Placing our hands in the prayer gesture, Michael and I bowed respectfully. Then I said, “Shifu, we’ve just been looking around and appreciating the temple.”
With equal respect, the monk bowed back with his hands together. “Thanks, you are welcome here,” he said. “I apologize that I did not meet you at the gate. It has been a long time since we have had visitors. Stay as long as you like. Please join us for tea?”
“Thank you, Shifu, we’d love to,” I said, then translated our conversation to Michael, whose face lit up instantly.
We followed the young monk through another moon gate. He pointed out a stone lion, an enormous bronze incense burner, and a tower with a green encrusted bell, so ancient it looked as if it had been last struck a thousand years ago.
Then, when we passed a small pond laced with weeds, the monk stopped and pointed to what I’d thought was a stone ornament covered with moss. “My honorable guests, I would like you to meet Perfect Merit, our enlightened tortoise. We believe he is the direct descendent of that tortoise who lived on the bed of the Eastern Sea and carried the Five Divine Mountains on his back.”
Before I could express my amazement, he went on. “Perfect Merit has witnessed the vicissitudes of many lives and is older than the three of us together.”
I translated this to Michael, and he exclaimed, “Is that so? How old-one hundred?”
I told the monk. He raised three fingers and smiled proudly. “No, three.”
I asked, “Can we touch it?”
“Sure. He’s achieved wisdom and compassion.”
Michael and I stooped to pat the tortoise’s shell, and the spiritual creature, instead of shrinking his head, cast us a slow soulful glance, as if saying, “Please leave me alone, you deluded mortals with your worldly entanglements!”
As I drank in the beauty of the place and inhaled its mingled fragrances, a sense of purity and freedom rose inside me.
The young monk led us from the sunlight into a cool, dim hall. Following him, we crossed another threshold into a sparse interior. The wooden furniture was plain and worn smooth. On one wall hung an ink painting of Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen, with an expression warning that he had no time for nonsense.
The young monk excused himself into an adjacent room.
The feeling here was quite special; there’d been nothing like it in the large cave temple that I’d documented with Enlightened to Emptiness. It was as if I’d somehow found myself in one of the remote mountain temples in a Song dynasty landscape.
Michael’s thoughts were echoing mine. “When I first looked at Chinese art, I imagined myself in a temple like this. I never thought it would really happen.” Smiling, he asked, “You think we’ll be able to find our way back?”
“Who cares?” I smiled. Perhaps, like me, he hoped that somehow we could live together in this simple place far from the confusion of the real world. But of course, a monastery would be the last place I could live with Michael!
A pause, then I went up to take a close look at another hanging scroll. The ink pale, the style effortless, it portrayed a dozen elegantly crisscrossing plum blossoms; in between their branches a big moon peeked through. The poem to its left read:
When cold chills every crack, purity arises.
Now I realize I was the moon in a past life.
I kept savoring “I was the moon in a past life,” until Michael asked, “What is it, Meng Ning? Can you translate it for me?”
After I did, he said, “If I were the moon in a past life, then you must be the Moon Goddess Chang E, who ascended to heaven and flew into my arms.”
“Sometimes I wish I were Chang E.”
Michael looked puzzled. “But what of her poor husband? Meng Ning, don’t go away to the moon. China is far enough away. I need you here on earth. With me.”
It felt strange to me, talking of earthly desire in this isolated temple. Strange to really be wanted by a man.
We went on joking for a while before my gaze was arrested by a piece of calligraphy. I went up to take a close look at the flowing characters executed in the running style.
So I have looped around. From the preciousness of sensation to the harmfulness of being attached to it.
Intrigued, I wondered who had written this poem and what the motivation was.
I translated to Michael and told him my thought. He said, “I think it’s just another Zen poem about nonattachment.”
Just then the young monk returned. With tender respect, he helped another monk, old and wrinkled, who was inching forward with a cane. As slow as the turtle, Old Monk settled down onto a chair. His brown leathery face, brown robe, and brown cane blended in with the chair and the room. If a guest entered the room now, I bet he’d have taken Old Monk merely as another piece of antique furniture!
The young monk invited us to join them at the table.
Old Monk looked at us and split a toothless smile from a mouth like a dried-up well. His eyes, though yellowed and clouded, still penetrated, as if transmitting the law of Dharma directly from his mind.
Young Monk was now busy arranging the teapot, teacups, and dried fruit. When finished, he knelt at the altar table, muttered a short prayer, then offered his tea and fruit to the Buddha with utmost piety and respect.
I felt moved by this act of sincerity and devotion.
Then he poured another cup of tea and went to the old monk. To my surprise, he knelt down and offered him tea with the same piety and respect he’d paid to the Buddha.
After these offerings, the young monk, now looking relaxed, poured us steaming tea. Then he introduced the old monk to us as Master Detached Dust and himself as Eternal Brightness. Old Monk responded with an innocent smile.
Eternal Brightness said, “In comparison to our tortoise, my Master Detached Dust is quite a young man at only one hundred and five.”
I translated this to Michael. He exclaimed disbelief, but then bowed respectfully to Detached Dust. And, I believed, to the mystery of his longevity.
Suddenly the master spoke. “Do you two watch TV?”
This question from a one-hundred-and-five-year-old Zen monk recluse really took me by surprise-he should have long transcended the seven emotions and the five desires.
I translated to Michael. He said, “I feel sorry for him; he must be extremely lonely here.”
Then I turned back to Detached Dust. “We have a TV, but we don’t watch much.”
The master surprised me again by saying, “I’ve heard about it, but I’ve never seen it.”
“Master, you mean never in your whole life, not even once?”
“No.”
Now this living fossil really intrigued me. “Aren’t you curious to watch TV?”
Instead of directly answering my question, he smiled contentedly. “I have my garden, my sutras, the sky and the clouds.”
I translated this to Michael and he said, “Ask him whether he’s bored sometimes.”
I turned and asked the master.
His reply was, “Night after night the moon shines on the pond.”
Eternal Brightness eagerly chimed in. “Since his youth, Master’s eyesight has been weak,” as if an apology were needed for Master’s not watching TV, and not connecting to the modern world.
“Then how can he read his sutras?” I asked.
“He’d already memorized most of them before he reached twenty.” He paused, then added, “But Master possesses the Buddha eye.”
I translated this to Michael and he nodded, looking deep in thought.
A brief silence. Then the young monk stood up, went to the cauldron, and held out a bamboo tray on top of which lay fat, snowy-white buns. The bun, hot and steaming in my hands, seemed alive and palpitating.
Michael, probably very hungry by now after our long climb under the sun, was devouring the bun and gulping down the tea with relish.