the texture of ordinary

One more in a series of random snapshots from my October 2011 trip to China and Thailand.

Following adventures at the Fourth and Fifth Ancestors’ temples and the Luhua Nunnery in Hubei Province, my tour group took off for Anhui Province and Jiuhua Mountain, one of Chinese Buddhism’s four sacred mountains.  Our bus driver is shown here in one of my favorite photos of the tour, wearing a t-shirt that says “Impossible is Nothing.” He claimed his name was “Beautiful.”  I think it fits.

Jiuhua Mountain has a very nice new hotel with the first coffee (mm, can you call it that if it’s Nescafe?) I’d had in several days.  We spent the night there and in the morning headed up in a cable car to Tiantai temple, at 1342 meters the highest temple on Jiuhua Mountain.

The cable car was an older system with not enough capacity for the number of tourists trying to get up the mountain.  We snaked along in long lines as if we were at Disneyland waiting for  Space Mountain.  Eventually we made it into the cars and had a pleasant ride up the side of the mountain in some pretty nice country.  After exiting the cable car, we were dumped out onto a set of walkways and stairs that would take us to the first level of the temple.

That’s when I saw the monkeys.

It’s possible that someone had said something about the monkeys. But there were a lot of us and we weren’t all together all the time, so I didn’t get the memo.  All I knew was there they were on the path, looking adorable and acting as though it was completely natural for them to be just hanging out watching the tourists trudging by.

Of course.

That monkey over there on the left, up the path a ways?  I was thinking to myself it would make SUCH a good photo if only I could get down and shoot him from eye level.  So I walked up a little closer and crouched down below the chain fence to get a better shot.

And the next thing I saw was this:

The next thing I heard, probably before I saw the blurry blob of fur coming at me, was an enormous growl, or perhaps it was more of a scream, issuing forth from the beast.

And then I had this warm, muscled, hairy thing clinging to my right calf trying to sink his teeth into my shin.  I felt his (her?) weight pulling down on my leg, his hot breath, sensed the shape of his open jaws through my pant leg as he clamped down. And then from out of nothingness a second monkey, one of his buddies, was suddenly clinging to my other leg.

Nowhere in my plans for the day had there been the possibility that at some point I’d have two monkeys wrapped around my lower legs.  My overall response was pretty much “how astounding, look at this, I have monkeys on my legs!!”  and a huge sense of marvel.  I wasn’t afraid. I was flabbergasted.

My brain didn’t have a chance to kick into the next stage of figuring out what kind of action I might want to take that would prevent me from being devoured by monkeys or carried off by them or whatever their plan for me might be, because in the meantime my friend Sandy just ahead of me had seen what was going on and unlike me he was not distracted by the marvel of it all and so he made himself appear nine feet tall and yelled out at the monkeys “Haw! Haw!” Or perhaps the utterances were in Chinese which he knew a bit of, these were Chinese monkeys after all.  They sounded like just the right words from where I stood, whatever language they were in.

Too bad for Sandy, the net effect of his lightning-quick reflexes on my behalf was that the monkeys jumped off of my legs and straight onto his.  And then like in a dream, the air was filled with a barking sound and a big shaggy dog appeared from on high, bounding down the stairs toward the monkeys, and the monkeys jumped off of Sandy’s legs and chased after the dog, who did a quick U-turn, and the whole riled up animal entourage disappeared into the forest.  They left a few of their calmer monkey friends sitting in the trees or along the path, looking nonchalant as if nothing had happened.

It occurs to me that I’ve had moments like this before, and right now I’m thinking about the time I drove up from Los Angeles to Santa Cruz and took a shortcut along the back roads of San Juan Bautista. I knew this shortcut from years before when I had projects in the area working as a geotechnical engineer in San Benito county.  I was cruising along at a pretty fast clip down a farm road in my Acura Integra with the cassette deck at full volume, singing along, and it was 9 or 10 at night, and suddenly I remembered that the road I was on came to a “T” in just a few hundred yards, and in front of me was the line of trees marking the place where I was going to need to do a 90-degree turn, and I didn’t have enough room to slow down.  And in that long pause inside my head I heard “well, that was stupid – Mom and everybody else are going to be baffled as to how this even happened” as I prepared to crash into the trees and meet my demise.  Only I didn’t – I actually fishtailed a bit but made the turn, and suddenly I was on the next road heading in a new direction and my heart was beating about twice as fast as it should, but other than that there was nothing at all unusual about the road, my car, the speed, the farmhouses, the trees … and it was kind of weird, because I had almost died but absolutely nothing had changed as a result of it.

Similarly, once the monkeys and the spirit dog (or whatever it was) were gone, we all just continued walking, passing by the calm monkeys in the trees, appreciating the view.

Olga caught up to me a few minutes later and asked if I was doing okay, so at least I knew there was one other person who realized something had just happened.  We checked my leg to make sure the monkey bites hadn’t done any damage. There was monkey spittle on my pants leg, but no monkey teeth had penetrated cloth or flesh.

So that‘s the story of the monkeys.

The next day I caught up with Sandy and thanked him for his valor, and we rehashed the event a bit.  Embedded in Sandy’s version of the story was an implication that the monkeys had acted out of something like malice, and Sandy noticed this and apologized for it (good Buddhist!). I said oh yeah, really it was more like a big hug they were giving us, and we both laughed.

So now here are some photos from the mountain – 800 steps from the cable car up to the temple at the very top.  Like many of the temples on Jiuhua Mountain, this one is  dedicated to a Bodhisattva named Ksitigarbha, more commonly known in the US by his Japanese name Jizo.  Ksitigarbha is the guardian of beings in the hell realms and also of children. There was a Korean prince who lived at Jiuhua Mountain who the monks thought was a reincarnation of Ksitigarbha, and that prince encountered nirvana at this top temple; we visited another temple built for him further down in the valley that housed his body after his death.

Tiantai temple, lower level

Pilgrim doing prostrations up the stairs to the upper temple

800 steps!

theoretically possible to be carried up ... ethically impossible for many of us

eventually you reach the highest temple

offerings

lovers and pilgrims shackle their vows to the fences

my shadow side

gateway to the next episode

temple at lower level

monks hanging out

One in a series of random snapshots from my October 2011 trip to China and Thailand.

I was sent to support business meetings in Beijing and that was my first week in China, including some local sightseeing with colleagues.  My business obligations ended Saturday afternoon and the next day I was to join a tour group of German and Australian Zen practitioners who were visiting some of China’s Zen temples, lead by a scholar of early Chinese Zen history who just happens to be from Marin.  Life is weird that way.

The gap between these two activities had been a source of excitement and concern during my planning for the trip:  it represented about 15 hours in which I was floating around China on my own, without tour guides or hotel staff to point me in the right direction, to a part of the country not visited by many foreigners.  I had to negotiate a taxi ride to a train station, find the right train/sleeper car, get off at the right station at 6:15am the next day, and somehow miraculously connect up with some monks who might or might not include a guy in a photo my friend Lucy had sent me.  I had two phone numbers on me and no ability to write or speak Chinese.  It was an achievable challenge, unlike those crazy Bodhisattva vows we keep talking about, but one that required some calm focus if I wanted to arrive gracefully.

As I left the hotel the sky was a deep blue and Tianan’men was lit up.  Apart from a blurry image of Mao I kind of like the photo I took from the taxi’s window.

Tianan'men at night.

Beijing West and Colonel Sanders

Beijing West train station was like any other, complete with recognizable corporate symbols, which was strangely comforting at the time.

Comforting, perhaps because my reference for Chinese train stations was the movie Last Train Home, about the migrant population trying to get home to their villages for the New Year.  Once a year, factory workers spend days at the train stations trying to buy tickets for trains that are so full of people it’s impossible to move or use the bathroom.  Think of Christmas travel in the States when the airports start closing down due to weather and everyone is trying to just get home somehow, by any route.  The Colonel’s familiar face that evening was a strangely calming force. And I had my ticket already through the hotel concierge, it wasn’t New Years, and my seat was in a sleeper car, so my main concern was getting to the right gate, which I accomplished in the usual straightforward manner:

Beijing West train station

I had some entertaining moments using the women’s restroom once inside the waiting area, trying to negotiate my huge suitcase into one of the stalls.  Seven or eight Chinese women watched me queue up, fascinated, and held an intent conversation about me that I didn’t understand.  Strange how one’s brain fills in the gaps according to one’s state of mind, whether it be relaxed or on extreme vigilant alert:  I leapt to the assumption that they were gossiping about me, that perhaps I’d committed some social faux pas they were passing judgment on.  But actually they turned out to be friends, fending off some line-jumpers and steering me away from a water faucet that was spewing boiling-hot water.

People holding tickets to the sleeper cars could sit in a roped-off area with big blue lounge chairs and tables (arousing self-consciousness about class distinctions), and that’s where I found a tour group of foreigners heading for Xi’an. A woman from San Diego said she was impressed that I was out traveling on my own and I had a moment of uncertainty about the sanity of my plan.  Then we all headed for our trains.  The Xi’an tour group turned right and I turned left, and I found myself completely surrounded for the night by people who did not look or talk like me.

I met the train attendant who exchanged my ticket for a little plastic chip, and again I was comforted by the familiar and expected, as I had read about this procedure during my preparations and it was all lining up with my expectations.  My bunk-mates confirmed I was in the right compartment and on the right bed. The train rode on through the night. It was dark along the track and I couldn’t see much, just the black outlines of trees passing by.  I fell asleep early and woke up around 5am, looked but couldn’t find coffee anywhere, only car after car of sleepers.  The attendant came to exchange my little chip back again for my ticket and kicked most of us out at Jiujiang.

I joined a stream of dozens of Chinese people swimming out of the station and into the daylight, where I finally stood in the middle of a plaza next to a crowded street.  Cars pulled up, loaded passengers, and took off again.  This was the point at which seeing a monk holding a sign with my name on it would have been good, but I was left in pause for about ten minutes to think about maybe starting to wonder what my Plan B was going to be if no one showed up. Then I heard a shout and there was a guy standing next to a BMW wearing a grey work outfit, not quite a samue but close, and he loosely matched my ideas about what a Chinese monk would look like so I rolled my suitcase over and let him put it in the trunk.  I tried a few words of introduction to see if we were sure we were meant for each other.  He responded quizzically to ‘Daoxin,’ the name of the Fourth Ancestor whose temple we were going to.  I wasn’t sure how the local monks were referring to the temple.* Then I tried ‘Chongdi-shi,’ the monk whose photo Lucy had sent, which almost got a response out of him.  Ultimately I decided it was unlikely that I would be kidnapped or that a renegade taxi driver would be wearing a monk suit and driving a BMW, so I got in the car. But it was an uncertain moment.

The driver was on and off his cell phone having serial conversations while driving through the streets of Jiujiang.  After about ten minutes the phone rang again and he handed me the phone.  I heard Chongdi-shi saying hello in English (or was it Eric, our in-country guide? things were confused that morning), telling me that the monk would take me to the temple to meet my tour group. I was in the right car after all.

Then we inexplicably did a U-turn and stopped across the street from a park, waiting in the car for another ten or fifteen minutes. What was this about?  I wondered – but couldn’t find a way to ask, and it was not unpleasant, as there was Qi gong and badminton to watch, music playing over some loudspeakers, men and women rolling by pushing huge carts with boxes or pieces of wood piled high.  And then two other monks opened the rear doors and piled in, one of them making the gassho mudra with a big smile on his face, and we were off again.

(Outside of Jiujiang, I spotted:  a small truck with three huge pigs crammed in the back; large brooms made of bamboo poles and something like juniper branches attached at the end; an open-air butcher stand; a woman riding a bicycle holding a handful of mylar balloons.)

Monk buying youtiao

Once we were in Huangmei we stopped at a streetside donut stand (I’m saying ‘donuts’ but I think they are called youtiao) and the driver-monk came back with a big plastic bag of them.

And then we drove through a busy intersection and cut across all the lanes of oncoming traffic to park on the left side of the street in front of a noodle shop.

I’m still looking for the joke that begins “Three Chinese monks and an American tourist walk into a noodle shop …”

Three Chinese monks (American tourist not shown)

One bowl of noodles came out and the smiling-gassho-monk spent a few minutes mixing up the black paste on top so it covered all the noodles and handed it over to me.  I took the noodles and the chopsticks he offered and sat there, thinking it was polite to wait until they all had their bowls. The smiling monk got up to speak with the cashier, and in the course of watching them it dawned on me that he thought I needed a fork in order to proceed. Hah!  I’ve been handling chopsticks since 1978, when I was first introduced to Sichuanese food on nights off from my job at summer camp, before that guy was even born.  I waved the monk back and said “it’s okay,” holding up the chopsticks and demonstrating my proficiency.  The noodles, the donuts, and hot soymilk were excellent.  I felt embraced in nurturing good will.  For them it was probably just an excuse to not eat temple food, but what the heck.

Rice harvest on the road to the Fourth Ancestor's temple

The ride out of Huangmei wasn’t too long and we took a turn off the main road and wound our way up into the hills.  All along the way we were driving over or around mounds of dry grass that turned out to be rice, and in many places the rice had been shaken from the grass and was laid out on the street waiting to be put into big bags, which we also saw piled along the road.

And then we were at the monastery and the monks left me, and I rolled my suitcase along the corridor …

Fourth Ancestor's temple

… and was introduced to tour group leaders Andy and Eric and the Australians and Germans and a couple other Americans who were all starting on week #2 of the “If it’s Tuesday it must be Jiuhuashan” tour.  (The Germans didn’t get that joke either, it had to be explained.  Google it with Belgium instead of Jiuhuashan.)

Fourth Ancestor's stupa

The rest of the morning was spent walking up to the stupa and dharma transmission hall.  The Fourth Ancestor Dayi Daoxin (or you may know the Japanese version we chant at SFZC, Dai-I Doshin – he lived approximately 580-651 C.E.) was buried in the stupa and reportedly the following year “the door of his stupa opened spontaneously and revealed the master sitting inside as though alive.” Early Chinese Zen history abounds with stories like this of the miraculous circumstances surrounding the deaths of the early masters.

Daoxin is also known for bringing farming and work practice to the Zen monasteries, an evolution from the itinerant beggar model that created more autonomy and self-sufficiency for the monks and was more practical for the cold Chinese winters.

Valley of the Fourth Ancestor's temple

This shot was taken from the front of the Dharma Transmission Hall, looking back toward the stupa and the monastery (buildings on the left) and out through the valley toward Huangmei.

Fourth Ancestor's temple - Buddha Hall

Monks at the Fourth Ancestor's Temple

Calling the monks into the dining hall for lunch.

Sunset at the Fourth Ancestor’s temple.

*the monastery’s alternative/historical names include:

• East Mountain Monastery
• Feng-mu-shan Monastery
• To-zan Monastery (Jap.)
• The East Mountain Temple
• Sizu (Fourth Patriarch) Zen Temple
• Shuangfeng (Double Peak) Temple
• Zhengjue Temple

Greetings from Koh Samui, Thailand!  I’ve spent the last two and a half weeks in China and could have been blogging my way through the countryside (Shundo says I should write more, and I agree) but entering China is like a portal into another universe.  I was prepared to lose Facebook while I was there but unprepared to lose access to my blog.  Mai pen rai.

This morning I woke up while it was still dark and took my bare feet and a loaner umbrella along the beach for a stroll as the sky lightened up, starting from my  $30/night “resort” past the ramshackle beachside bars and cafes and massage huts and into the high-end $300/night villa realms, watching the early-morning workers with their sand rakes and trash hooks cleaning up the beach for the guests, all the while listening to a driving drum beat that seemed to be coming all the way across the water from Koh Phangan, some crazy all-night party that only stopped half an hour ago at 7am.

Bangkok was underwater from the worst floods since 1942, Koh Samui is in their monsoon season, and for the past several days I’ve gone back and forth with my travel agent wondering if it was insane to try to come here, wondering if I’d get stuck somewhere coming in or going out. The going out part remains to be seen, but coming in was easy, apart from delays on all ends having perhaps very little to do with the weather.  My travel agent was placid in response to my rants and proposals for alternate itineraries.  I have a feeling she is part travel agent, part emotional counselor, her success bolstered by a talent in assuring her clients that they’ll probably get through whatever tribulations their imaginations are conjuring.  I appreciate her equanimity.  The walk this morning made it all worthwhile, even before adding the time I’ll be spending here with my friend Meredith over the next couple of days.

In China we had a big meeting and sightseeing in Beijing, and then I left on the train for Jiujiang to join a group of Zen practitioners who visited the Fourth Ancestor’s temple near there, Tiantang temple where Dogen studied with Rujing and dropped body and mind, plus Jiuhua Shan (more temples), Huang Shan (which is temple-like in its beauty), Putuo Shan (more temples, and the biggest Guanyin I’ve ever seen), and Shanghai (home of the Jade Buddha temple as well as other sights). I have stories, of course, which I will roll out in good time.

I was expecting to write about sesshin, a five-day meditation retreat
that happened some weeks ago here at City Center.  But I had trouble achieving a useful meta-position from which to write about it, because this sesshin was personally rather unsettling, and the unsettling bits just kept rolling over and deepening, days after sesshin ended, without the catharsis or resolution of past sesshin experiences.

For the first couple of days of sesshin I was grumpy about Zen practice, feeling like I was never going to “get it,” and wondering why I was bothering anyway, as I am generally a happy person who could lead a normal life free of esoteric Zen rituals if I chose it. The incessant repetition of going up and down the stairs, into and out of the zendo, opening and closing our oryoki sets, setting out utensils and other accoutrements for oryoki and then having to clean it all up again day after day, seemed pointless, especially when compared to the idea of going outside and enjoying a nice walk in the park.  During the many periods of zazen I traveled into my own personal hell realms of doubt, disappointment, loneliness, and grief.  And then sesshin ended and I headed back to work, still stewing in it.

After sesshin I read this in Brad Warner’s blog:

“I hate it — just absolutely hate and despise it — when people try to make some kind of a ‘dharma lesson’ about every damned thing that happens. I hated it when people did that with David Coady.  I’m not going to do that now.”

I’ll admit to being a bit confused as to why he’s so cranky about people seeking dharma lessons in something so significant as a friend’s death, unless he’s pointing to a tendency cover up the raw emotion of “suicide is stupid,” in which case I agree with him.  But in any case I read that and it triggered whatever insecurities I have about the pablum that I push here on this site (not that I think Brad reads my stuff) and the insecurities became grounds for not writing anything, not then, maybe not ever again.

And then the grumpiness generally continued until a week later, when I found myself magically transported to Lake Como, Italy, where I was to enjoy a week of relaxation and agenda-less-ness with nine of my closest family members.  As an antidote to grumpiness and doubt, this was rather a good choice.

I brought a book that my friend Ed had given me that had been sitting on my shelf for awhile: The Heart of the World, A Journey to the Last Secret Place, by Ian Baker.  Baker spent several years exploring Tibet’s Pemako region, an area the Tibetans call a beyul, or hidden-land.  Beyuls are places where the spiritual and physical worlds overlap, and at the center of Pemako is Chime Yangsang Ne, “the innermost secret place of immortality.”  The beyul is not quite a literal geographic reality and not quite only a mental construction, but “an eminent paradise veiled more by habits of perception than by features of the landscape.”

Since I was also on a journey, and because I was alternating between these two worlds on my vacation, Italy in the external world and Tibet in the internal world, I amused myself by finding correlates in the circumstances and environment in Italy and the circumstances and environment that were playing out in Tibet as I read about Baker’s attempts to find the center of Pemako.

In comparison with the huge jagged mountain ranges of Tibet, I was surrounded by a magical landscape of limestone cliffs rising 1500 meters from Lake Como’s surface, banded and tilted jointed rocks into which caves and tunnels have been carved and settlements built perched on ledges formed by joint surfaces.   Baker was delving deep into the deepest gorge on the planet; I was skittering around over the surface of the deepest lake in Europe.  I looked around and saw an abundance of rhododendron, cypress, and juniper trees in the Lake Como region, which were also major protagonists in the Baker book.  In both cases we were in foreign lands where the customs were not our native customs. Baker was often at risk of hurling over the edge of a precipice if he made a wrong step; the stairs leading down from the bedrooms in our villa were perilous in the dark.  He encountered leeches, poisonous bugs and snakes; one night my sister fought a huge flying beetle that refused to be quiet in her bedroom.  (Okay. Some of this is quite a stretch, but it did keep me amused.)

Even the action in Baker’s book was sometimes strikingly parallel to my life in Italy and provided some small dharma lessons for me. (Apologies to those who, like Brad, are cranky about turning every damn thing into a dharma lesson.  There are days when I’m right there with you.)  One night I was reading about an excursion where Baker was having difficulty finding good information or guides for the area he wanted to explore, the porters were fighting with each other and then trying to renegotiate their terms en route, a horse fell through the planks of a bridge, and his Chinese liaison officer was not happy with him.  The next day my family wanted to go into the town of Menaggio. The water taxi seemed expensive so we thought perhaps it would be simple to ferry the eight of us down in the one car making two trips, but we got a late start, my niece was having ear problems, my brother missed the turnoff, my sister had to complete a business call before we could take her in the second load, the parking we finally found was at the opposite end of the town from where the first load was waiting for us, and by the time we all assembled in Menaggio it was already 1:00 in the afternoon.

Here is what Baker wrote about his state of mind when things weren’t going exactly as he’d planned:

“Despite my initial concerns about restive porters and the composition of our group, the journey had begun, and I accepted the situation as containing its own hidden logic.  Tibetan tradition speaks of Kha sher lamkbyer – ‘whatever arises, carry it to the path’ – a Buddhist injunction to abandon preferences and integrate all experience beyond accepting and rejecting.  Without that dynamic openness to adventure (from the Latin ad venio, ‘whatever comes‘), Tibetans say, pilgrimage devolves into ordinary travel and the hidden-lands–both physical and metaphysical–will never open.”

Pretty cool, huh? This book gets five stars from me.  The Dalai Lama wrote the introduction!

Contemplating the various parallels between Como and Pemako, both geographic and otherwise, I was reminded of a therapist I’d seen back in my twenties, who had spent a lot of time evaluating and treating inmates at a nearby prison facility. As I rambled on about my problems, he smiled compassionately and told me that what we were talking about was very serious but represented the “bunny slopes” on the ski resort of mental health issues.  I don’t think he was trivializing my concerns, but wanting to put them into a broader perspective.  My life is apparently not lived at a grand scale, not at a Tibetan scale.  It’s a structure in miniature.

On the journey back to California, I waited in the Malpensa airport in Milan with my father and his friend.  Dad’s friend had just tripped over someone’s luggage and scraped up her shin pretty badly, and was in an adrenaline-fused daze trying to get her bearings back when a handsome man from Seattle in adventure-travel clothing popped into view, sat next to us and started talking.  Oddly, he was just returning from a trip to Nepal and told us an amazing story about how he’d been trekking through the mountains with a girlfriend and they had run out of food and were soaked to the bones from the rain and had stumbled upon a hermit’s hut and the hermit offered them food. He began to describe the meal – at this point I reflexively ejected the word “tsampa!” because my mind had been in Tibet all week reading about butter tea and tsampa.  “Tsampa, that’s right,” he replied.  They had continued on, over a 16,000-foot pass, but his friend was wet and cold and turning blue with hypothermia  and they had to retrace their steps to find a flat spot where they could put her in the tent to get her warm and dry before continuing.  Eventually, they both made it out.

And then the flight attendant said something over the loudspeakers and the guy disappeared to run off and catch his plane.  The hidden-lands, or something close by, they jumped out of the pages of the book and showed up at Malpensa that day.  Pretty cool.