Notes from Shanghai (and China, generally), part 2

We’ve been having an incredibly busy, informative, and fun time here in China. Just before I introduce the things I’ve been writing here so far, I want to apologize to any readers who found a rather perplexing post that was up here for a few hours, that should have gone onto a private family blog…

Anyway, here are the main things I’ve been intending to put up here.

Between Thursday April 29 and Saturday May 1 or so,
I managed to write the following notes about experiences I’d had during the
previous ten days or so:

Hangzhou, including tea gardens and a Buddhist
temple
Some dinner conversations
Tibetan Buddhism in Beijing

Hangzhou, including tea gardens and a Buddhist
temple

I’m writing this Thursday afternoon, China time. We’re in Beijing
now: we came here from Shanghai on Tuesday. I haven’t written anything
for the blog for so long! I have a lot of catching up to do. I want to
start by writing a little about what we did while we still in Hangzhou,
on Sunday and Monday.

In addition to being a large provincial capital and evidently the
center of a lot of industry, Hangzhou is also very famous in China for
its gardens. We were staying in a very well known area called West Lake,
which stretches westward from the city. I think the main lake, which is
maybe two kilometers by one kilometer, was all man-made (Managua?) It has
a few little islands in it, and a causeway that stretches the length of
it, from north to south, near the western edge. And then all around it
are little subsidiary bodies of water, all surrounded by lovely landscaping.
Walkways thread along through all the gardens, and when they have to cross
water they do so by means of exquisite little bridges.

Lots of Chinese people like to visit Hangzhou in the spring! The
main menace is the tour buses all over the place. On Sunday evening, after
yet another great dinner, Brantly, Ann, Bill, and I decided to walk back
to our hotel by means of the long causeway. At each end of it there were
lots of people, but in the middle it was not too crowded. The menace there
was the cyclists, who were clearly defying all the ‘No Cycling’ notices as
they bore down on us at some speed… But each side of the causeway was lined
with lawns and willows. Everybody was having a good time. So we did, too.

Before that, we had driven out to some of the tea gardens that stretch
westward from very near the edge of the lake. At that point, the ground
rises into a series of small but steep hills, most of which are far too
steep to cultivate. But the tea growers have pushed their terraces of tea
bushes as far up the hillsides as they can. The tea from this region is,
it seems, quite renowned: it is the Long Jin (Dragon Well) tea, and the
best picking season is in spring. Actually, we were there a little later
than the peak of the picking, which I think has to occur in March. But
each bush is subjected to multiple pickings during the growing season, with
each picking producing just the green tip and one infant leaf.

The road we took out through the tea gardens is lined with tea-tasting
and tea-selling places. We stopped in one, sampled the tea, looked at
the huge, electrically-heated, wok-type metal tubs in which the fresh-picked
leaves are lightly roasted, and then Lipeng, our guide and friend from ECNU
insisted on buying us some of the product there as a gift.

Then we drove on, via a short stop at a garden called “Nine Gullies
in the Misty Mountain”, to a massive pagoda built beside the river. The
pagoda is called something like the Pagoda of the Six Harmonies. It has
twelve stories. We climbed as high as we were allowed–maybe to the eighth
or ninth level. The view from the top was fantastic: out over Hangzhou,
to the east, with a couple of large bridges spanning the river between
us. A tiny toy train chugged across the lower level of one of the bridges.
There was a lot of construction going on on the Hangzhou side of the river:
we counted more than 15 high cranes in just one small section of the river-bank..

On MOnday morning, we four visitors got up early and walked across
to one of the nearby islands at around 6:30 a.m. As we walked around it,
we found a gate leading to a park, and it turned out out as we climbed the
steep, wooded hillside inside the gate that the park took up most of the
island. We climbed and climbed to the top, and once there we found a series
of platforms on which, at that time of day, people were out doing their
various, and very graceful, exercizes. We wandered on along the hilltop.
“There must really be a market for someone to have a little tea-house up
here,” I said. And lo and behold as we turned the next corner there was just
what we were looking for.

The way the Chinese people serve the very best green tea is in large,
clear glasses that have a heavy, solid glass base. They toss in a small
handful of tea leaves, pour on a little hot (but certainly not boiling)
water, and then a short while later fill the glass to an inch or so beneath
the rim. At that point, the leaves do different things. The best Dragon
Well tea will have some of the picked leaf-plus-tip pieces rising to the
top, then drifting slowly back down, and the rest of it just standing upright
at the bottom of the glass. When nearly all the pieces from the top have
drifted down to the bottom, you can drink it. Then, you can re-fill and
re-fill the same glass fromn the vacuum flask of hot water that is never
far away.

When we had our early-morning tea up there at the tea-house the weather
was quite damp. As we drank our tea, a group of older Chinese people
was sitting playing Chinese chess or mahjongg nearby. We looked down over
various platforms scattered throughout the trees where people were doing
their exerecizes. One women was doing something that looked like some fairly
suggestive dancing, all down there on her own. On another platform, a couple
of older guys were doing some impressive shadow-boxing.

Later in the day–after yet another great meal, this time at a restaurant
called ‘The Mountain Beyond the Mountain’– we went out to a Buddhist temple
to the southwest. There, too, there were thousands upon thousands of
visitors. Lukcily, it’s a big temple complex there, so the crowds were manageable.
This place is called ‘The Mountain that Flew from Afar’, and there’s a complicated
story about how that all happened. (I don’t have our guidebook to hand.
If I did I could sound more knowledgeable about all these things!)

So first of all, we went to the extensive series of grottoes that
is at one side of the temple complex. There was a story about how a certain
very holy Buddhist monk had lived there… All these details were told
to our friend Lipeng by a Mandarin-language guide, which was all he could
find, and he then rendered a version of it all in English for us. Our little
group of six people was strung out in these very complicated series of caves,
huddling under umbrellas and being buffeted around by much larger tour groups…
Many of those larger groups–nearly all of which were 100% Chinese– had
guides equipped with small bullhorns. So between the bullhorns, the echoes
off the cave walls, and the reverberating sounds of all those people moving
aound, it’s a wonder any of us heard anything of what Lipeng told us. Even
more of a wonder that we managed to stick together being borne through
those totally unlit caves by the crowds of our fellow-visitors.

The main thing about the caves is that they had hundreds upon hundreds
of very intricate and lovely Buddhas carved in deep relief to their walls.
On many, many of these Buddhas, the faces had been hacked off. I think
that happened during the Cultural Revolution.

After the grottoes, we moved on to the main temple complex. It has
a number of large walled courtyards with various large structures built
on massive red-lacquered pillars and with a style of decoration much more
intricate and colorful than in the Buddhist temples in Japan that I’ve visited.
The centerpiece is a vast, soaring hall housing a 40-foot-high gilded Buddha.
We circled slowly around it. Ann and I performed little namaste-type
greetings in front of it. (“Three times!” Lipeng coached us quietly from
the side, when we showed signs of stopping after one.) Most of the toursist
swirled on past this renowned “historical and cultural relic”, as it was
descibed on some of the signs. But a fair number of them walked forward to
the yellow-covered kneelers and did a full, forehead-to-the ground kowtow
in front of it, instead. Several other visitors, who did not do the full
kowtow, placed incesnse sticks in the stands and did a namaste-type thing
like us.

As we walked through the grottoes, we saw one shaven-headed Buddhist
nun walking through, too. And then, as we exited the whole temple complex,
we saw a group of some two dozen people waiting to go in, two of whom
were women wearing Tibetan-style striped aprons– and all of the group
looked fairly “Tibetan”.

So of course, I’m trying to figure out the extent to which all of
these thousands of visitors here see the visit to the temple as having
any possible religious, as opposed to purely “historical and cultural”
relevance. Hard to say, really. Tomorrow, here in Beijing, we’re planning
to visit the big Tibetan Lamas’ Temple that is a big place to visit here.
Bill has a colleague at the University of Virginia who says there is
a large new interest in Buddhism in China these days, and that Tibetan Buddhists
in Beijing have been a part of that.

Anyway, at the temple in Hangzhou, one of the really interesting things
was that it was Chou Enlai who gave the temple protection from
the very earliest days of Communist rule. Indeed, the Communists didn’t
just protect what was there, but in 1953 they allowed (encouraged? helped?)
the Buddhists to build that whole big Buddha that we saw there, its predecessor
having been destroyed in one of China’s many earlier wars…. And then,
though so many of the Buddha images in the grottoes had been defaced during
the Cultural Revolution, inside the main, walled part of the temple complex
there didn’t seem to have been any still-visible destruction at all. It certainly
looked as though someone had been still protecting it at that point.

Return to menu at top of post

Some dinner conversations

I’m writing this Friday evening. We’re still in Beijing– now, staying
in a really lovely courtyard hotel not far from the northen end of the
Beihai Gardens, called the Bamboo Garden Hotel. But before we leave for
Xian tomorrow, I want to reflect a little on a couple of very interesting
dinner conversations we’ve had since we came to Beijing earlier this week.

At both these dinners, our little four-person traveling group was being
hosted to really excellent restaurant food by Chinese colleagues of our
friend Brantly Womack, the inspiring force of our group. (Brantly is a China
expert and the only Mandarin speaker among us.) For these dinners, our hosts
took private rooms in very large, good restaurants. I cannot even begin to
describe some of the great meals we have had on the trip so far!

At the first of these dinners, our main host was a researcher working
for an important government agency. He had brought along two of his friends,
both of whom were charming thirty-something executives in the private sector.
One of them, it turned out was a close business associate of the researcher’s
wife; but none of the three men had brought their spouses along. All spoke
excellent English.

The two business executives talked easily and informatively about their
work. But when the conversation turned to politics, they deferred first
of all to our main host. After he had spoken, however, on several occasions
they chimed in as well.

I have to confess that this dinner came hard on the heels of the frustrating
trip we’d had to the capital. We flew here from Shanghai. Our flight
was cancelled due to unspecified mechanical trouble, and East China Airlines
then put us all onto another flight a couple of hours later… Well, it
was no big deal, and the airline handled everything (including having our
bags arrive on the same flight) just fine. But still, it meant I was tired
by the time we went for dinner and didn’t commit everything that was said
to memory.

The three young(-ish) men talked quite a bit about the current economic
situation, and the fears in the international financial markets that the
country’s economy is becoming “overheated”. They discussed some possible
remedies for that. The researcher also talked interestingly about how the
Communist Party leadership had decided a number of months ago to start redirecting
attention and resources to the rural sector, since that was now seen as
lagging seriously behind the urban sector. “They’ve already started doing
that,” he said. The three men also talked about the effects of the dismantlement
of some portions of the country’s earlier cradle-to-grave social security
net. People in the cities were having to start getting used to paying for
medical care, and to saving for their own retirement, they said, and one
of them even noted that the American Life insurance company had recently
started selling policies here.

Mainly, though, I was very interested to see the easy, very friendly
relationship among our three hosts. When we were still in Shanghai, we
had had another interesting meal-time conversation with a high-ranking faculty
member at East China Normal University who had told us his view of the role
the Communist Party still played in the life of the university community.
People generally respect the Party members, he said, since they have a
reputation for being serious and diligent, and for helping out with extra
tasks when asked. He estimated the proportion of students who were Party
members at around 50 percent. While he admitted that maybe a few of them
might have joined for mainly “opportunistic”, career-related reasons, most
had not. “The Party still has an important role in the life of the country,”
he said…

Anyway, the second interesting dinner conversation we’ve had since
arriving in Beijing was one hosted by a high-ranking member of the administration
of one of the institutions of higher education here. This man took us for
a great dinner, accompanied by a senior female colleague from his university.
Both were urbane, self-confident, friendly– and both spoke really excellent
English.

At this dinner, too, there was some similar discussion of economic
issues. At one point, though, our host got into a noteworthy little side-discussion
on the best term to use in English to describe China’s growing presence
on the world scene. “For a while, the Party leaders used to use the term,
‘China’s peaceful rise’,” he said. “But once, some of them asked me about
this term and I said I thought it was not the best way to say this. What
do you think? Peaceful ‘rise’, or perhaps peaceful ’emergence’ or peaceful
‘development’? I think peaceful ‘rise’ might sound a little threatening?”

He noted that more recently, the country’s leaders had stopped using
“peaceful rise”, and had started using “peaceful development” more instead.

Later, he talked a little about the shift he saw the country’s leadership
as having recently made, towards trying to increase the safeguards for
the personal rights of its citizens. He cited two examples of this. In
one case, a student had been beaten to death while visiting a friend in
another city. Remember, to be a “student” in China is already a mark of
some distinction, given the tough competition for spots in colleges and
universities. It is possible, too, that this particular student might have
been politically well-connected,or might have come from a well connected
family… Anyway, whatever the reason, the fate of this student had become
something of a national cause célèbre, and during the
most recent Communist Party Congress the country’s leaders pledged to put
in much more effective procedures for monitoring and preventing abuses of
power by the police.

In the other case he mentioned, a woman from the countryside had spoken
up during a public meeting that Premier Wen Jiabao held in her province,
and had told him that after she’d worked a year for her former boss he had
simply refused to pay her. “So then, Premier Wen and the rest of the leaders
passed new legislation requiring employers to pay their workers monthly
or even more frequently, rather than yearly, and providing some means for
workers to seek redress against tardy bosses. “This was even more of a problem
in the urgban areas,” he said. “Here in the cities, many contractors in
the construction sector lag behind in paying their workers, or pay them only
annually. Now, they’re going to change all that, and give the workers more
protections.”

For the record this articulate, cultivated person expressed scathing
criticisms of President Bush’s policies regarding both Iraq and Israel/Palestine.
In fact, just about every Chinese person with whom we’ve had any kind
of a serious conversation at all has dome the same. I saw in today’s China
Daily that Premier Wen Jiabao recently defined these two problem areas
as topping the list of China’s priorities in the foreign policy field.
(People here are also very concerned about the ongoing political developments
in Taiwan. But those, they do not consider to be matters of foreign
policy. They’re also concerned about North Korea, and about what some of
them have described as the unpredictability of Kim Jong-Il.) Significantly,
though I’ve heard many harsh criticisms of what the Bush administration
has done in Iraq and Israel/Palestine, I have heard almost no expressions
of schadenfraude (?sp) over these issues. Instead, there’s a sense
that these are explosive issues that China has to be very concerned with.
In both cases, the main thrust of China’s policy seems to be to maximize
the role and effectiveness of the United Nations.

Whew, I’m tired! We had a wonderful but very full day today, including
a lot of walking, visits to two extensive Tibetan-Buddhism complexes,
a short tour of Mme. Sun Yat-sen’s home, and dinner at a great Peking duck
restaurant. Tomorrow’s May Day, and Bill and I are flying to Xian. I don’t
know how crowded the airports and flight will be, but however it is I guess
it’ll be an adventure. But I have so much more I want to write about here!
Later, later…

Return
to menu at top of post

Tibetan Buddhism in Beijing

Yesterday (Friday) was a beautiful day in Beijing, after a heavy rain
the previous day and night had almost totally cleared the city’s persistent
smog out of the air. Luckily we didn’t have anything firm planned: we’d
had it in mind to spend most of the day wandering around some of the city’s
gardens, starting out from the fabulous little courtyard hotel we were staying
in not far from the north end of the Beihai (North Sea) Gardens. Brantly
had a good map, and we had learned from our guidebooks that there plenty
of little hutongs (alleys) in that part of the city, through which
we could make our way to where we wanted to go. (Hutong tours are a big deal
in this year’s tourism “experience” in Beijing– catch those hutong scenes
before the alleys all get ploughed under in the city’s relentless push to
modernize!)

Our first destination as we walked out of the hotel was the compound
where Mme. Sun Yat-sen lived most of the second half of her life. The hutong
scene was interesting, but maybe I’ll write more about it later.
Mme. Sun’s compound was maybe a mile or so away from our hotel, picking
our way along the rain-washed backstreets and dodging the pedicabs, pedicarts,
cyclists, cars, and buses that all vied for space in them. Her compound
was similar to the one our hotel was in: an extensively landscaped garden
compound sheltered from the bustling streets around by a high wall. Actually,
both compounds had been the homes of high officials in pre-revolutionary
China. Mme. Sun’s place was the birthplace of Pu Yi, China’s “last emperor”,
though I’m not sure how all that happened…

Anyway, she was one of the three famous Soong sisters: Soong Chingling.
She and her two sisters grew up in China and were then sent to Wesleyan College
in Macon,Georgia (USA) for their B.A. studies. After their return to China, in
around 1915 or so, she went to work for KMT leader Sun Yat-sen as his seretary
and shortly after that she married her boss. They had, as the fairly extensive
exhibit in an annex to her house told us, “ten years of happiness” before
he died. After that, she continued to be active in Chinese nationalist politics.
Her sister Mingling was too: she had married Chiang Kai-shek. I guess Mme.
Sun’s most important contribution to Chinese history came during the years
of Japan’s occupation of most of China: she worked with her extensive network
of friends and supporters in the west to rally support and aid for the Chinese
nationalist resistance to the occupation, and was fairly successful in doing
so. (In the discussion Bill and I had earlier in the week with a very smart
bunch of students from Beijing University, about the Middle East, the issue
of Bin-Ladenist terrorism came up. Our host there, Prof. Wang Suolao, told
us that China’s leaders seemed really to understand the difference between
the kind of violence employed by indigenous resisters to foreign occupation
in Iraq or Palestine, and that employed in a very different context by Usama
Bin Laden. Of course, China also faces some challenges from Muslim militants
in its own western areas; but those, I don’t think it regards at all as
being legitimate resistance to ‘foreign’ occupation.)

Well, anyway, Mme. Sun’s place turned out to be much more interesting
than I had expected. After the revolution, she came here to live, and continued
to play a sort of qiet “elder stateswoman” role for the country. On her
death-bed in 1981, she was accorded the high honor of membership in the
Communist Party…

But, moving right along here, we continued our walk, turning south toward
the Beihai. I learned to fend off the importunings of the pedicab drivers
with one of my few words of Chinese, “sam-BO” (walk!)

What a beautiful day! Now, we were walking along the bank of another
small lake, not the Beihai. Everyone who could get out to enjoy the freshness
of the morning seemed to have done so. People had come out with their
caged birds: they hang them in the trees to let the birds talk to each
other. A small group were standing around playing shuttlecock hacky-sack.
Some people were doing their tai chi or other exercises. A few folks
were fishing. Some granddads had brought their little grandbabies out to
play by the park benches. The willow fronds wafted gently in the breeze.

We walked along one little area of lakefront lined with high-end restaurants,
ending with a Starbucks. Then we traversed a pedestrian underpass under
a busy road and found ourselves at the north end of the Beihai, which proudly
describes itself as China’s oldest park.

Most of it is in fact taken up by the body of water from which it takes
its name, but around the lake itself there is beautiful landscaping and even,
as we discovered, a very extensive traditional compound housing a Tibetan
Buddhism study center. In the middle of the lake is a small island dominated
by a steep hill, atop which sits a truly massive Buddhist stupa, which was
built in the mid-17th century to celebrate the arrival in Beijing of the
then-Dalai Lama.

The plan formulated by our friend Brantly had us taking the boat from
the north end of the lake down to the island, from where we would walk across
a bridge to the southern shore and then exit the park to find a place for
lunch. However, we didn’t quite know where along the northern shore the
boat would leave from, so we started walking the wrong way along the shore
by mistake. But what a serendipitous mistake to make! As we wended our way
back through the moderate crowds I saw an older man working with what looked
like a broom on a stretch of the walkway. (All the walkways in the parks
and beside the streets are kept impressively clean in Beijing, as in Shanghai
and Hangzhou.) But this guy wasn’t sweeping! He was writing a poem on the
concrete slabs with an ingenious long device that delivered a constant slow
supply of water to two-inch-wide, specially-shaped sponge on the end of
his stick. So he was writing his poem– which Brantly told us said something
about the “north wind” and something about “jade trees” in beautiful strokes
in water– right there on the walkway. By the time he had finished the thirty or
so characters that made up the poem, the earlier characters were already
starting to dry. The transitory nature of beauty! What a fabulous thing to
do!

We stopped a little to watch. A few other people did so, too; but by
no means everyone else did. Bill took a couple of photos, which I’ll try
to get up here when I can. Then we walked on.

The next serendipitous find was the Tibetan-Buddhist study center, also
at the north end of the lake. It seemed not to be being used very actively.
It was housed in what had evidently been a gorgeous compound for a very
high-ranking Chinese official and was built, like the Forbidden City or any
of the other imperial palaces I’ve seen, on the model of a number of walled
courtyards linked by halls of ever-increasing dimensions. These halls housed
various Buddhas and statues of the founder of Tibetan-style (“yellow hat”)
Buddhism. I don’t think I saw any monks there, however.

Brantly started talking a little about the nature of the long cultural interaction
between China’s political elite and practitioners of Tibetan-style Buddhism,
which is much richer and more complex than I had previously understood.
From the 17th through the early 20th century, China was ruled by the Qing
Dynasty, whose people had come down from the Manchurian areas to the north.
As Brantly explained it, Tibetan-style Buddhism had been very widespread
there as in many other peripheral areas of China (including Mongolia and
of course Tibet itself). So the Qings were very hospitable to yellow-hat
Buddhism and actively encouraged the establishment and support of yellow-hat
intstutions in Beijing itself. “So it was not totally an assimilationist
version of the interaction between the Han Chinese and the Tibetan Buddhists
then?” I asked. “Oh now, not the total ‘melting pot’ version at all,” he
said.

I bought a little brass Buddha near the gate of the study center. I’d
been looking for one for a while, but nearly all the Buddhas I’d seen before
this one were either hideously laughing Buddhas, or extremely ornate and
over-decorated painted porcelain Buddhas (or sometimes, both). I was looking
for something serene, for my friend Marian Morgan, a Buddhism teacher back
home in Virginia, and this was the most serne one I could find.

Then we embarked on the boat, along with 30 or so very happy Chinese
tourists, and soon enough it departed for the island. At the island, we
bypassed the waterside restaurant which is renowned for once having served
120-course dinners to Cixi, the Empress Dowager and Dragon Lady of late-19th
and early-20th century infamy. And we climbed and climbed up behind it
to the platform on top on which the vast, inverted-vase-shaped stupa was
built. From the north side from which we were approaching it, it just looked
massive (maybe 20 metres high from its stone base?), plain, and fairly ugly.
But the view from there, out over the rest of Beijing, was spectacular.

To the immediate south is the ‘Middle and South Sea’ lake-side park which
is a closed compound, the nerve center for the Communist Party leadership.
To the south-east from us spread the acres and acres of yellow roofs of
the Forbidden City. And beyond all those sites, ringing the horizon, were
the crane-studded views of modern, high-rise Beijing.The mid-day sun glinted
off the broad curved expanses of glass covering the new National Theater
down near Tienanmen Square, and off the various architectural fancies topping
the cluster of new high-rises at the Wangfujiang shopping area.

Coming down the steep south side of the stupa hill, we ended up in another,
but much smaller, Tibetan-Buddhism emple complex, built along the same lines
as the one we’d seen earlier. (And now, looking back at the stupa, from
the side people are supposed to view it from, we saw the big Tibetan design
on this side of it, and the whole wooded temple complex leading up to it:
it looked much prettier from this side!

We exited the path nearby there. We were now at the northwest corner of
the Forbidden City, which we had visited in a gathering rainstorm the day
before. We went to an excellent restaurant Brantly knew of near there, had
a ood lunch, then took a taxi to the main, much bigger Tibetan-Buddhism center
in Beijing, which is in yet another former palace three miles or so to the
northeast.

This temple does operate as a functioning center of religious life. We
saw a number of people in monks’ clothes (or novices’ clothes?) performing
various functions around the complex. Here again, there were the familiar
courtyards linked by cavernously large halls. Here again the esthetic was
dark red pillars, intricate “imperial” gold tiling on all the roofs, and
bright, symmetrical painted designs on all the multiple lintels and cross-beams.

Here, however, there were also clouds and clouds of incense, billowing
up from large bronze coffers into which many of the visitors were plunging
great handfuls of long incense sticks. Fur or five of the halls along the
main ‘spine’ of the complex all had either three vast statues of different
aspects of Buddha, or three large statues representing the founder of yellow-hat
Buddhism and flanking him the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama. All very trinitarian!
The same trinitarian group of statues was found in many of the side-halls,
too. These halls included the Hall of Mathematics, the Hall of Medicine, the
Hall of Esoteric Knowledge, and the Hall of Exoteric Knowledge… (Actually,
the organization of all this reminded me strongly of Thomas Jefferson’s design
for the original “Ackademical Village” at the University of Virginia.)

In a few of the halls, there were large, red-painted wooden cases in which
the bulky, yellow-silk-wrapped shapes of Tibetan-style books had been stacked,
but I didn’t see anyone studying them. Then, in the final hall there was
a truly impressive, standing Buddha statue, gilded like all the rest of the
statues and standing maybe 50 feet high. We could only peer up toward its
distant face! In one of the halls near there, there were rows of slightly
elevated seating platforms laid out around another large Buddha statue, with
space for maybe 30 or 40 monks to sit during a study session– but again,
no-one sitting there at that time, studying.

I was struck, however, by the high proportion of the Chinese people who
were visiting this temple who seemed to be doing so as part of an intense-looking
religious experience. These included many younger people as well as some
older people, and many who didn’t to my unpractised eye seem to “look” specifically
Tibetan, as well as some who did. These worshippers would hold a handful of
smoking incense sticks to their foreheads and pray intently for a couple of
minutes before stepping forward to plant the incense sticks in the large coffers.
They would stand before the front of the Buddha or other statues praying
intently– some of them almost shaking, or should I say “quaking”, as they
did so– and then they’d kneel on the little kneeling platform to perform
three full kowtows before the figure. From one of the side-courtyards came
the repetitive wail of a recording of someone crying out the simple Buddhist
prayer of “Om mani padma ommmm”. Occasionally a brown-robed monk would hurry
through a courtyard on some task. Mainly, though, their job seemed to be
to sit in the shadows at the corner of each hall admonishing people who failed
to obey the “No photographing” signs.

Talking of the signs there… On the front of each hall were two brass
plaques, giving a general explanation of the nature of the hall and what
it was used for. On one plaque, this explanation was provided in Chinese
and English; on the other, in Tibetan and Manchu. Manchu script is, like
Mongolian, basically a form of Arabic script– but written on its side, from
top to bottom.

I found the whole set of experiences throughout the day interesting in
ways I hadn’t expected. When Bill and I have visited Japan, I have always
loved the more somber esthetic of the Buddhist temples there. And about ten
years ago, I became fairly fascinated with Tibetan Buddhism– though even
then, perplexed and slightly off-put by the intricacy of Tibetan cosmology
and the fairly violent-seeming nature of some of the culture and practices
associated with it. But anyway, I was really looking forward to seeing these
Tibetan temples in Beijing. I came away from the experience, however, disquieted
in ways I hadn’t been expecting. I think that probably, over the past ten
year, I have absorbed a lot of the traditionally simple esthetic, values,
and worldview of the Quakers. I found the temple we visited to be fascinating–
but ways over-decorated, and thought that all this creation of and
worshiping at huge, expensive gilded images seemed wasteful, slightly authoritarian,
and definitely perplexing… I longed for the simplicity of our plain, undecorated
meeting-room in Charlottesville with nothing but the faces of my dear friends
and the natural scenes that present themselves through our windows there to
distract me from (or lead me to) where my spirit needs to be going.

Return
to menu at top of post