Detaching - Chapter 3

      

By Yuan Changming

3/ yin: Bond beyond the Connection At noon, he has a much sought-after free lunch. Like most other popular Buddhist monasteries with good attendance, the Richmond Zen Center provides two complimentary vegetarian meals every day. Being a prosperous charity organization, it is funded almost exclusively by donations from temple-goers, including casual visitors, meditation practitioners and all Buddhist followers. Probably because he has been a quite regular contributor since its establishment, he was readily welcome back yesterday, he thought.               After lunch, he returns to the shrine hall for a nap as he used to when he was a volunteer cleaner years ago. At an obscure corner, he puts three square cushions together to make them into a single narrow mattress on the hard floor. Lying down and facing the huge golden statue of Buddha sitting high in the front of the brightly illuminated hall, he feels as warm, relaxed and comfortable as he can hope. Exhausted both physically and mentally, he expects himself to fall into sleep sooner than usual and have an auspicious dream, yet somehow he feels just a bit too excited. Looking at Buddha in dazzling silence, he wonders when he himself can become a little one in his own right. After all, Buddha is an enlightened human in a philosophical sense. It all depends on the way he sees his inner self and all others in the outer world.              Unlike other meditators, he never bothers about adjusting his breathing rhythm; rather, the moment he closes his eyes, he starts to do sleeping meditation by allowing his thought drifting around like an unmanned ferry boat in a wide river on a rainy afternoon. He imagines himself lying down in a cozy and much smaller Buddha hall of a temple squatting in the exuberant depth of a mountain, where he overhears Su Dongpo, his favorite Chinese poet, the greatest author of Song Dynasty, talking with his monk friend Fo Yin immediately after Su completed his meditation.             “Hey, Big Monk, what did you see in me while I was meditating?”              Looking up, Fo said without pause, “Your whole body was shining like a Buddha.”             “Really? You’re not kidding me, are you?” Su asked again, smiling heartily, his eyes sparkling with excitement and complacency.             “Of course not!” replied Fo characteristically in a serious tone. “What about me, how did I look then?”             “Well,” after a moment of hesitation, Su decided to tease Fo as he often did, “you look like a pile of cow pats!”              Hearing Su’s reply, Fo looked more than embarrassed and remained speechless for an extended moment before he responded sheepishly in a murmuring voice, “Oh, that means I must practice more and harder!”              As the literary legend has it, Su gloated over Fo’s failure for the whole afternoon. When he returned home later and kept bragging about his victory to his witty younger sister, she burst into chuckles against his great expectations, commenting in a pitiful tone, “My poor bro, you’ve lost to Monk Fo disastrously this time!”              “How come?”              “Fo saw you looking like a Buddha because there is Buddha in his own heart, so everybody he sees is a projection of Buddha, but he looked like cow pats to you, just imagine what’s there inside your heart!”               Reflecting on this amusing zen anecdote, Ming cannot help wondering what there is in his own heart. He is sure that there is no Buddha, no god or any other deity residing at the center of his inner world, for he is never a religious person, even if he often wishes to become one, even if it is just for the benefit of his health, but somehow he could not convert himself to any religion that has been practiced on earth since time immemorial, not so much because he was too thoroughly brainwashed with atheism in his teenage years in red China, as because he has never experienced or witnessed any miraculous event that makes him believe in an omniscient supernatural being, be it called Buddha, Brahman, Jehovah, Jesus or Allah.                On second thought, he feels he does have a closer relationship with Buddhism. Though there is no specific deity governing his inner world as the supreme ruler, he is certain that there is a Buddha-like figure functioning as the protector of his family; otherwise, he would not have been positioned to understand why both the death of his grandma and the survival of his father as a child had more to do with Buddhism than with any other mystic force.    He does not know what his grandparents looked like, since neither of them had left a single picture behind long before he was born, but his father told him again and again that his grandma was widowed at age twenty six and never married again during her lifetime. An extremely pious Buddhist follower, she regularly said prayers to Buddha, strictly practiced abstinence from meat, and was always ready to do a good deed. She was so compassionate and kind-hearted she would avoid killing any life, even if it was only an ant happening to crawl in front of her. To provide her two daughters a better living condition, she married both of them away as child brides. To support herself and her only son, she had to toil with her bound “lotus feet” like a farm cattle in the field during the day, and did manual weaving at night to earn a few wen for the most basic household necessities. Poor and helpless, she had no extra money to see a doctor when she began to suffer more and more from some painful but unknown diseases. [It was not until almost a century later that Ming, after doing a lot of research and consulting several specialists, figured out that she was suffering from all bad symptoms of Spinocerbellar Ataxia, which has actually become a family disease haunting every female descendant of hers.] Like every other mother, she longed to see with her own eyes how her only son would grow up into a strong and handsome adult and succeed in every way as an educated man; she could not bear the very idea about how he would stand alone against all hardships in this world once she left him. But after a long and hard struggle between mind and heart, she knew that for her son’s sake, she must perforce do something resolute about her own life. So, on a snowy night, after her son fell asleep, she struggled to put beside his pillow all her clothes, which she had alternated to fit him, gazed at him for a long while and then crawled quietly with great difficulty into the water tank in her leaking kitchen. Shivering in cold, she used every trace of her last strength and put her head deep into the tank with as much resolution as despair. Choked with death, she remembered not to disturb her sleeping son by pulling her head out of the water until she drowned herself.         Struck by his mother’s suicide, the young boy broke down and felt at loss as to how to move her body and bury her at the village’s mass gravesite as all other poor families did. Fortunately, a kind-hearted neighbor woman, who was also a lay Buddhist believer, sent her two sons over to help him wrap his mother’s body with a couple of thin straw mats and put it on a door board. Too tired to continue carrying the corpse uphill against a snow flurry, the two young men stopped and buried the woman just at Rabbit Mouth, a small ridge at the foot of Big Wok, the tallest hill in the village, rather than on the hillside as they would surely have done if it had been the body of their own mother.          A few days later, a local saying began to be known among villagers after one of them heard a travelling monk chanting: “if someone happens to be buried at Rabbit Mouth, his descendants will have talents to fill a big house.” However, since neither of the widow’s two daughters nor her only son showed any recognizable talent in the decades that followed, this saying soon faded into oblivion.             It was not until Ming became the first and, for many years to come, the only one from the whole village to attend a university and eventually obtain a doctorate from a foreign university that they not only came to remember the saying but felt somewhat shocked by the way it had turned out to be a little mystic prophesy. Since the villagers got word about him as a quite widely published poetry author, they have developed a serious belief in the good fengshui of Rabbit Mouth. Whenever a parent dies in the village nowadays, the family would make sure to bury the body there, some even burning joss sticks for, and kowtowing to, Ming’s grandma as if she had become a village Bodhisattva.          Coincidentally, just as in the case of his grandma whose life and death can both be associated with Buddhism in a quite dramatic way, his father has an even more mystic link to it the day he was born.           It was a day of wintry mix in 1934, exactly forty one years after Mao Zedong was born in the neighboring province. Ming’s grandfather had been bedridden for nearly half a year, lingering on the brink of death due to a disease unknown to the family. [Since Ming has a congenital heart condition which contributed most significantly to his father’s death, he now reasonably assumes that his grandfather must also have died of heart diseases.] Without any money to send for a real herbal doctor, his grandma had a few days before paid a personal visit to the nearest temple, where she prayed long for blessings from Buddha over her dying husband and the baby in her belly. As she stood up to leave the dim and small shrine hall, she heard the only residing monk chanting aloud, “All is in correlation in this world, and whatever will be will be. Buddha blesses everyone who has faith in Him!’ Then, of his own accord, the monk mysteriously told her that it wouldn’t be easy to bring up her baby after the delivery, but a white goose could help a lot. Probably because she had always been a faithful Buddhist follower, the poor pregnant woman was blessed with a perfectly normal child on the cold night. So greatly relaxed and elated, her husband managed to sit up for the first time in months and kneel down, kowtowing repeatedly to Heaven like the pounding of garlic in a mortar, as the popular saying goes. After showing his deep gratitude to Buddha, the dying man named his son as ‘Debao’, meaning “receive the treasure” and, three days later, breathed his last at age twenty nine.         “He’s been trying so really hard to hang on, just to know if he has a son,” Ming’s father once told him. “You know, for every Chinese man, there’re three forms of most ungrateful deeds, and ‘the worst is not to have a male descendant,’ as Confucius taught us all.”         “What about the monk’s advice?” asked Ming.         “After my mother begged our relatives to help bury my father, she sold her jade bracelet, the only valuable dowry that she had meant to keep for me as a family heirloom. And, with the money, she bought a white goose and hoped it would become my personal guard!”           As a relative confessed to Ming’s father many years later, there had been a conspiracy going on among male adults in the clan-village. Seeing the sick man’s days were numbered, they planned to drive all his female survivors out of the village so they could divide up his house and land lot according the convention. The reason was well grounded: there would be no male left once the sick man kicked the bucket. However, despite their wishes, a baby son was born to the family. Considering that the young widow was illiterate and knew little about clan affairs, the relatives then decided to take advantage of the fact that she could gain neither support within the village nor any help from her parental family, which was living afar in Hankou. What they only had to do was to have the baby son stolen and sold to a human trafficker. Once her only son became “missing,” the young widow would have to get remarried as arranged by the village elders even if she didn’t want to.             But the white goose turned out to be a true guardian angel. Unaware of her later husband’s relatives’ ill intentions, the widow just followed the monk’s advice by keeping her little Debao in the company of the goose. During the day, when she was weeding with a rusty hoe or picking cotton in the field, the goose would stand nearby on alert, ready to give a loud warning each time a stranger approached Debao or passed by. On a sizzling hot afternoon, the little woman was doing a man’s job by shoulder-carrying water with a pair of wooden pails from a small pond almost a li away in the valley. She was trudging breathlessly when she heard the creature honking aloud without stop. Putting down her pole, she rushed to her baby and spotted a middle aged stranger trying to calm it down in his arms. No sooner had the man realized what was happening than he cast aside the child and ran away at full speed. It was not until then that the woman realized the importance of the goose to her only son as the monk had suggested.             As if to demonstrate its loyalty and reliability, the creature would sit close to the bed every night while the mother was weaving with an old cotton spinner in a different room. Once, in the wee hours of the morning, the mother was working attentively in the dim light of a cotton seed oil lamp when she heard an agitation in her bedroom. Hurrying to the scene in no time, she found her little boy lying on the cold floor without getting himself hurt in the slightest way, and conjectured that he must have fallen on the back of the goose first, thus waking the bird. Thanks to such unfailing protection, Debao remained safe until he knew enough to shout for help in need or run away from danger. In other words, the relatives never got a chance to steal the baby son, nor did the boy ran into any real danger even when left alone. Five years later, when the goose was fatally wounded by a wild dog, the mother and the son were both thrown into the depth of sorrow. After burying it in their backyard, the widow told Debao that no one within the family, including his future descendants, should ever eat goose meat.            Debao was only about thirteen when his mother committed suicide. By then, his two elder sisters had moved farther away with their husbands. As his relatives in the village strongly advised him, the boy left his ancestral house in hope of working as an apprentice for a relative on his mother’s side, who owned a grocery store in Badong, Hubei’s border town with the contiguous Sichuan to its west. Without anyone sticking up for him, he was coerced into entrusting them to take care of his family property during his absence. So, within two days after his mother’s tragic death, Debao had to set off on his lonely journey.             As karma would have it, Debao was once again rescued by a monk after his relatives in Badong turned him away because he was neither needed in the store nor really close enough to be a member of the family. It was a burning summer afternoon in 1949, about three months before the Communists were to take over the entire country. While wandering around aimlessly and pennilessly on his way back to his native village, Debao began to run a high fever. Unable to bear the scorching weather in addition to his internal heat, he hit upon a clever idea and went to a pond nearby, where he dug up some alluvium with his hands and covered his body with it before lying down on a small ridge for a rest. He would have soaked his entire body in the pond like a buffalo, but the water also felt very hot; furthermore, he was afraid to get drowned, for he had never taught himself how to swim, even like a dog. After several wrappings, his body temperature dropped quite a bit, but he was still too weak to stand up because he hadn’t eaten any food for the past two days. He was dreaming about getting a big bowl of rice from a mother-like landlady when a traveler in a long orange robe spotted him and came over. Finding him in such a dire situation, the travelling monk readily gave Debao five silver yuan, which was all the money he had saved for his own long journey to Guiyuan Temple, the most famous Buddhist monastery in Wuhan. With the monk’s money as well as his timely help, Debao was soon recovered and got back to his normal life as a vagrant beggar. Since that casual encounter, he had always cherished his memory about how he was saved by the monk. To show his deeply-felt gratitude, he not only donated every extra yuan in his pocket to the poor, the homeless or temples when he grew up, but subsequently lived as a most pious lay believer, and kept trying to convert his two sons into Buddhism until his death.                However, with all his respect and gratitude to his father, despite his emotional proximity to Buddhism as a religion for his whole family, Ming just cannot allow anyone or anything, even his own father, much less any religious organization or the all-powerful communist party, to intervene or encroach his spiritual freedom. That is also the most fundamental reason why he resolved to leave his beloved fatherland, thus starting his lifelong self-exile in Canada after the Tiananmen Square Movement in 1989.   Detaching  (Alien Buddha Press, 2024), by Yuan Changming, PhD https://www.amazon.ca/Detaching-Yuan-Changming/dp/B0DCNN474N), a hybrid work about spiritual cultivation Books released by Yuan Changming since Feb. 2026: 1/ Return to Roots (cnf collection, Alien Buddha Press)  https://www.amazon.com/Return-Roots-sketches-southern-Hubei/dp/B0GHNCQRPK /2/ Towards (novel trilogy; Silver Bow Publishing) https://https://www.amazon.com/Towards-Yuan-Changming/dp/1774034158/ 3/ Museum of Limerence (poetry collection; ABP) https://www.amazon.ca/Museum-Limerence-Silver-Romance-Poetry/dp/B0H3FHC6NG/ 4/ Bamakoola (poetry trilogy; SBP) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H6HWLNFB