimed over thirty million people was coming to an end, but the country was still suffering. Farmers back in Grandmother’s village were too weak to plough the fields; factories were shut down; very few children were born – starvation had made women infertile. On top of everything, parts of China were going through appalling drought, while others were afflicted by severe floods.
Reluctantly, in the face of all the misery the Party relaxed its grip, not only in its economic policy but also in its ideological control. But what followed took Mao and the Party by surprise: the masses who had survived the hunger immediately returned to their old gods and goddesses for solace and divination – they even built new temples. They were not just old ladies like Grandmother, but even Party members. Mao must have found this very discouraging, particularly after thirteen years of intensive campaigns to educate the masses and implant socialist ideas. He had lost confidence in the Marxist-Leninist ‘law’ that religion would fade as socialism developed – it was on this basis that a guarantee of freedom of religious belief had been included in the Constitution. Mao resorted to his old method, mass campaigns. The Campaign against Superstitious Activities and the Socialist Education Campaign began in 1963, the year I was born.
They were some of the biggest programmes Mao launched prior to the Cultural Revolution. Hundreds of thousands of civil servants, teachers, doctors, artists, engineers and soldiers were sent to the rural areas to reinforce the Communist ideology. My father went to a commune near his military base. For four months he helped the farmers with their work, ate with them, and slept in their huts to gain their confidence. He spent days and nights persuading the activists of the village to target what the Party regarded as the residue of feudalism: traditional Chinese medicinal practice and funeral customs, fortune-telling and arranged marriage, and visiting local temples. Father lectured them not to put their faith in God, but in the Party, echoing a verse of the time written by a loyal farmer:
God, O God, be not angry,
Step down as quickly as you can.
I revered you for a long time,
And yet you changed nothing
And our farms were still ploughed by the ox.
Mechanization is now being carried out,
I request you to transform yourself.
But instead of helping him root out the die-hard believers, the locals took advantage of the struggle meetings he organized to voice their grievances. They told him about the suffering and deaths in their villages during the recent famine – the worst they could remember. They begged him to go back and tell the Party the real problems in the countryside. Superstition was not on their minds – survival was.
Father had a frustrating four months, and he was even more disappointed when he returned home. I was born, his third daughter. Despite Mao’s claim that women were half the sky and the absolute equal of men, my father desperately wished for a son to keep the Sun family line going. A veteran Communist, he none the less believed in a dictum of Confucius, as all Chinese had done for more than two thousand years: the biggest shame for a family is to fail to produce a son. Now my mother had borne yet another girl, instead of the much-wanted boy. Father was so disappointed he did not even visit Mother and me in hospital. We were left there for three days and it was Grandmother who brought us food and took us home. Years later Grandmother told me what happened – the only fight she ever had with Father.
She prepared a special meal to welcome Father, Mother and me home. But Father, even while he was gulping down the dishes that Grandmother conjured up, could talk about nothing but his headaches and successes during the campaign. ‘They were really backward in the villages. Even the cadres weren’t good Communists. They allowed temples and family shrines to be rebuilt. We had a good go at them. We banged away at the village officials, then we asked them to identify the most superstitious people. If they didn’t cooperate, we would take away their jobs. There were some really stubborn ones; you can guess where they ended up.’
When Father had finished his meal, he cast a casual glance at me in the pram, shook his head, and sighed. He turned to my mother. ‘Why didn’t you give me a son?’
My mother was very apologetic. Back in her village, there was a saying: ‘A hen lays eggs. A woman who cannot produce a son is not worth even a hen.’ Years ago Father could simply have taken a concubine to give himself another chance. He could not do that now but he had other ways of showing his displeasure. And I, the unwanted girl, could not be drowned as in the bad old days; instead I would bear the brunt of his disappointment.
Then Grandmother made a rare intervention; ‘It wasn’t her fault. You should blame me.’
‘What has it got to do with you?’ Father asked impatiently.
Grandmother said she felt responsible for my birth. In the Lotus Sutra there is a passage which many Chinese, Buddhist and even non-Buddhist, passionately believe: ‘If there is a woman who desires to have a son, then she should pray to Guanyin with reverence and respect, and in due time she will give birth to a son endowed with blessings, virtues and wisdom.’ My mother desired a son as much as my father and grandmother, but she was a Communist and would never think that praying, even to Chairman Mao, let alone to anyone else, would get her a son. So Grandmother decided it was her job to do the praying for our family. But she could only say her prayers at home, silently and late at night. She could not go to the temples and bow in front of the statue of Guanyin; she could not offer incense to send a message to her – Mao had all the incense factories switched to making toilet paper in 1963. Grandmother thought it was unpropitious: if the goddess did not hear her prayers or receive her message, how could she ensure a much-desired son for our family? That was why my parents were given a girl, an inferior being.
Father looked at her in disbelief, apparently wondering whether Grandmother was serious. He had been fighting superstition in the countryside, but here it was, rampant in his own home. Suddenly he thumped the table.
‘What nonsense are you talking?’ he yelled. ‘To hell with all your superstitious crap. What is so good about your gods up there? If they’re as good as you boast, how come they let people live in such misery before? How come they were so useless in protecting your children? You know what? They are not worth a dog’s fart.’
Grandmother was shocked by the anger in Father’s voice – they were the harshest words she ever heard from him. She picked me up and went quietly back to our room.
From very early years, I had felt I was the unwanted daughter in my family. The one person who always cared for me was Grandmother. I shared a bed with her, head to toe, until I went away to university. My earliest and most enduring memory was of her bound feet in my face. The first thing I learned to do for her, and continued doing right up to my teens, was to bring her a kettle of hot water every evening to soak her feet. The water was boiling and her feet were red like pigs’ trotters, but she did not seem to feel it – she was letting the numbness take over from the pain, the pain that had never gone away since the age of seven when her mother bound her feet. It was done to make her more appealing to men. The arch of her foot was broken, and all her toes except for the big one were crushed and folded underneath the sole, as if to shape the foot like a closed lotus flower. On these tiny, crippled feet, she worked non-stop every day from five o’clock in the morning: making breakfast, washing clothes in cold water, cleaning the house and preparing lunch and supper seven days a week – both my parents were too busy with their work and the endless struggle meetings they had to attend. The only time she gave to herself was this daily ritual of foot-soaking to soothe the pain, restore her strength and prepare her for another day. She took her time. She massaged her feet gently and slowly, unbent the crushed toes one by one, washed them thoroughly, and carefully cut away the dead skin. After I took away the dirty water she would lie down and we would chat for a while. She would say to me sometimes, pointing at her feet: ‘It is tough to be a woman. I’m glad you did not have to go through this.’ Then she would add: ‘Life will be hard for you too. But if you can take whatever life throws at you, you will be strong.’
I was not sure what she meant. Father was very harsh with me; he would slap my face if I reached for food at table before everybody else, or had a fight with my sisters. I thought she was sympathizing with me for what he did; she was powerless to protect me, however much she wanted to. I was too young then to be able to imagine the trials life might hold – I knew no real pain, nothing like that Grandmother had suffered.
She was born in 1898 in a small village in Shandong, a great centre of Buddhism on the eastern coast. There were three temples in her village; the biggest one, the temple of Guandi, the God of Fortune, was only a hundred metres from her house. She saw it every morning when she woke up. It was tall; the statue alone was three metres high, carved by the village men in stone from the nearby mountain. It was always bustling with people who came to pray that Guandi, with his indomitable power, would help them to make a fortune. But it had no place for women; the temples for the God of Earth and for Guanyin were where Grandmother went and prayed, for rain and sunshine, for a good harvest, for sons instead of daughters, and for evil spirits to stay away. April, October and the third day of the Chinese New Year were particularly busy in these two temples. People came with clothes, carts, horses, cows, boats, money and anything else you could think of, all made of paper. They were burned to commemorate the dead. In April you changed your summer clothes and in October your winter outfit; and nobody should go without money for the New Year, particularly the dead.
Grandmother was married at the age of seventeen to a boy of thirteen; such was the custom in that part of China. The boy’s family gained a daughter-in-law, a servant, a labourer and a child-minder all at once. Grandmother cooked for the whole family, did all the chores in the house and helped with work in the field. She took over from her mother-in-law the responsibility of looking after her child-husband. She dressed him in the morning, took him to school, washed his feet in the evening and made sure he did not wet the bed. She cuddled him at night and told him about things between men and women. Occasionally he tried to put this information into practice but it did not come to much. In Grandmother’s words, ‘It was more water than sperm.’ But she was not annoyed because her husband really was a child. Bringing him up and making him a man was expected of every woman in Grandmother’s world. And then, when their husbands were in their prime, the women were often old and exhausted, which gave the men the perfect excuse to take concubines. It was a rotten deal for women but Grandmother did not feel it that way. She accepted it. When her young husband finally acquired the knack of lovemaking at the age of sixteen, they had their first child, and then eight more in the next seven years. With one acre of land, two donkeys and a mule, nine children and one ‘big child’ – her nickname for Grandfather – life, as Grandmother said, was ‘sweet as moon-cake’.
Then terror struck. Within a week, three of her children caught smallpox. There was no doctor, and an old woman in the village told Grandmother to mix ashes with cow’s urine as a medicine. The eldest son and two of his sisters died, choking on the mixture. The village had a custom that if you placed mirrors on your roof, the devils would be too dazzled by the light to come in and trouble your family. She did that and also put peach branches under her children’s pillows to ward off any hungry ghosts. But none of it worked. In the following two years, dysentery took away another four of her children. She cried for days on end; her hair turned white and she became almost blind. She wanted to take her own life but she had to live on for her remaining two children. She was so scared of losing them that she had them adopted. My uncle went to a family of eight boys and three girls, and my mother to a family of five girls and two boys. Grandmother hoped that the sheer number of healthy children in those two households would give her son and daughter some protection. If the others could survive, hers would too. Her children spent most of their time with their adoptive families, playing, eating and sleeping in their houses and giving a hand in their fields. They were hardly hers any more. She was heartbroken, but they were alive and she was happy for them.
As if she had not suffered enough, my grandfather died of an unknown disease, probably stomach cancer, when Grandmother was still young – she lived well into her nineties. A good-looking woman with seven dead children and a dead husband could not be a good omen. People in the village began to shun her, as if contact with her would bring them bad luck. They would go the other way when they saw her coming; the foster-parents of my uncle and mother forbade their children to visit her house; even farm labourers did not want to work on her land. She was half blind; now she hardly spoke.
Grandmother was desperate to know what crimes she had committed to deserve such harsh punishment and what she should do now to make sure her son and daughter would survive. One day she met an itinerant monk who was passing through her village. He told her that she must have done something terrible in her previous life and now it had caught up with her. He took out a small statue of Guanyin and gave it to her. If she prayed hard and recited the name of Amitabha, her son and daughter would be safe and she would unite with all her children in the Western Paradise. From that day on, Grandmother was a changed woman. She no longer burst into tears when she saw children playing in the street. She stopped reminiscing about the deaths in her family to anyone who cared to listen. To support herself and her children, she spun silk from cocoons for a local middleman who sold it to the big cities. And she prayed and recited Amitabha’s name day and night.
Even today, I can remember clearly the night when Grandmother told me all this. Grandmother did not sleep very much. Whenever I woke up in the middle of the night, I always found her sitting there. Most of the time it was too dark to see her but occasionally her face hovered above me in the faint light of the moon. She looked serene; her eyes, almost blind, looked up as if searching for something; her white hair glowed in the moonlight; her lips were moving quickly but silently while she dropped things continuously into a bowl in front of her. Once I asked her what she was doing and she said she was counting beans to pass the time because she could not sleep. I said I could ask my parents to get some sleeping pills for her. ‘Don’t bother. Old people don’t need much sleep,’ she told me with a gentle smile. ‘Please don’t tell your father about it. He has quite a lot to worry about as it is.’
I thought nothing of Grandmother’s sleepless nights until one day in the early 1980s. When life resumed its normality after the tumult of the Cultural Revolution, The Monkey King was the first classic Chinese novel adapted for television – an ideal medium for bringing alive its colourful characters, fantastic stories and magical elements. It was an astonishing success. I, like the whole country, was glued to the box for two months. Every boy in our neighbourhood had a plastic cudgel; everyone could sing the theme song; adults talked about nothing but last night’s television. Even Grandmother, who was half-blind, joined us. The magic was still there, and I was lifted once again out of the mundane world.
One night I woke up to find Grandmother in her usual position and counting the beans. Her posture and expression struck me at once as familiar, not because I had seen them so many times but because they reminded me of something. But what? Then it occurred to me that the monk in The Monkey King sat like this to pray whenever he was in trouble, with the same concentration and calmness; the only difference was that he had a long string of beads round his neck, which he never stopped counting. Was Grandmother praying? I asked her; she nodded. She was counting the beans to remember how many prayers she had said. I asked her what she was praying for. She said for her dead children and husband, for her to join them in paradise, for me not to suffer too much as the unwanted daughter, for my brother, for us all to be healthy, for us to have enough to eat, and for Father not to be a target in the endless political campaigns.
I was astonished. I did not know whether to laugh or to cry. Looking at her, fragile as a reed and with deep lines of sorrow on her face as though carved by a knife, I felt immensely sad. I wanted to shake her by her slender shoulders and wake her up. How could she be so stupid? How could she be sure there was a god up there who would answer her prayers? How could she bank all her hopes on the next world that did not even exist? Why did she blame herself for my being a girl instead of a boy? Why had I never heard her claiming credit for the birth of my brother born four years after me? Besides, what was the point of having gods and goddesses who did nothing for her but made her feel she never did enough to please them? Somehow, though, I knew I would never convince her. My father did not succeed. Those beliefs sustained her all her life. They were her life, her very being. We were worlds apart.
Grandmother must have felt very lonely among us. Despite her love and affection for me, I and my sisters always sided with Father and made fun of her Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The relentless political drill that ran throughout my education had turned me, like most Chinese born after 1949, into a complete atheist. Buddhism was not only bad, it was dead, part of the old life, like the last emperor. As the Internationale says: ‘There is no saviour, nor can we depend on gods and emperors. Only we can create happiness for ourselves.’ The teachers told us that the only Heaven would be a Communist one and we must work for it. China had suffered centuries of wretchedness with no help from the Buddha. Chairman Mao changed our lives. We memorized a verse that was supposed to have been composed by Mao after he took up Communism:
What is a Buddha?
One clay body,
With two blank eyes,
Three meals a day are wasted on him,
With four feeble limbs,
He cannot name five cereals,
His six nearest relatives he does not know …
What should we do with him?
Smash him!
I recited the poem to Grandmother one night when we were following her foot-washing ritual. She did not say anything; instead she asked me if I wanted to hear a story. I nodded for I always liked her stories; some were as magical as those in The Monkey King.
A long, long time ago, Grandmother said, a pigeon was flying about searching for food. Suddenly it saw this huge vulture hovering over it. Frightened, it began to look for a place to hide but could find none. It could see no trees, no houses, just a group of hunters on their way to the forest. In desperation, the pigeon dropped in front of a handsome prince in the hunting party, begging for protection. The vulture descended too and asked for its prey back. ‘I am hungry,’ it pleaded. ‘I have had no luck for days and if I don’t eat something, I will die of hunger. Please have pity on me too.’ The prince thought for a while and said to the vulture: ‘I cannot let you starve. Let’s weigh the pigeon. I will give you the same amount of flesh from my own body.’ His courtiers were shocked, but the prince insisted and sent one of his ministers for a set of scales. Meanwhile he had a knife sharpened. The pigeon was put in one scale, and the prince’s flesh in the other. But no matter how much of himself the prince put on the scale, the pigeon was always heavier. The vulture was so moved by the noble prince he decided not to eat the pigeon.
‘What happened to the handsome prince? Did he die of bleeding?’ I asked Grandmother impatiently, forgetting all about the poem and the clay Buddha. ‘He did not die,’ she said. ‘He was the Buddha in disguise.’ I was so relieved, and got up to take the basin of water away. Grandmother told me many stories like this. At the time I thought that was all they were, tales of animals and heroes. But she was teaching me humility, self-sacrifice, kindness, tolerance: looking back, I can see now how much she influenced me.
My father left the army in early 1966, when I was three, and the whole family moved with him from Harbin in the far north, where I was born, to Handan. It is a small city, with a history going back to the sixth century BC – the remains of the ancient citadel are still at its heart. It is most famous among the Chinese for the numerous idioms which permeate our language. Everyone knows the phrase ‘Learn to walk in Handan’ – it means if you learn something new, learn it properly, otherwise you are just a dilettante. Father said we were lucky to live in this old, civilized place.
Father was made head of production in a state timber factory employing 400 people – but there was no production. Hardly had he settled down in his new job, when the Cultural Revolution began. It was to purge the Communist Party of anyone who was not sufficiently progressive, to shake the country out of its complacency, and to revive enthusiasm for the Communist cause. The Red Guards were the front-runners but the real players were the workers. My father’s workforce was busy grabbing power from the municipal government; people fought each other, armed with guns stolen from military barracks. The city and the timber plant were divided into two factions, the United and the Alliance, with the former in control and the latter trying to oust them. My father tried to persuade the two sides to go back to work but nobody listened to him. ‘Chairman Mao says revolution first, production second. How dare you oppose our great leader?’ one of his workers warned him. Eventually, Father joined the United faction: nobody could sit on the fence or they would be targets themselves. All our neighbours were United members.
My father often told us how much he regretted leaving the army. At least we would have felt safe inside the barracks. Our new home town reminded him of a battlefield, with machine-guns, cannons and explosives going off day and night. In this escalating violence, my mother was about to give birth to her fourth child. Grandmother was happy, her face all smiles. She told Father that all the signs of the pregnancy indicated that Mother would produce a son this time: her reactions were very strong, unlike the previous three times; she insisted on vinegar and pickled cabbage with every meal; her stomach was pointed but not very big; most importantly, two pale marks like butterflies had appeared on her cheeks. My father could not conceal his delight – he did not lose his temper as often as before. He spent many months deliberating on a suitable name and in the end he chose Zhaodong, ‘Sunshine in the East’. To him, a son would be as precious as the sun – but it had a double meaning: all Chinese had been singing ‘East is Red’ in praise of the Great Leader, Chairman Mao, who was like the sun rising in the east to bring China out of darkness.
The birth was complicated. Almost all doctors had been labelled ‘Capitalist experts’ and sent to the country or to labour camps for re-education; hospitals were taken over by the Red Guards, who were more interested in saving people’s souls than their lives. The constant fighting in the streets and the blockades put up by all the factions made the journey to the hospital impossible. Mother consulted with Father and decided it would be better to use the woman from a nearby village who served as a midwife – experienced if not trained. Unfortunately the baby’s legs came out first and the midwife panicked. She asked Mother to breathe deeply and push hard. The baby reluctantly showed a bit more of itself: it was a boy indeed but there he stuck, seemingly unwilling to come into this turbulent world.
Then Mother started bleeding heavily. Father was frightened to death and kept asking Grandmother what to do. Grandmother tried to calm him down but her teeth were chattering like castanets. While Father was pacing about like a caged animal, Grandmother knelt down and began to pray loudly to Guanyin, holding tight to Mother’s hand. ‘I have been praying to you for more than fifty years,’ she pleaded urgently. ‘If you have too much to do and can only help me once, please do it now. I need you more than ever. I am begging you.’ She promised she would do anything if the boy was delivered safely: she would produce a thanksgiving banquet for Guanyin for seven days; she would go on a pilgrimage to her place of abode in southern China even if she had to pawn her bracelet, her only piece of jade; she would tell her grandchildren to remember the loving kindness of the Bodhisattva for ever. While Grandmother was praying fervently, the midwife was pulling hard, as if it did not matter if a limb was broken as long as the boy was alive. When he was finally dragged out, he had his arms above his head, looking as though he had surrendered to the world.
With the baby’s first cry, Father fell on his knees beside Grandmother, thumping the floor with his fist and murmuring softly. He did not stand up until the midwife handed his son to him. He was beside himself: at last he had an heir. He was overcome with gratitude – but to whom? To Heaven, to earth, to Grandmother’s deity, to the midwife? Grandmother was still on her knees, praying. Tired or overwhelmed, Father knelt again beside her, praying too, or at least appearing to.
Of course Father did not believe for a moment it was the Bodhisattva Guanyin who saved his wife and son. But he was very grateful to Grandmother. Perhaps her prayer did help him psychologically: it gave him a gleam of hope when everything else seemed to have failed; it kept him calm and it had a soothing effect on my mother and the midwife. Some time later when I reported to my parents that Grandmother was muttering her prayer again in our room, my father told me not to tell anybody else. Then he said to my mother: ‘I guess praying is better than killing people and burning factories.’
After the birth of my brother, my father changed into a different person. He was not as enthusiastic about his job as before. He used to work really hard, going out before I got up and coming home when I was asleep. Now he often drank on his own. He even had time to play with us. He seemed to have lost interest in the revolution that was going on. As a soldier he had killed his enemies, but that was to liberate the country. In the land reform of 1950, tens of thousands of landlords and rich farmers were executed because they were the enemies of the people, threatening the stability of the new China. He did not think twice even when his own father was labelled a landlord, though his family had hardly more than four acres of land and employed only two labourers. He could understand why Mao sent half a million intellectuals to labour camps in 1957 after they had criticized the Party openly and fiercely. But what was it all for now?
My father often said that in the thirty years of his revolutionary career, he had never seen so much harm done in the name of a cause. He could not understand how an ideal that had inspired so much devotion in him had gone so terribly wrong. He never said much but it was obvious he was losing heart. He did not mind Grandmother praying at home; he even bought her candles for the Day of Ghosts.
After I entered middle school, my teacher encouraged me to join the Communist Youth League, as an induction into the Party: it was not good enough simply to get good marks; the most important thing was to have the right political attitude – only then could our knowledge be truly useful. Father had insisted that my two sisters join. But when I asked him whether I should follow them, he was vague. ‘There is no hurry. You should concentrate on your studies,’ he told me. I never did join the Youth League.
In 1982, I gained a place in the English Department in Beijing University. I felt like the old Confucian scholar I read of in the Chinese classics, who finally made it in the imperial exams and wanted to tell the whole world about his happiness. Out of millions, only a few hundred were chosen. I had heard of Oxford and Cambridge, both of which were considerably older, but perhaps no university occupied the unique position of Beijing University, absolutely the academic and spiritual nerve of the country. Perhaps only a Chinese would fully appreciate my good fortune. It was students of Beijing University in 1919 who first created the slogan ‘Democracy and Science’, as the cure for the ills of a China at the mercy of all the Western powers. It was two professors from Beijing University who started the Communist Party of China. Mao went there to study at their feet. It was one of the fiercest battlegrounds in the Cultural Revolution, and again it was there that the deepest introspection on the Cultural Revolution took place, just when I arrived.
Self-searching was rampant throughout the country: its most public form was the Scar Literature, the outpouring of novels and memoirs describing the unbelievable cruelty of the Cultural Revolution, suffered by individuals as well as the whole nation. The students went a step further. What caused this suffering, unprecedented in Chinese history? Never before was the whole nation, hundreds of millions of people, allowed to think only one thought, speak with one voice, read only one man’s works, be judged by one man’s criteria. Never before were our traditions so thoroughly shaken up, destroying families, setting husbands against wives, and children against parents. Never before was our society turned so completely upside down. The Party was barely in control, with all its senior members locked up or killed. Workers did not work; farmers did not produce; scientists and artists were in labour camps; not criminals, but judges, lawyers and policemen were in prison; and young men and women were sent to the countryside in droves for re-education. On top of the physical devastation, the psychological impact on everyone was even more poisonous. The Cultural Revolution brought out the worst in people. They spied on, reported, betrayed and murdered each other – strangers, friends, comrades and families alike – and all in the name of revolution. So much hope, so much suffering and sacrifice, and for what?
There were heated debates in our dormitory, in the lecture halls, in the seminars after class, and in a tiny triangular space right in the heart of the campus. Freedom to think and openness to all schools of thought – the ethos of Beijing University from its very birth – were in full flower. Coming from a small sleepy city, I was like Alice in Wonderland, bewildered and exhilarated at the same time. Thoughts and ideas flooded in with the opening up of China to the outside world, after decades of isolation – we breathed them in like oxygen. ‘Democracy and Science’, the slogan raised seventy years earlier, came to the forefront again. Could this be the solution for China? Certainly it seemed time to try something new.
When I described to my parents the stimulating life on campus, my father wrote back immediately, warning me not to follow the crowd. ‘You’re still young,’ he said, ‘and have just begun your life in the wider world. You have no idea how politics work in China. I’ve been through it all. Liberal thinking is never a good thing. The crushing of the intellectuals in 1957 is a lesson. Find some books in the library and read them, you will see what I mean. As Mao said, students should study. I think you should talk to the Party Secretary in your department, reporting to him your wish to be educated, judged and accepted by the Party. You perhaps know that being a member will be of great help to you if you want to stay in Beijing and get a job in government departments after your graduation.’ He ended the letter with ‘These are words from my heart. I hope you remember them.’
While the students in Beijing University were busy exploring how democracy could be adapted to suit Chinese conditions, I was given the chance to go to Oxford. It was 1986. When Grandmother heard the news, she could not sleep for days: ‘You are just like the monk, going to the West for new ideas,’ she enthused. ‘It won’t be easy but if you are determined to do good, you will have people helping you. You will get there in the end. When you come back, you can help the country.’
Father was very happy for me too. He had learned that the West was not a dungeon as he had been made to believe. Nevertheless he still warned me, in the only language he knew – that of Communist jargon: decaying capitalist society was no Heaven, and I should be vigilant and not allow decadent bourgeois thoughts to corrupt me. He insisted on coming to Beijing to see me off. I thought it was unnecessary: his health was poor and the train to Beijing was slow and crowded and anyway I would be back in one year. Then he said something that made me understand. Just before I boarded the plane, I gave him a hug and asked him to take care of himself. For only the second time in my life I saw tears in his eyes – the first was when my brother was born. ‘Don’t worry about me. This is your big chance, you’ve got to take it. Look at me, look at your sisters, look at what society has come to. Don’t get homesick. There is nothing here for you to come back to.’ When I turned around and waved him goodbye, I was shocked, and sad. As someone who had devoted his entire life to the revolution, he must have been in total despair.
My father died in 1997. He was strong and had never taken a day’s sick leave. But his depression ruined his health. He came down with diabetes, and soon was paralysed and became blind. His old work unit, which was supposed to look after him, could not afford to pay his medical bills and he refused to let me do it for him. His last wish was to be buried not in a Western suit I had bought for him, nor a traditional Chinese outfit, but in a dark blue Mao suit. It was a difficult wish to gratify – nobody wore one any more. We searched for three days before we finally found one in a little shop on the outskirts of the city. We wanted him to be buried in it because it embodied his lifelong hopes, his ideals and unbounded faith, even though he had died a broken man.
Many of my father’s friends, colleagues and comrades from the army came to his funeral. The occasion, the gathering, brought out their own anger and frustration. I could understand their feelings; they were just as my father’s had been. They had sacrificed so much, gone through so much suffering and deprivation for the revolution – and now they were told what they had done was wrong. They must embrace this new world of markets and reform – but they could not; they felt they had no place in it; it was against all the beliefs they had held throughout their lives. Their whole raison d’être had been taken away. They were betrayed; they were even being blamed for what had gone wrong. The bitterness of loss was crushing and the void left in their hearts was deep. They found it impossible to cope with a past that had been cancelled and a future so uncertain.
As is the custom, my mother and my sisters prepared a meal with several dishes to thank the visitors for their sympathy and support – they had all brought presents, and gifts of money that was later used to pay off my father’s medical bills. Mother was moved – their lives were not easy either. To her surprise, many of them left the meat dishes and ate only the vegetables. These were people who used to drink with my father, and feast on all kinds of delicacies such as pig’s trotters and ox tails. ‘How come you have all turned into monks?’ she joked with them.
‘We can’t be monks. We are old Communists,’ one of them laughed, and then added, ‘it’s good for our health. And it’s better not to kill anything.’
I wanted to ask the old men about what they believed. In his last years my father often reminisced about Grandmother, and regretted his harshness towards her, especially selling her little statue of Guanyin. He did not become a Buddhist but in the twilight of their lives, I knew some of his oldest friends had actually turned to Buddhism, the very target of their earlier revolutionary fervour.
But before I had a chance to question them, they asked me if I had become a Christian. I shook my head, telling them I still did not know what to believe. ‘Many Chinese are going to church. You live in England and you don’t go to church?’ one of them said. ‘She should be a Buddhist,’ another one interrupted him. ‘She is Chinese after all. Buddhism is the best religion.’
Buddhism was making a come-back in China. In the early 1980s, the government had issued a decree allowing a limited revival of religion. As a Marxist would put it, the base had changed so the superstructure had to change too. The decree allowed for the 142 most important Buddhist monasteries damaged or destroyed in the Cultural Revolution to be restored or rebuilt. Monks and nuns in their orange and brown robes once more became a regular sight in towns and villages. In the cinema and on television, young people watched for the first time the lives of great Buddhist masters, albeit all kung fu wizards or martial arts heroes, who used their fantastic skills to save a pretty woman or impoverished villagers. The faithful could go to the temples, make offerings to the Buddha, draw bamboo slips to tell their families’ fortunes, and join monks and nuns in their chanting of the sutras and other Buddhist rituals. In a way, it resembled the old days when Buddhist monasteries were among the most important centres of Chinese life. They were a source of spiritual comfort but also of practical help with birth, illness, death and other crucial events in life. They received the infirm and the insane who were abandoned by their families and reviled by society. They gave the disillusioned and the discontented the perfect retreat, where they were asked no questions and given the space they needed. Many Communists, including senior Chinese leaders, had been sheltered in monasteries when they were hunted by the Nationalist government.
Observing these changes, I found myself thinking more and more about Grandmother. When I visited a temple, I would light incense for her; in the swirling smoke, the image of her counting beans in the night came back to me again and again. Sometimes I read a sutra and found the stories in it very familiar – they were among those she had told me in our long foot-washing sessions. The forbearance, the kindness, the suffering, the faith and the compassion were what she embodied. I felt many of the elements she had tried to instil in me were slowly becoming part of me. I began to see how extraordinary her faith was. She had suffered so much, enough to crush anyone, let alone such a frail person. Her faith kept her going, even though all she could do was to pray on her own in the dark, without temples and monks to guide her, and derided by her own family. Her beliefs made her strong despite her lifelong privations. She was illiterate but she knew the message that lies at the heart of Chinese Buddhism, the certainty and the solace. That is why she wanted me to follow her faith and acquire the strength it gave her. I never gave it a chance, rejecting it early on without really knowing what it was. Now I wished I could believe something so profoundly.
It was about the time of Father’s death that I decided to go on my journey and follow Xuanzang. I had been inspired through my early education by the idealism of Communism, but the intellectual ferment and questioning I was exposed to at Beijing University stayed with me. With Father’s death and the collapse of his world I lost all that remained of my attachment to the cause he gave his life to. I knew I was lucky, I was free and I had not suffered like my forebears and my fellow-countrymen. But like so many Chinese, I felt strongly that something was missing. The idea of a confirming faith dies hard. I was increasingly unsure of where I was going, why I was doing the things I did; I was at a loss, and pondering. Probably when I made the decision to go I wanted some clarity in my life, and the journey would give me a very clear objective.
Of course, I could have just sat in libraries and read about Xuanzang. But I knew that would not be enough. I did not think I could find a different outlook just by reading. The Chinese have a saying: ‘Read ten thousand books; walk ten thousand miles.’ I wanted to explore for myself, to make sense of everything I had been reading about Xuanzang and about Buddhism. He found his truth by going in search of the sutras – I had to go and look for mine.
It would be a spiritual journey for me but physically demanding too. Travelling along Xuanzang’s route would not be easy. In his time, covering those 16,000 miles through some of the world’s most inhospitable terrain, not knowing what he would encounter, required enormous courage and strength of will. What inspired him to brave the unknown and keep going for eighteen years, and what did he inspire in others? Was it the same faith that had sustained Grandmother? How did he maintain his equanimity and remain indifferent to flattering royalty and aggressive bandits? How did he manage to achieve so much? If I followed him, perhaps I would come to understand his life, his world and the tenets of Buddhism. I would also learn how much Buddhism has contributed to Chinese society, a fact well hidden from me and my fellow-countrymen. And perhaps I would find what I was missing.
When I told my mother about my plan, she exploded. Why was I going alone to those God-forsaken places in search of a man who died more than a thousand years ago? I must be out of my mind. Was I unhappy living in England? What was it for anyway? But she knew she could not stop me. I told her I would not be away for eighteen years. Many of the places Xuanzang visited no longer exist, or at least no one knows where they are; some, like Afghanistan, I could not visit. I would go only to the key places that mattered to him personally, and were important for the history of Buddhism. I would be travelling for no more than a year.
My little nephew Si Cong was also concerned. He had been completely gripped by yet another cartoon series of The Monkey King on television. It looked magnificent with the latest computer graphics and special effects. It was on every day at five o’clock when children came back from school. Would I have someone like the monkey to protect me? he asked me, while his eyes were fixed on the television. I said no. He quickly turned around. ‘What happens if you run into demons? They’re everywhere. Even the monkey can’t always beat them. You’ll be in big trouble.’ I told him the demons would not eat me because my flesh was not as tasty as the monk’s and it would not guarantee their longevity. He seemed relieved and went back to the magical world of The Monkey King.
It set me thinking, watching with him and looking at the steep mountains clad with snow, the deep turbulent rivers, the sandstorms that swept away everything in their path. Soon I would have to encounter them myself, not in fiction but in real life. I would pass through dangerous and strife-torn places; I might be robbed, or put in situations beyond my control. Whatever might happen, I would try to face it. Xuanzang would be my model and my guide.
TWO (#ulink_58449c2c-3a95-5ef4-88fb-e054f8fa3aad)
Three Monks at the Big Wild Goose Pagoda (#ulink_58449c2c-3a95-5ef4-88fb-e054f8fa3aad)
IN AUGUST 1999 I took a late-afternoon train from Handan, my home town, to Xian, the capital of the early emperors for much of the first millennium. It was where Xuanzang began and ended his travels. I was conscious that I was starting the most important journey of my life. But for the other people in my hard-sleeper compartment, the first order of business was food. As soon as the train started moving, the man opposite me produced a big plastic bag and unwrapped the contents. An amazing banquet slowly appeared: roast chicken, sausages, pot noodles, pickled eggs, cucumbers, tomatoes, melons and dried melon seeds, apples, pears, bananas and six cans of beer. The Chinese have suffered so much from starvation and famine that eating is rarely far from their minds. Everyone followed suit. Before long, they were sharing food, finding out each other’s names, where they were going, and why.
Privacy is not a concept we understand in China. We have lived far too long on top of each other, as in this six-bunk compartment, off a narrow corridor without doors. Conversation reduces the tension and makes life tolerable, but it is not small talk; more like an interrogation. After ten years in England where you can choose to live and die without knowing your neighbours, I was uncomfortable with the intrusion. I took out a book about Xuanzang and tried to read, but that was no protection. A single woman travelling on her own makes her fellow-passengers curious. Whether for business or pleasure, the Chinese like to do it in groups. Xuanzang tried very hard to find companions, but in vain, owing to the emperor’s prohibition against travelling abroad. I had also asked several monks myself. They were over the moon; pilgrimage to the land of the Buddha was the dream of every Buddhist – they would even gain merit from it should they need it for their rebirth in the Western Paradise. And to follow in the footsteps of Master Xuanzang! He was a model for them. His indomitability was an inspiration for them in their struggle for enlightenment. Many of the sutras they read every day, their spiritual sustenance, were his translations. His selflessness in giving his life to spreading Buddhism, not seeking his own salvation, was the ideal of the Bodhisattva, and of all Chinese monks. And for me, to see their reactions, to hear their thoughts, to ponder their reflections and to ask them questions – I would have learned so much more and understood Xuanzang better. I was not so fortunate, oddly enough for the same reason as Xuanzang: Chinese monks were not allowed to go abroad, unless they were on an official mission.
The men and women in my compartment quickly determined they were all going to Xian for business: the men were in engineering and the women in quality control. Then they turned to quizzing me, firing rapid questions like well-trained detectives. Who are you? Where are you going? Why? I told them I was following Xuanzang. They fell silent for a moment, then erupted into questions.
‘You mean you are really following that monk in TheMonkey King, the one who went to India? Are you really going all that way?’
I nodded.
‘Why? Are you a Buddhist?’
I had hardly finished answering him when the man sitting next to me put his hand on my forehead. I stiffened. ‘I want to see if you are running a fever,’ he said. His colleagues laughed and I relaxed.
‘If you really want to travel, why don’t you go to Europe, or America or Australia? I wouldn’t go to India if you paid me! It is so dirty, so poor, worse than China.’
‘If you want to write about Xuanzang, why don’t you talk to some academics in Xian and make it up? Do you really think all the scholars do such hard work? You must be joking.’
They went on for some time, trying to dissuade me. After the lights were switched off the woman above me knocked on the edge of my bunk. ‘You really shouldn’t make this trip,’ she said. ‘It’s too dangerous. Why don’t you join our group and have a good time in Xian?’
We arrived in Xian early next morning, by which point my companions seemed to have become used to the idea that I really was going on my journey. Perhaps they thought I was a bit crazy. The men all helped me with my luggage. I told them I could manage on my own. ‘Save your energy. You have a long way to go. You don’t have the Monkey King to help you. You must take care of yourself,’ they said, smiling and waving from the platform.
