Fading Away, Ever Farther, Ever Silent—Reflections on Rereading Roads to Heaven
I cannot remember when I bought Roads to Heaven (Kong Gu You Lan) by the American Bill Porter; I only vaguely recall buying it about ten years ago, and after that I also bought another of his books, Zen Baggage.At the end of last month, while organizing my book collection, I came across this book again and reread it in my spare time. I had completely forgotten the contents of this book I had read before; I even suspected I had never read it after buying it, and reading it again was like reading a brand-new book I had never opened.Roads to Heaven is a book Bill Porter wrote while seeking out hermits in the Zhongnan Mountains; it is part travelogue, part reflection on life. Bill Porter was drawn to the life of Chinese hermits, so he spent a great deal of time traveling around China, seeking out monks and teachers. After returning to the United States, he himself lived the life of a Chinese hermit, in a secluded place, tending a vegetable garden and keeping deer as companions. Having studied for a doctorate in anthropology when young, Bill Porter was fascinated by traditional Chinese culture all his life; China was his great field site for anthropological research, and his infatuation with Chinese culture kept his heart tied to China forever.After these two books he successively published The Silk Road, Yellow River, South of the Clouds, Attention! You Arrived, The Heart Sutra: A Biography, The Platform Sutra: The Zen Teaching of Hui-neng, One Thought of Peach Blossom Spring, and A Journey to the Jiangnan; I have skimmed these as well. But these later books seem less readable than his breakthrough work Roads to Heaven and Zen Baggage, perhaps because the spiritual content running through those two is deeper.For Chinese people, the Zhongnan Mountains can only be described as thunderously famous; no other word will do. Many ancient legends are connected with the Zhongnan Mountains; idioms and allusions such as "the Zhongnan shortcut" and "the Four Greybeards of Mount Nan" reflect its influence on Chinese people from different sides. Kumarajiva and Xuanzang, the two great translation masters famous in Buddhist history, both completed their translation work in the Zhongnan Mountains. A nun I know and two patients I am treating also cultivate there; that vast mountain range is the spiritual home of many people.Blocked by the pandemic, I have not traveled far for a long time. Cooped at home reading Roads to Heaven, following in Bill Porter's footsteps, and sensing the landscape of the Zhongnan range and the people who cultivate there through his words has a peculiar flavor. Reading this book at my present age is a very different experience from reading it ten years ago. What Bill Porter longed for was the idyllic life of Tao Yuanming; if ten years ago Tao Yuanming was still someone I admired, today I simply treat him as an ordinary neighbor. The reason is none other than that I have now become the same kind of person he was, except that I cannot write poems as beautiful as his.Bill Porter must have traveled the same inner path. At first he marveled at the lives of the hermits dwelling in the deep mountains, unable to suppress his excitement and emotion. In the end he himself became such a person, and gradually came to understand the mood Tao Yuanming described in his poem: "There is a true meaning here; I meant to explain, but forgot the words." Fading away, ever farther, ever silent, is the mark of a person moving from youth to maturity—silence and wordlessness are a more powerful and steadfast force than sound and words. When all fantasy becomes reality, romance fades, and difficulty and dullness appear, the most sincere side of our being shows itself.Compared with another Western anthropologist, Will Durant, Bill Porter understands the inner meaning of Chinese culture better. Durant's The Story of Civilization, hailed as "the Shiji of the twenty-first century" and awarded the Pulitzer Prize, includes a volume on Eastern civilization called Our Oriental Heritage, but that book reads more like a surface skim, whereas Bill Porter writes from deep within the soul.The ultimate pursuit of Eastern civilization is the unity of knowledge and action, or, as Buddhism puts it, the perfection of awakening and practice—a lofty state in which theory and practice are fused into one. Once a person reaches this state, their mind is immeasurably at peace.This is also the charm of Eastern culture. Through all ages, east and west, and into the distant future, human beings have spiritual needs. The longer one lives in this world, the more one realizes that nothing external matters as much as the peace deep within. A person seems to be reading another's books and articles, seems to be observing another's life, but is actually only using that to observe himself and examine his own heart. One day, most people will see that all five aggregates are empty. Bill Porter is like this, and so are you and I.The traveler need not be someone like Bill Porter, carrying a pack and trekking across mountains and rivers; everyone cultivates in his own way. At this moment, my son is heading into an exam hall in the pouring rain to take a national physics competition. I have not preached to him the idea that fame, wealth, and sensual pleasure are all empty; I believe that his living through all of this himself is his best way of cultivation. The day before, his school was organizing parents to attend a lecture by some psychology expert, and I did not go either. In recent years psychology experts have become another kind of public nuisance in family education; they are making parents less and less able to raise their children in a natural way.Tasting the sweet and the bitter is cultivation; experiencing success and failure, gain and loss, is cultivation too. Flowers and rotten eggs, tears and laughter, all are provisions on the path of cultivation. I only said to my son in my heart: child, go through all of this! Joy and discomfort, fervor and calm, boldness and humility, the entanglements with your parents and with all beings—all will shape your soul. When one day you are mature, you will naturally, like an orchid in an empty valley, quietly dwell in a corner, silently giving off your fragrance. The "cultivation" in my understanding contains both accumulating and correcting; a person grows by continually accumulating experience and lessons and continually correcting his own errors.The great world is an empty valley, and the empty valley is another great world. An orchid, whether in the great world or in the empty valley, is still an orchid. As for when we ourselves become orchids, that is not for us to decide. Fate may make us early-ripe or late-ripe; we cannot fight it. Over the past ten-plus years I have witnessed at least ten thousand deaths; the only rule I have learned from them is that human fate follows no rule. So now I have chosen an attitude of going along with fate without resistance.All dharmas arise from emptiness, and all return to emptiness. But human existence is real: this physical bag of filth has needs for food and shelter, and our genes have the urge to reproduce; all this dooms us to have wants and suffering. For ordinary beings to leave suffering and attain joy, there is no way but to transcend the self in spirit. How to transcend is, in turn, a matter of personal view; everyone has his own way of transcendence, so the means of release from the sea of spiritual suffering are infinite.Breaking through this gate and freeing oneself from the sea of suffering is a lifelong required course for each of us. What Bill Porter observed is only a part of the countless cultivation methods that release beings from the sea of suffering. By observing our own hearts through his books, we may find another method of cultivation better suited to ourselves. This is something Bill Porter cannot interfere with; from ancient times to the present, the author can never replace the reader. So this chattering parrot of mine should fall silent.