Huanggang, Hubei: A Land Shaped by Buddhist Culture and Revolutionary Spirit
My grandmother believed in Buddhism all her life; at seven I began teaching her to recite the sutras, reading from pinyin. She often went to temples to worship the Buddha and brought back many hand-copied sutras; the monks told her that reciting them would bring merit. She believed this firmly, regardless of whether she understood the texts. This faith was probably inherited from her elders and passed on to my aunt. My aunt, now in her seventies, has been a vegetarian and a Buddhist since birth under my grandmother’s influence. Fortunately, by my generation no one believes in Buddhism as blindly as my grandmother did.
My native place, Huanggang in Hubei, is a place with a strong Buddhist atmosphere. As the saying goes, “The Chan of Qi and Huang is first under heaven; when great Buddhist matters arise, ask at Huangmei.” My home region was the ancient “Qi-Huang” (also called Huangzhou)—today’s Huanggang prefecture.
Our county was anciently called Guangji; in the 1980s it became the county-level city of Wuxue in the Huanggang region. It lies between today’s Qichun (ancient Qizhou) and Huangmei counties. The county name is drawn from the phrase “the Dharma is vast, saving all beings.”
According to the county gazetteer, our county was known in ancient times as “Little Western Heaven,” with temples everywhere. Today, several of its towns are still named after some temple or pagoda. Sima Daoxin, the Fourth Patriarch of Chan and its actual founder, was born in the old county seat—today’s Meichuan town—where relics of his life remain. The present Four-Patriarch Temple is built on the border between our county and Huangmei.
We are separated only by the Yangtze River from Mount Lu, the holy land of the Pure Land school. Since Master Huiyuan of the Eastern Jin taught in the Kulou area, Huangzhou in Hubei (today’s Huanggang) and the Jiujiang–Mount Lu region in Jiangxi across the river have been one of the centers of Chinese Buddhist culture. Master Huiyuan is said to have first stayed on Mount Kuang in our county; in the old days the famed sights of Kuang and Lu were spoken of together, and Kuang Mountain lies within our county. Su Shi, the great literary figure of Chinese cultural history, studied Buddhism with the monk Foyin while in Huangzhou; Li Zhi, the most unorthodox thinker of the late Ming, also lectured in Macheng, under Huangzhou prefecture. Xiong Shili, Tang Yongtong, and other modern leading scholars of Buddhist culture were also Huanggang people.
Both Chan and Pure Land, the schools that most influenced Chinese Buddhism, originated here—one can see how thick the Buddhist atmosphere is. Huanggang has many extraordinary aspects. Its best-known modern influence on China is the education at Huanggang Middle School. But a hundred years ago, Huanggang’s greatest influence on China came from its several revolutionary centers now called “general counties.” Lin Biao, Li Xiannian, Dong Biwu, and others were all Huanggang people; the iron-boned Wen Yiduo was also from Huanggang; the scientist Li Siguang was one of ours. Bi Sheng, inventor of movable-type printing, and Li Shizhen, author of the Bencao Gangmu, were both Huanggang people.
After I left home and met people from other places, I gradually realized how different Huanggang people are. I now see that what makes this region different is its cultural heritage. Some think Huanggang people are clever; actually we are not necessarily cleverer than people elsewhere, but our greatest trait is a strong “spirit of humanistic concern.” Many Huanggang people have a powerful urge, called “saving the world,” that is in fact an urge to intervene in affairs. This urge makes Huanggang people work very hard, whether at jobs or at study.
This urge is tied to Huanggang’s historical heritage. From ancient times to today the region has been repeatedly torn by war, which brought it too much suffering. If one does not intervene in the world, the world will be absurd enough to break into war again, and Huanggang, a strategic point contested by every military force, will once more become the bloodiest killing ground.
Huanggang was historically a migration center. Sitting at the junction of Wu and Chu, with the Yangtze as a natural barrier, it was often the fiercest battlefield in ancient times. The Battle of Red Cliffs in the Three Kingdoms period was fought near Huanggang. In the late Yuan and early Ming, the hardest battles between Zhu Yuanzhang and Chen Youliang were also fought around here. The cruelest campaigns of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom were fought in this area as well. The “iron chains across the river” was a real historical battle event, chain-locking the Yangtze section at Tian town in Wuxue, our county.
Old tales say that when the Taiping cause failed, some fleeing generals threw a cache of Taiping treasure into our village pond. It was only a legend, until a lucky person in our village—a childhood friend of mine—unexpectedly unearthed the cache a few years ago, secretly sold these rare treasures, and became rich overnight. Then his fortune was schemed away in recent years by local thugs.
The reason three of China’s ten “general counties” are in Huanggang, with another right next to it, is also that this is contested military ground. After every major war, Huanggang’s population dropped sharply; at its worst the region was almost scorched earth, and at least nine in ten people died in the fighting. After each great upheaval, the state would move migrants in from all over the country. When the next war came, the residents here were again slaughtered to the last.
When our village compiled its genealogy a couple of years ago, I learned something of our local migration history. My family migrated to Huanggang around the Hongwu reign of the Ming. Migrants brought various cultures; they also shaped the hardworking and combative character of Huanggang people. Migrants arrive with nothing and inevitably must encroach on locals’ interests, so struggle and contention are hard to avoid.
The most severe clan feuds of the Republican era originated in our village. The Zhou surname is one of the largest locally, with great power, and our village is the main clan settlement of the Zhous in several neighboring counties. When my father was small, in a feud between our village and the next, eight villagers from the neighboring village were killed at one blow, making the two villages hereditary enemies. This enmity lasted into my middle-school years. When I was in primary school, there were still frequent incidents in which people from their village passing through ours, or ours passing through theirs, were set upon and beaten. Only after Reform and Opening Up, when young people left to make a living, did these feuds gradually cease.
Huanggang has both a literary and a martial spirit. The Yue-family long-fist, originating from Yue Fei’s army, is very popular here. My father and fourth uncle are locally known folk martial artists, skilled in Yue-family scattered-hand techniques. Our village once had a highly skilled orthopedist and martial artist; my father says he once floored more than a dozen men from the neighboring village who were attacking him, using only a shoulder pole.
My remaining memory of this old man is that as a child I often went to his house in the evening; villagers from miles around lined up to have their bone injuries treated, which he did entirely for free, with superb manipulation and bone-setting. By day he worked his own fields to support himself. He earnestly hoped to pass his skill on to my father, feeling my father was talented enough to inherit it.
Unfortunately, my father was then too busy feeding the family to spend much time learning this life-saving art. The old man’s skill was essentially lost. His eldest son is still alive; by generation he is my clan-uncle, and he inherited a fraction of his father’s skill, but is far less accomplished.
My father was very interested in martial arts. When I was small, he made my older brother and me study with him; he wanted his two sons to be versed in both letters and arms. My brother was obsessed with martial arts, standing post with total seriousness, fiercely practicing hard qi-gong, daring to smash bricks on his head, and especially liking to find two wooden staffs—one for me, one for himself—and force me to “fight” him.
I preferred opera. My father knew a little of music, chess, calligraphy, painting, martial arts, drama, and Chinese medicine, but he would only teach us martial arts and push us to study for university; he would not teach me opera. I had no interest in martial arts; forced to stand post I would just strike a pose, and as soon as my father walked away I would go off and amuse myself.
When I was small, my father was a local celebrity who knew all sorts of people. Professional TCM herb-processors once stayed in our house; I remember that was when I first had direct contact with the processing of Chinese herbs. The herb mills used to grind medicine fascinated me; later, at some unknown time, they were sold as scrap iron. When I was small our village also had a large genealogy-compilation project; several of the compilers stayed at our house, and I had the chance to see ancient Chinese movable-type printing equipment. My childhood friends and I even stole some of the type sorts from the compilers to play with.
My father strongly disliked Buddhists, especially monks, because those monks had cheated my grandmother out of a lot of money. So he was very rude to them; whenever he met a monk at home, he would turn a stony face and show him the door. My grandmother had to give alms and feeds monks out of my father’s and fourth uncle’s sight.
Looking back, those monks really did cheat people badly; my grandfather originally owned some antiques, which the monks also tricked him out of. Many Buddhists in our village, like my grandmother, gave their wealth to the monks in exchange for so-called merit.
My older brother and I liked to associate with local monks. Once my brother went to a temple to chat about martial arts with a warrior monk of similar age; as the monk took something from his trouser pocket, a condom accidentally fell out and my brother saw it; both were embarrassed. Another monk we knew well from that temple absconded a few years ago with over two million yuan. My father, when young, had probably seen enough of such things, which is why he had no good feeling toward monks.
An old woman who lived next door, about my grandmother’s age and a close friend of hers, was with my grandmother and another old lady one of the leaders among the Buddhist believers in our village. All of them were lifelong vegetarians who chanted sutras, fed monks, and gave alms. Unfortunately, in her old age this woman suffered a run of misfortunes: her second son died of cancer, her younger son got uremia. While she was watching her grandchildren, a little granddaughter accidentally fell into the well and drowned; in her panic the old woman herself jumped into the well and killed herself. Her well was later filled in; it was right at the foot of the wall of our backyard. Even now, when I go home, I am afraid at night to go to that side of the wall.
Recalling these childhood experiences, I have gradually identified the various cultural factors that shaped me. Some are beneficial, some harmful. Now that I can think for myself, I reflect on all I went through growing up.
I feel that the cultural root of the Huanggang region is a culture of war-torn refugees; in chaotic times, many outstanding talents emerge here. In peaceful times, the people Huanggang produces feel out of place elsewhere, because there is a revolutionary spirit in our folkways. Put unpleasantly, many of the people it produces are desperadoes. I used not to understand why I myself often have a desperado spirit—why when morally indignant I lose control of my emotions and fear nothing. Now I know this is the desperado spirit I absorbed from the broader environment.
That Buddhism flourished here may relate to this bloody history; it is the other side of how Huanggang people have coped with war. After all, struggling against suffering may not always overcome it, and even if it does, the cost is great. After enormous pain, one seeks spiritual solace in religion.
Tracing it to the source, the Buddha was produced by fear; the so-called ultimate awakening of human beings mostly comes after witnessing the strife of the world and the impermanence of fate. If the world had no such suffering and ignorant strife, religion would lose its reason to exist. In high school my teacher often told me that only after great joys and sorrows, and after seeing great right and wrong, can a person fully awaken. Having succeeded young and then suffered the loss of my mother, I deeply understand my teacher’s words.
My present understanding of life and of the Buddha has reached the point of “pointing directly to the human heart and seeing one’s own nature.” I have also come to understand deeply the suffering ancestors who lived on this land of my hometown, Huanggang, Hubei. I roughly understand why our Huanggang ancestors created Chan—Chan is truly a major victory of native Chinese philosophy over imported Buddhism, reducing cumbersome Buddhism to the single character “mind.” That is why Chan was once called the “mind school.” What kind of mind can understand “Chan”? It must be, as my teacher said, a mind fully awakened after great joys and sorrows and after seeing great right and wrong.
The Fourth Patriarch of Chan, Master Sima Daoxin, was very clever; he even invented an artificial rainfall method using smoke to make clouds. Beyond the Chan teaching he founded and the Chan ethos of Buddhist self-sufficiency, he was also known for his medical skill. He was titled the “Great Physician Chan Master” because, while cultivating, he also saved people with exquisite medicine. Perhaps, in the end, this is about the only stance one can take toward this troubled human world.