CONVERSATIONS 8

Huaihai 

(Baizhang Huaihai 百丈懷海 720-814)

The pair of red foxes gamboling in the meadow below me had put a thin smile on the old man’s face. Sitting before the large ovoid stone, aged with lichen and smoothed with centuries of rain, wind, and snow, the man nodded gently, then resumed tracing the etched characters that ramboled across the face and flats of the rock. He was missing the index and middle finger of his left hand, stumps badly scarred, and so used his ring and little finger to stroke the inscribed lines.

“Each stroke relies on the others,” Huli muttered softly. “Animate, they are.” He placed his gnarled right hand flat on the rock. “Not twigs arranged in this shape or that. Before the eyes are the grove of trees that arrange and rearrange as through the wood we walk.”

A sharp bark returned my eyes to the meadow, but the foxes quite quickly had gone.

The old man laughed, then slapped my head. “You stink of that old thief Matsu.”

He had caught me out. As soon as the thought that ‘the foxes had gone’ came into my head, the famous koan of Mazu followed:

Baizhang Chan Temple 2024

One day, Baizhang Huaihai on a walk with Matsu saw a group of wild geese flying by. Matsu said, "There,” pointing, “what might they be up to?" Baizhang said, "They are wild geese.” Matsu asked, "And where are they going?" Baizhang shrugged and said, "They have flown away."

Matsu then grabbed Baizhang's nose and twisted it. The young monk yelped in pain, backing awkwardly away. Matsu said, "Humpf. Do you still say that they flew away?"

Baizhang, bent over, holding hands to his face, groaned, and shook his head in puzzlement.

“When have they ever flown away?” Matsu asked. Turning away from the young man, the Master squared his shoulders and left him.

The shadow of a realization creased Huaihai’s brow. The next morning, Baizhang went to hear Matsu's lecture. Before Matsu started talking, Baizhang went forward and rolled up Matsu's bowing mat. Matsu, amused, simply gazed at this impetuous fellow. Then the Master rose from his cushion and, without a word, returned to his room.

Later he asked Baizhang, "When I went up to the seat, why did you roll up my bowing mat before I spoke?"

Baizhang said, "My nose was hurt when you grabbed it yesterday."

Matsuu said, "And where in your mind do you keep yesterday's aches and pains?"

Baizhang answered, "My nose does not hurt today."

Matsu nodded and smiled. "You understand today's matter very well."

Baizhang made his bow and left.

“Look,” Huli said, circling his two fingers just over the inscription. “The center part of the character is compact, but, here and here, the four directions are expansive. Restraint inward; expansive outward. Calm dignity. Composed tension. The center of each character tends to be just the least bit higher, yes, so stability arrives to the eye through the balance between long vertical strokes and short horizontal strokes.”

The paragraph I write on paper does nothing to capture the short, clipped phrases of Huli’s Chinese. So much is missing.

“Liu Gongquan remains,” he said.

The calligrapher died in 865, ten years previous; but like the geese, he has not flown away. I said nothing for fear that Huli would pull my nose.

I had met the man on the wide cart path of a village deep in the mountains called Baizhang (百丈). My cloud flying, still a clumsy business for me, had set me down in the right mountains, but 60 years too late for the eminent Chan master Huaihai.

A wooden sign hanging from the eaves of a nearby shop pictured a carved fox and the characters for stone (石) and wood (木). An old man sat before a neatly squared stone slab, a tombstone in the making perhaps, and worked his foot treadle spinning the abrasive end of his tool as he polished the edges of the characters etched in the slab.

I had appeared suddenly in the street, unsure of both my time and place. He had not bothered to look up from his work, hand steady, foot tapping up and down, up and down. Experience had taught me that direct questions brought suspicion and wary terse answers.

Beating around the bush brought out curiosity.

“Excuse me, sir. Is there a tea shop nearby?” I asked.

His silence lasted for a minute or so as he finished the last of the horizontal strokes. With a finger to his nose, leaning out, he blew snot to the dust at his right foot. Then turned to me now standing nearby on his left.

“Tea?” he said.

“Yes, please.”

“Poor village, this one. The rocks of Baizhang make water. Make do.”

I was taken aback. Was this a play on words? Did ‘make water’ in Chinese have the same connotation as ‘make water’ in English?

He pinched his nose between his little finger and thumb. A woman and two small children came down the street. A cart pulled by a young man rattled up behind me.

“But the temple,” I said, “might I get a bit of rice and a cup of tea at the temple?”

The man with the cart stopped beside me. Hauling round river rock, it seemed. He said, “Huli, telling lies again?” Then to me, “He’ll spin tales and weave lies like truth, this old fart.”

The woman stopped. She held the two children tightly by their arms.

“What’s he want?” she asked the young man.

“He doesn’t know.”

They spoke quickly, in dialect, and I managed to understand that they were wary and perhaps contemptuous. Obviously, I was not from there.

Without looking up from his work, Huli said, “You two be on your way. My friend and I have business.”

Exchanging smiles, the young man and the woman just shook their heads. The children, sullen looks painted on their faces, said nothing.

Watching them go, turning up the street and down, Huli said to my back, “Temple rundown since Pochang went to dust. Fifty years or more. Drinking nettles and dirt there now. Eating millet. Chanting like dessicated frogs.”

‘Pochang’ I knew was but one of Huaihai’s names. An older pronunciation of ‘Baizhang.’ The famous Chan master had died in 814, and I, of course, had overshot the mark.

“Did you know him?” I asked. Breaking my rule of circling to an answer, I had blurted the question. And continued in the same vein. “Were you here when he was at the temple? Before his …. Before he passed away?”

“Stoned?” Huli grinned, shook his head. “Passed,” he said. His pronunciation of the two words was similar, but obviously different.

I had used the Chinese term ‘shìshì’ (逝世) for ‘passed away.’ He was having a bit of fun at my expense. “‘Stone’ and ‘passed away’ were almost homophones. But he expected an answer.

“Died,” I said. Using the Chinese ‘sǐ le’ (死了), blunt but to the point.

Huli slapped his knee, and said, “Ah, thank you,” another homophone (xie xie 谢谢) to mock my clumsy Chinese.

“Stoned,” he muttered, chuckling. He rose from his stool and went inside his shop. “Come,” he said.

I went in to find Huli squatting beneath a work bench, rummaging through a box of scrolls. He found what he was looking for, stood, and rolled it out across the bench.

“The Regulations of Baizhang Huaihai,” he said. 

A tattered, ink stained sheet of once transparent paper lay before me. The calligraphy, balanced, thin, elegant yet quite robust, filled the page.”

“Carved it on the rock’ Huli said. “My job. Liu Gongquan quite a fellow, he was. Dashed this off in no time.” Huli punched my arm. “We’ll have a cup of tea,” he said. “Then we go visit Pochang.”

CONVERSATIONS 7

 SUN-FACED BUDDHA, MOON-FACED BUDDHA

日面佛, 月面佛

(Mazu Daoyi 馬祖道 708 - 788)

We walked through the main gate, Matsu slightly ahead, his limp still noticeable, but his swagger intact. He walked like Captain Cook pacing the quarterdeck of HMS Resolution as that stout ship plunged through Pacific swells. An imposing figure, his worn black robe wrapped casually around his slightly portly, broad shouldered torso. His sandals slapped down and raised dust as we walked the broad trail that meandered into the countryside. He ran a hand over his bristly skull, spat, and strode on.

We were off to see how the harvest was coming. Lotus root, watermelons, early rice, and piquant red peppers were all being gathered. Many monks wore straw conical hats to keep the sun off their heads and faces, and most were barefoot. Here and there were women, working the melon patch cutting the veins from the fruit ahead of the men.

“A busy time,” Master Mo said.

“I’m surprised to see the women.”

“Hmm, more of them than you’d think,” Matsu said. “Last I heard there were 20 or 30 nunneries in Chang’an.”

“Chan? Or of all denominations?"

The master considered the word ‘denominations.’ Not a common designation apparently.

He said, “Not many from our lineage.” His tongue swiped his lips. “Hard business, those nuns.”

And said no more.

Voices called from behind us. As we turned, a messenger was brought to him, a man  from Szechuan;  and, as he came up, Matsu immediately switched dialects to speak with the fellow. Then, with the same facility, he switched back to Middle Chinese, the lingua franca of Tang Dynasty China, to give what I took to be directions to the monk from the temple.

This business of language had piqued my interest. In modern China, the current count gives about 150 dialects most of which are not mutually intelligible. Only half of these regional languages have dictionaries. All literate Chinese, whatever variety of the language they speak, can read and write the Chinese logograms. They can often be seen writing characters in the air, informing their speech with visual clues.

“Were you speaking a different dialect to that messenger,” I asked.

He stopped and turned to look at me. “Him?” looking at the departing man. “He’s a Bashu. From Chengdu. Doesn’t speak Gan.”

“But you speak both?”

Master Ma ran a finger under his nose. Sniffed. “A man travels a bit, picks up some words and such. That’s all there is to that.”

“Aren’t they both Chinese?”

“Lotta Chinese. Some more than others.” A shake of the head, and he turned and walked on, leaving me to ponder his cryptic words.

Another hot morning had us both sweating though it was not yet ten o’clock. The Chinese, of course, had their own way of telling the time, dividing the day into two hour slots each represented by an animal from their zodiac. It was now the hour of the snake and appropriately warm for an ectothermic critter.

The back of Matsu’s faded black robe was darkening with sweat. Apparently, our conversation was over. He walked on, called out to men pulling a cart towards us, a cart filled with watermelons. The other men, all older monks, laughed as Master Ma began measuring the stripes on the melons with one of his thick fingers. They seemed to be chastising him, shaking their heads, waving him away with a hand.

Speaking Gan quickly, as they did, they were hard to understand; but I picked out a few words. There would be no melons for the master until this evening. I think they called him a ‘naughty boy.’ They had used the word ‘táoqì, pronounced like ‘how chee.’ That was a Middle Chinese expression still common in Mandarin that meant ‘naughty.’ That was my guess anyway.

The few words that I recognized all had tonal structures similar to my Beijing Mandarin. Most of their words, however, did not. The Bashu messenger spoke with many high-pitched sounds, more nasal than I was used to, but more easily understood than the Gan dialect which seemed to have a vocabulary and grammar all its own. Probably should be considered a separate language rather than a dialect.

Monks, walking meditation

I had turned to look as the muted sound of chanting men came from the temple. A half dozen monks, three older, more venerable fellows and three young novitiates, were just leaving the gate and heading down towards the bridge. Barefoot, eyes lowered, their steady pace kept time with their chants.

“The old show the way; the young stand on their shoulders.” Master Ma had stopped and given the nod to the solemn procession.

“What are they carrying? Drums? Are they carrying some type of drum?”

A laugh from Master Ma. “Just robes. They got their begging bowl, a bag for water, and maybe a sutra or two. All wrapped up in the patch-work robe. Set for a day on the road. Carrying all their earthly possessions.”

I thought immediately of Mahatma Gandhi. At the time of his death, assassinated in New Delhi in 1948, his material possessions amounted to fewer than ten items. There was a small desk, perhaps a hand loom, sandals, a bowl, his trademark round, metal framed glasses, and a few other items.

Do we own our goods and chattels, or do they own us?

Echoing my thoughts, Matsu said, “Less the better.” He seemed to reflect for a moment, then said, “Peppers. It's the peppers we’re after.”

And on we walked.

Though early in the day, I had begun thinking of lunch; but there would be no lunch as such. A meager breakfast by western standards, and then, sometime between 11 AM and 1 PM, leftover rice and vegetables were served. A rule for most monasteries prohibited eating after midday, the hour of the horse.

My experience, at least for Matsu’s temple, was that fasting through the afternoon and evening was given lip service but little else. Informal ‘medicinal meals’ were taken between 4 PM and 6 PM. Ostensibly for the sick or aged, most Chan monks helped themselves.

We had gotten ourselves some peppers to sustain us on our return, their reds not as fiery as jalapenos, but with more of a bite than our little sweet peppers. I would be leaving the following day, and asked Matsu if I might return the following summer. He lapped his nose with his tongue, then put a hand on my shoulder.

“You always return. Not a problem. Me? I’ll be dead and gone.”

That stopped me in my tracks. I had forgotten.

Blyth had written a brief account of Matsu’s death in his two volume  Zen and Zen Classics. It is all anecdotal, of course, but not without interest. He tells of the Master doing his walking meditation through the woods, hands crossed on chest. He stops and points to an open grassy lea, and tells the friend with him that ‘ … next month, my carcass must be buried just there. Put it in the ground. Get on with your day.’

Not long after, he became ill. He called for the abbot, an old friend. The man came, commiserated, and asked how he was feeling. Matsu replied with his famous, paradoxical phrase: ‘Sun-faced Buddha, Moon-faced Buddha’ (日面佛, 月面佛). Soon after, failing, he was bathed, sat crossed legged on his cushion, and died.

We would both move on; neither of us would return.

NOTE:

A sun-faced Buddha lived to a great age; a moon-faced Buddha lived only for a short time. No distinction is to be made between the two.

Blyth interpreted this as the ultimate ‘haiku moment,’ the acceptance of "what is" without any mental anguish or concerns about  ‘passing away.’ For Blyth, it represented the ‘Great Death’ in Chan (Zen) Buddhism, the apotheosis of enlightenment when the ego is no more.