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F E A T U R E S Bad Trips
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E A R L I E R Tuesday April 22 A night from hell in Los Angeles
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questions of heaven T H E C H I N E S E J O U R N E Y S O F 
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By Gretel Ehrlich
+ + + + + + + + + + + + The road to Emei Shan we spent the night at a hotel catering to Chinese tourists going up the mountain. My translator, Zha Yu, who preferred her adopted American name of Vivian, was young and efficient, bright and well traveled. The daughter of a physicist, she had been allowed to travel out of the country, had seen the Louvre, and knew which films were being censored in China. Her regular job at Chengdu television studio was not so busy that she couldn't moonlight as a translator. She had read the poems of Meng Chiao, Li Ho, Su T'ung Po, and Tu Fu, and knew a little about Buddhism, though she thought it odd that I wanted to climb all the way up a sacred mountain when I could have been driven.
The Chinese phrase for "going on a pilgrimage," ch'ao-shan chin-hsiang, actually means "paying one's respects to the mountain," as if the mountain were an empress or an ancestor before whom one must kneel. In China, sacred travel and the cult of the mountain were endemic. The recorded history of Taoism began during the second century A.D., and regarded mountains as home to immortals and as places where magic herbs to aid transcendence could be found. Confucians saw mountains as emblems of world order. In the Chou Dynasty beginning in 1027 B.C., imperial altars were built where emperors came to pray for prosperity. Heaven, earth, and man -- the three mainstays of Chinese cosmology -- were linked by the country's vertiginous peaks.
The meaning of pilgrimage changed when Taoists set up their mountain altars and Buddhist monks began plying the trails. For them pilgrimage was not only paying homage to a place of power, but also the transformation of the inner and outer environment through the physical act of walking, every step and breath altering the atmosphere, path and goal becoming the same. I thought of Mao's Long March, how step by step, year by year, his humanitarian ideals and visions of Marxist liberation were ground down to ego and tyranny.
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In the evening we walked to the foot of the mountain. The main street of Emei Shan town unrolled in a single line to its base. The air was balmy and young couples walked hand in hand from shop to shop, then to a small pavilion at the top of the street where the stores stopped and the mountain began.
Across a narrow irrigation ditch that followed the road, a young, dark-faced farmer had just finished plowing his rice field. As he unharnessed his water ox, I asked if I could watch. He smiled proudly. "This is not my field or my ox but I farm it for the owners and get half the value of the crop." Forty years earlier over 25 million landlords were executed by Mao's army in an effort to purge the country of just these kinds of relationships.
I touched the neck of the ox. The wooden yoke, arched in the middle where it rested on the animal's neck, was shaped like the arched gate at the entrance to the farmstead. The farmer bade us good night and led the ox down a narrow path toward a shed.
As light left the sky, the moon rose shining in each of the flooded fields as if they were bowls and the plowed earth a roiling sea of black. Overhead a white cloud dissected trees. Was this the white mild road of early landscape paintings that led up the mountain to heaven?
"The road to Chu is hard and steep, steep as climbing to the sky!" That's what the poet Li Po once wrote. Li Po was born in Sichuan Province and honored Emei Shan as a perfect mountain that could turn him into an immortal. He probably climbed Emei Shan or at least gazed at it from afar. He also wrote, "In the West at Mount Taibo, there is a bird road that can cut across the summit of Mount Emei."
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In the morning, after a breakfast of congee (a rice gruel), instant coffee, white bread, and jam, Mr. Tong drove us to the base of the mountain. The day before, when the plane had descended through clouds and smog, I knew I was dropping into a beautiful country that had been made into a living hell. Nations can be shattered, cultures can be laid on history's anvil, twisted, flattened, and decimated, but a mountain remains a mountain. Now I had to rise out of that hell on foot and I knew it would be hard.
Mr. Tong waved good-bye and said he would return in four days. Tourist buses filled the parking lot as he wove down the hill. Hefting our rucksacks onto our backs, we turned to face our pilgrim's task. Despite the stairs that were so small we had to wrench our feet sideways, it felt good to be on our way.
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Shan: mountain. Mingshan: sacred mountain. All pilgrims stepped onto a path. The path led to a mountain. The way was crowded. From rows of rickety tables, vendors sold herbs picked on Emei Shan's slopes -- ginseng, fungi, and a bundle of golden plant hairs given the shape of a dog; also amulets, walking sticks, maps, and cold spring water. Medicinal herbs seem to grow more profusely on holy mountains. No one knows why.
At a little over 6,000 feet the air was thick and humid. Women passed with baskets of strawberries and young men slung fresh-picked vegetables on their backs. Crowds of golden monkeys gathered, demanding and taking peanuts from the hands of Buddhist pilgrims and Chinese tourists. Further up the mountain an old man stepped out on the path behind me, bamboo broom in his hand, a thin long pipe in his mouth, and as I walked by, he hawked, spit, then swept my tracks clean. Trackless, I continued on.
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Shu dao nan: The road to Shu is hard. There is no top, no goal. Only this hard path made of stones, the dry instruction of climbing a mountain. Every step up is a movement away from the realm of human sorrows, from the Middle Kingdom teetering between heaven and hell, from all suffering. Every step down is a slide back into it, until up and down become the same thing.
Up and up we continued, each sideways, cramped step a reminder of how difficult it is to relinquish habitual thought. "Abandon hope all ye who enter here." Dante's words and been posted above the door of the meditation hall where I sat for three and a half months in 1978. They might have said: "Welcome to the heaven or hell of your own making. Good luck climbing out." This I had already learned: If you weed the garden of your mind properly, there will be no hope and no fear, just the hard vigor of life as it plays itself out in you. But the body still resists and the mind curvets like a missile shot off and gone wild.
Emei Shan was arduous in a senseless way. I had some questions for heaven and I asked them: Why steps on a mountain path? Who carried these stones? There were stairs on the three other sacred Buddhist mountains and on the five imperial mountains and they were well used: a seventeenth-century record showed that six hundred thousand pilgrims had climbed Mount Tai. Does climbing a mountain teach about transforming effort to effortlessness? Are the two really the same, or was I a fool, were we all fools to do these things? Poor fool that I am, and often grinning through streams of sweat, I clambered on.
Every sacred mountain has its founding story. A monk or layman has a vision of a certain site and of the bodhisattva who inhabits the places. I don't know what atlas guides him, points his feet, or how he knows where to scuffle away the dirt and uncover the thin spot, the umbilicus of the mountain where its divinity is finally exposed, but it happens.
Emei Shan was opened by a man named Pu Gong. One day he was gathering some herbs on the mountain and began following deer tracks. These led him to the top of the mountain, then disappeared. Suddenly Pu Gong heard music. When he looked up he saw humans, some on horseback, drifting toward the summit on clouds. But one figure was riding a six-tusked albino elephant and above his head glowed a halo of colored light. Pu Gong was so moved by this vision that he took off and walked all the way to India -- a journey that took three months -- and visited a Buddhist monk to tell him his tale. The monk listened, nodded, then passed the story on to his teacher, who interpreted Pu Gong's tale as the coming of the Bodhisattva Samantabhadra to the mountain. Pu Gong was instructed to return to Emei Shan and build a temple. Called "First Audience Hall," it was burned down by Mao's Red Guard and has since been reconstructed.
In the first century, the poet Fan Zhen wrote this quatrain:
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The further up we went, the fewer people we saw. The climate felt tropical, not alpine; I was bathed in sweat and the skies revealed nothing, no glimpses of high peaks. Vivian said she was too young to know much of what went on during Liberation -- except that her physicist father and artist mother were put in labor reform camps where they were "struggled against." How ironic that the word liberation used by Mao was the same word used by American Buddhists to mean deliverance from samsara -- human suffering -- through practice. Once, going to these mountains was sanctuary, a distant retreat, a nostalgic home, a land where immortals picked herbs to prolong life, where hopping shamanic dances were danced and questions of heaven were posed. I wondered if, after the tyrannies of Mao and the Cultural Revolution, a culture could come back into being, if the human spirit could be stirred? When I asked Vivian, she said she was too young to know what had been lost and didn't see that there was a problem.
Sweating and listless, I began coughing. Having come from Hong Kong with a cold, my chest had tightened. This wasn't even a mountain by Tibetan standards, only the foothills of the Himalayas. I had walked in many mountains but nothing resembled Emei Shan: so many stairs, so many people. It was hard to see where I was, to frame the scape. Was this the axis mundi from which the spirit soared? Were the stairs the rungs of the metaphorical ladder on which Shamans climbed and the mind scratched a hole to see through?
Hogars, the young men who carried people up the mountain on narrow, slung-seated palanquins, hounded us. "Please let us carry you," they beseeched. "Bu, bu, bu, bu." No thanks, I said, and told Vivian I was shocked at the idea. "But humans carrying humans has had a long history in China," Vivian exclaimed. "It's perfectly natural."
Tea shops, temples, pavilions, and pagodas dotted the mountain. We stopped often to rest and drink cool Emei Shan spring water. At Elegant Sound Pavilion, a tumbling cataract sounded like rolling thunder. Ox Heart Pavilion was flanked on either side by the stream, which was split again by Ox Heart Rock. Golden frogs croaked and the shade of ancient nanmu trees cooled us. A Ming dynasty monk, Hong Ji, planted 69,707 of these trees, chanting a sutra and prostrating after each one went into the ground. In this way, he kept count. With only a few remaining, their shade in hot Sichuan sun still soothes tired pilgrims.
I stepped and counted. One stair equaled one of Hong Ji's trees. Rounding a bend, I entered the cool breeze of a narrow ravine called "A Strip of Heaven Cleavage." Did the rhododendrons that flowered on those steep cliffs have to climb the stairs to flower there?
Every step seemed to provoke in me more speculation. But the Chinese are still afraid to give the wrong answer. We passed a skinny porter sound asleep on his palanquin by the side of the path. A friend who had climbed Emei Shan in 1984 said the hogars had passed her on the mountain carrying a dead woman. They had wrapped her up and laid her on the sling as if she were sleeping. When my friend asked if the woman was dead the hogars said, "She's not dead, she's just very, very tired."
I asked Vivian about the mountain's geology. Was it wind or glaciers that carved these cliffs? "The gods cut through the mountains with their swords," she replied laughing. "That's the story Chinese people love to tell. Of course, I don't believe in such things." Gretel Ehrlich is author of "The Solace of Open Spaces" and "A Match to the Heart: One Woman's Story of Being Struck by Lightning." She lives near Santa Barbara, Calif.
Reprinted from: QUESTIONS OF HEAVEN: The Chinese Journeys of an American Buddhist by Gretel Ehrlich.
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In ancient times the name Chu alluded not only to the region now called Sichuan, but also to the mountain, Emei Shan. Also called Lofty Eyebrows Mountain, it is traditionally thought to be the abode of the bodhisattva of pervading goodness, the protector of all those who teach the Dharma, the one who is the embodiment of essential sameness, the unifying threat that strings together all disparate things.
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