SICHUAN—HAVE YOU EATEN TODAY?
Good morning, Kamisaraki, Namaste, Habari, Julley, Salam aleikum, Tashi deley, Chi fan le ma?… The greeting is usually the first semantic unit we come across when we land in a foreign country. We try to remember it and never fail to use it when the opportunity arises, because we have realised that by doing so electricity flares up between us and the people opposite us, which makes their day, as well as ours, better. Regardless of the fact that the greeting has a different lexical meaning in the different cultures, it has everywhere just a purely social function. If you wander over the islands in the Titicaca lake, the Indians will welcome you with “Kamisaraki” (Where are you from?), the Maasai in Kenya will say “Habari” (What’s new?”), and the Sherpa on the hills of the Himalaya will greet the divine in you with “Namaste”. Actually, nobody is interested where you come from or what’s new. The important thing is that you are not only visually registered but also verbally identified. Through the greeting phrase your presence is assessed, confirmed and accepted as an indisputable fact. The same is also true in the opposite direction. An equivalent social contact between human beings is being established—people who respect each other’s right to be exactly at that place at exactly that time.
Once, when I was going down in the dusk towards a village in Ladakh, I met on the path two herders who were going up to collect their livestock. “Do you come from above?” they asked uninquiringly. I had wandered enough in these parts of Asia to know that I shouldn’t answer literally. I answered with “Julley” and only later learned that the correct answer was: “Do you come from below?” Logical. However, the logic was somehow lost on me when recently—in the Chinese province of Sichuan—I was greeted with “Chi fan le ma?” meaning “Have you eaten rice today?”
Geographically, the Sichuan Basin forms the main catchment area in the lower reaches of the Yangtze, thus feeding the river’s mightiness on its way further down. However, in this territory of 485 thousand square kilometers there are not only rivers and lowlands, as the name of the region—meaning “The four river valleys”—could mislead us. The land in the west sharply flies away up to the sky forming the easternmost offshoot of the Himalayan mountain system, namely the Ta-sioue Shan massif and its ice bastion Minya Konka (7,556 meters). Beyond the catchment, the ocean-like Tibetan plateau spreads out far and wide. Part of it was included in the province of Sichuan when the People’s Republic of China was established in 1949 and Tibet was occupied. To the north and to the south, the Sichuan Basin is surrounded by lower mountains that border the provinces of Gansu, Qinghai and Yunnan.
As far as human presence is concerned, the lowlands of Sichuan are among the most densely populated areas in the world. There is nothing fortuitous in this fact. Agriculture has been flourishing here ever since the upsurge of the Qin dynasty in the 5th century BC. Thanks to the advanced irrigation system consisting of locks and reservoirs, the damages caused by the seasonal floods dropped considerably and the rice production increased tangibly. Even today East Sichuan is the main rice producer in China. And the greeting “Chi fan le ma?”, although a little bit archaic, is still in use in this area. It doesn’t matter that thanks to the fertility here hardly anyone of the 120 million local people is left without rice.
Agriculture aside, in the context of the general economic upsurge of the PRC, Sichuan is in the front line regarding quality of life and development. You’ll notice it right away if you come from a more provincial part of the country and land directly in Chengdu. A megapolis with over 10 million inhabitants, the capital of Sichuan is a modern city with an impressive look, though with a touch of gigantism. If and to what extent you fancy the Chinese ideal for urbanization and architectural esthetics, is another question. Along the huge boulevards resembling surging canyons of traffic and pedestrians, residential and office buildings are erected. Tidy indeed, but without any individuality. Confucian pragmatism wafts from everywhere and every attempt of showing imagination turns into downright kitsch. The not so big Nan He River flows through the city, but on coming from the airport—while traveling by bus along the river bank—the hull of an ocean liner suddenly appeared in front of us. We were wondering what this huge ship was doing in this little stream. However when we drew closer, we saw that it was just a concrete replica of a ship. Built on the very bank of the river, it housed shops, restaurants, etc. You drink your tea on the cement deck… and feel as if you were on a luxurious cruise far away from here.
It is really amazing how the Chinese manage to create the most exquisite works of art and at the same time be slaves of imitation and kitsch. If you walk along the narrow alleys in the more attractive part of the city, you’ll come across fascinating small shops with all kind of traditional products. Paper lanterns, filigree decorated chop-sticks, masks of the famous Sichuan opera, paintings on eggs and what-not—everything created with incredible refinement and elegance. And the tea shops, they are real masterpieces of interior design. Only girls who satisfy strict aesthetic criteria can be shop assistants there. To be attended by them in such a refined atmosphere is a real delight for the senses.
The parks in Chengdu are another attractive feature of the multitudinous city. They are planned masterfully with a gardener’s taste and are saturated with unique eastern atmosphere. We walk along alleys covered with white gravel, meandering among the decorative bushes of hibiscus and rhododendron. We pass beneath branchy oleanders, hanging over rockery and small pools with motley-coloured fishes. Contemplative calmness overwhelms us and we feel like sitting down on the benches put around and made of tree trunks divided into halves. We drop onto a bench and only then realise that they are built of concrete and the annual rings of the tree are skillfully painted with oil-colour. Ecologically correct, isn’t it?
Interesting temples are erected in some of the more or less old-fashioned parks. One of them is Wenhua Gongyuan, where the sanctuary of the Green Goat is located. This is the oldest and largest Taoist temple in the Sichuan Basin whose foundations were laid in antiquity. The teaching of the Chinese philosopher Lao Tse, who lived in the 10th century BC, serves as the basis of Taoism. Two centuries later Taoism won recognition as a state religion of the Chinese Empire, along with Confucianism and later Buddhism. The curious thing about Taoism is that it represents an amalgam of philosophy, psychology and old Chinese traditions. In fact, the Taoists pray to all possible other deities from Chinese mythology, only not to Lao Tse. Often the deified image of Lao Tse even doesn’t exist in the Taoist pantheon. When viewed from this perspective, one could say that Taoism is much more a centuries-old stratification and reflection of China’s culture than a typical religion.
As all religious beliefs, Taoism also abounds with all kinds of myths—one more bizarre than the other. They say that in this temple, Lao Tse had an appointment with a friend of his. When the friend arrived at the time stipulated, he found only one young herder who was leading two goats. The man wondered, but then realised in a flash of non-linear thinking that the herder was the wise man himself. This is how the goats of this story were proclaimed sacred. In their honour an impressive temple was built consisting of three different pavilions. A beautiful octagonal pagoda was erected between the second and the third pavilion. Noteworthy is not only that its design represents an architectural illustration of the Taoist teaching, but also the fact that the wooden structure was fitted without any nails or metal keys. In front of the entrance to the last pavilion one can see the bronze figures of the two goats. The greenish patina of some parts of their bodies is polished to the colour of yellow.
We walk with the crowds of worshippers through the pavilions and the orthogonal courtyard of the temple. Solid busts of unknown deities in rich gold garments are exhibited in the rooms behind glass. The believers kneel, repeatedly touching their heads to the ground. In parallel with Buddhism again, the worshippers light strongly scented ritual incense sticks on metal altars arranged outside between the buildings. The heavy aroma saturates the air that vanishes, squeezed beneath a blanket of smoke. From time to time a remote gong resounds, and Taoist monks in dark cassocks and hair put up in a bun angrily turn their backs on us when we lift our cameras to take a picture of them. Before long we reach the end of the temple, and led by the stream of people, we climb up to the statues of the two goats. According to the traditional belief, if you stroke the beard of one of the goats, luck will never leave you. Over the course of centuries, billions of hands have probably touched the cold metal with the same fervent hope that keeps us going even today.
There is no hope, however, in the eyes of the people thronged in the main square of Chengdu to see the marble statue of the megalomaniac Mao. We don’t detect nostalgia either. In the eyes of the younger people who are making faces for a photo in front of the leader’s monument, there is a kind of ridicule; in the eyes of the elderly people who are just walking around in the Sunday afternoon, concealed indifference. We, however—God knows why—feel somehow hypnotized. For more than an hour we can’t leave the place. It is as if the demonic charisma of this evil genius keeps exercising power over the square that has seen the degradation of entire generations who had vowed fidelity to the father of communist China.
While Mao Zedong now is only a tourist attraction in these lands, the panda has been the emblem of Sichuan for a long time. This species threatened with extinction reproduces with difficulty, and the Chinese zoologists raise them in conditions close to natural, however controlled. It turned out that there is such a breeding farm on our way to our next destination, Mount Emeishan, and without discussion we succumbed to curiosity. After we paid the inevitable entrance fee to the reserve, we walked for a long time in the bamboo thicket before we finally found ourselves in front of several pandas. They were sitting on the grassy ground—as if being on stage—absorbed in eating bamboo. There is really something in these cuddly bears that makes them look exactly like plush toys and not animals.
No such warm feelings arise from what was constructed in Emeishan, one of the four holy Buddhist mountains in China. The first temples here were erected at the time of the adoption of Buddhism in the empire in the 3rd – 4th century AD. Gradually Emeishan turned into the Sichuan version of the orthodox Mount Athos, and at the beginning of the 14th century there were more than 100 monasteries and several thousand monks here. Unfortunately nothing of the original buildings with their Tibetan iconography is preserved today. Many of the buildings fell victim to devouring fires, and in World War Two Japanese troops seized the area. Later on came the Red Guards who razed to the ground what was left. Today, about twenty temples are rebuilt in an attempt to demonstrate that the religious freedom in modern China is allegedly completely restored. However, it is difficult to overcome the dominating feeling of spiritual emptiness and falseness in spite of all the efforts of architects, builders and ideologists.
This is why the stream of worshippers and tourists inevitably directs its steps to nearby Leshan, where on a rocky cape at the confluence of two rivers you can see one of the wonders of the Buddhist world. Carved in a sheer cliff of copper-red limestone, the statue of the sitting Buddha Shakyamuni is 71 meters high. This is the largest statue of the Indian teacher. His ears are seven meters long and the big toes—eight and a half. Luckily for the present generations, neither the implacable force of erosion, nor the malefaction of the human hand have managed to destroy the grandeur of this colossal figure. Well, not completely… Trying to restore Buddha’s head with pink foundation and black make-up, the restorers have definitely overdone it. But this is the idea of aesthetics in this part of the world.
From the level of the river we climb up through a quiet park dotted with figures from the Buddhist pantheon. We come to an eminence with an old pagoda. Next is a temple complex full of people. Incense sticks fume everywhere, and young people prevail. No matter how disapprovingly the communist government of China views religion, the young generations seek religious experience more and more openly. From the temple, the crowd goes to a place above the niche in the cliff in which Buddha is carved. The sculpting of the statue began in 713. The project was the work of a Buddhist monk called Haytong who spent his life in a cave nearby, and the realization of the project took ninety years.
We examine the statue from different sides and even sail by boat to its foot, where the view is phenomenal. I try to imagine the emotions that sweep over the Buddhist worshippers when they stand face to face with this giant. Is it just veneration—of the kind the Red Guards felt when they fanatically marched in front of the stone figures of their living idol erected on the squares over the whole of China? Or are they overwhelmed by humility combined with gratitude? Illumination and gratitude for the good fortune that enabled them to come close to something—as it turns out—worth the long way here… When we step back on the river-bank, the monsoon clouds blacken and a remote sound of thunder warns of a storm.