A Journey to Xi’An: The City of Western Serenity

By Joseph Boyd, April 2006

The End of the Road, the Silk Road

It is time for an update on our trip, before we’re off on another leg of my spring-time adventures, to see the birthplace and resting place of China’s most influential thinker, Confucius. I will be accompanying some acting friends on a ten-hour bus trip to their performance in Shan Dong province this week, to the birthplace of the prevalent ethnic majority of the Chinese culture, the Han. I hope that I will grow to understand a little more about the roll that this place and its ethnic group have played in forming the oriental worldview and its socio-economic concepts into what they are today. Confucius, if any man really can, defines Asia and the Asian concept of “face” that still provides the driving ethos of the Sino-Japanese-Korean stereotype. 

This is an extraction of my photo journal of my journey to Xian, an almost-pilgrimage that I purposed to take for one reason when I was seven years old, and for another when I was twenty-one. Of all the places that I have been in life, not one distressed, stirred, questioned, or called up a torrent of emotion as this place did; never did I feel the agony of experience within a broken universe as I did walking through the vast cemeteries of shattered obelisks that record the long-forgotten philosopher kings of the Tang. The confusion of centuries of lost men, whose lives made sense in the momentary artistic sweep of a calligrapher’s brush and in the ordered ceremony of religious and social life, seemed to sink in the pit of my stomach. I had the sense that I could see through the chiseled stone and aged mulberry paper, into a fourth dimension where minds bend time and space to meet over art. What I saw made me fear for my own sanity, as I felt the tinges of otherworldliness that enshroud men who strive for nothing less than to become supermen. And my dreams  followed suit, in a place, where, you literally could believe that you had mystical powers of insight or understanding (not because you do, but how you feel)… for this must be the certain jurisdiction of the demon king of this place, for you can see the fruits of his labor in the tyrants of the Qin and the Han that he groomed to rule the earth as lords over men if ever there were.   

I did not take my laptop, but, instead, scrawled a hundred pages of notes in a little journal that I carried with me everywhere. It  contains sketches of the Islamic hats worn by different sects of Muslim street vendors and hastily drawn pictures of Buddhist relics, to which cameras are not allowed to be carried. I copied parts of the faded inscriptions in Arabic, Syrian, and Pictographic Chinese from some of the world’s oldest and most significant stone sarcophagi. It was because of this little book, almost filled by the end of my trip, that I finally saw the connection necessary for a theory that unifies void and vibration, a concept that has much to do with the Chinese philosopher’s fascination with the acoustics of bells and the idea of nothingness beneath space; and as it finally took shape it bridged a gap in my thinking that had irritated me for years… the association that can be summed up in the etymological relationship between the English word “gong” (a bronze bell) and the Chinese word “gong” (the force of work, or the action required to bring something into existence).    

Most people do not know that it was Xian which overflowed into the West as the fountainhead of the Silk Road, which effectively influenced Rome at the time of Christ in its craze for the fineries of the East, and which unalterably changed the course of history for the world on many occasions. Columbus, mesmerized by the reported wealth of this city, the capital of “Cathay”, led by mythic and beneficent Nestorian king, Prester John, discovered the Americas because of its exotic allure (and by the way, King John may not have been as mythic as all current scholars would like to pretend). I would not exist, were it not for this city; for the Native American in my blood (my great-grandmother, Maggie Hopper) and the convergence of Irish and Scotch-Irish immigrants would never have flowed into one bloodline, had it not been for the blessed cultural amalgamation that took place over the promise of Cathay.  

As I mentioned, I have long desired to see Xian for myself, for two very different reasons. The first, already mentioned in previous blogs, was due to my childhood fascination with everything Chinese, and my reverential awe of the builder of the Great Wall and the aesthetic genius behind the terracotta warriors (each of which is an exact copy of a unique person, right down to the attempts to mimic the fingerprints on the statue’s hands). The second was when I came to my senses from my excursion into the world of mental suicide, my coming alive from the dead, turning my back on Buddhism as the explanation of the world and the doctrines of purpose and existence. When I discovered that my master, Jesus, he who enabled me to die to all desire through His sacrifice, had already come to China, predating the advent of the Buddhists themselves, I was overwhelmed with a desire to see the only evidence that was left… a black stone that dated back to the 6^th century, carrying the basic doctrines on its back. When I found out that this stone still stood, and at the heart of the ancient city that still defines my philosophical and mental searching, I was drawn to it like an iron filling to another kind of black stone. 

Looking for the one place He was not

Down the one road I thought He never walked

I sought to find reflections of His Face

An independent confirmation of His grace

In the Abstract

In the Verbose

In the “Things that Matter Most”

And found contrary to my instinct

That He had left a sign at every precinct

“The East and West are mine… 

I am their Meridian, their defining line”  

And through these Arabic alleyways 

Past the grotesque of Angkor Wat

Touching the red and yellow walls of incense smudged hearts

He was still walks over Asia in the plain light of day

Undisguised and unhindered by what I would say

Nor by the obtuse words of scholars and the motions of dancers

For here He was Born

Here He was Torn

And here He lives in a myriad of thoughts

Walking with the common, the simple, the deaf, and the blind

All over Asia   

He is easy to find

April 17^th – 

Our Arrival

Today I spent the morning on an air plane, the afternoon in a bus talking to a boy about to go to Las Vegas for work, and the evening in Xian, walking around the “Drum Tower” (used to call out messages to the soldiers in the dynastic periods) and “Bell Tower” with an old man from Shanghai who immigrated to Xian during the Cultural Revolution. My initial impression of Xian, after living in Shanghai, was remarkably different. I was amazed at how different the people here seem to be… so unlike the hurried, stingy, impatient lot who make their daily routine in the big city. Such a contrast can be seen in how the people eat, for the local Xian people think that to eat in a hurry is the epitome of bad manners. 

My new friend, “Lou Baba”, the elder brother of one of my teachers in Shanghai, was delighted to meet with me and talk about anything and everything. It took at least an hour to get used to his combination of the lilting Shanghai dialect and the guttural accent of the Islamic Chinese dialect of Xian. He is a sprightly seventy, looking like he is in his late forties or early fifties, and talks with the same spring that is in his step. He talks of politics, art, religion, philosophy, the daily life of the Xian people, and his own experience seeing Xian change as the great archeological discoveries were made: and he has a good vantage point to talk of all things relating to the ground, for he specialized in agronomy, and spent most of his life trying to understand and use the “Huang Tu”, or, yellow hard pan soil that makes agriculture so difficult in this semi-arid area of western China. He has seen the soil grow a fertile and verdant sea of wheat, where once only dessert reigned, and told me that this was like Xian in sum – a new area of prosperity has descended on a downtrodden place, with just a few turns of the shovel.

Here the Semitic influence is unmistakable and even a little profound for me, for the imagery afforded by the most popular thing on the menu item of “Roast Lamb with Unleavened Bread and Broth” calls to mind the Last Supper and the squalor of a Hebraic Temple. Everyone eats with a loaf of unleavened bread in hand. They taught me how they break it into many pieces by hand, crushing them as small as possible, mashing them over and over with their hands, until they become like rice. If you do it well, they think of you as one of them. Lamb in added to the pulverized bread, and scalding broth is poured over the dish to cook it.  Wine is replaced with strong black tea, for Muslims are not permitted to drink wine, and “Hong Cha” quenches the thirst of a parched populous in the bright sun and sand-dusty wind. The only thing missing in this daily rite of repast are the words…“Take, eat, this is my body which is broken for you”, or perhaps, “This do in remembrance of me”. 

 

The 18^th – 

The Tower of the Buddha’s Pearl

We found ourselves in a park, in the sand-blown morning air, facing the west, with the upswept roofs of Tang dynasty temples looking like leaden kites in a two-thousand year long breeze. Before us stood the “Pagoda of the Wild Geese”, which houses the remains of Buddha, Gotama Siddhartha, or Sakyamuni (as he is known by his Pali name). Monks mowed in and out of the booths that sold trinkets to the resolute pilgrims, most of whom were Japanese. The devoted could be seen throwing money into fish ponds, putting money under rocks, and otherwise trying to buy off the Buddhist relic’s good graces. Buddha’s ashes are turning over in their airy graves. 

The story goes that after Buddha died, reclining on a giant lotus, serenely accepting his own fate without fear, that his disciples burned his bones and scattered his ashes. However, there were four “pearls” of different color that fell like grain from the chaff, as the ashes blew away. (This pearl is now believed by Buddhist to be physical proof of enlightenment, only being found in the ashes of teachers who displayed magnificent power and insight.) King Ashoka, the Buddhist Emperor of India, sent these four pearls to the four corners of the world (all of them in Asia), and Xian represented the North. Today, pilgrims from the U.S., Japan, S.E. Asia, and Europe come to worship a teacher that taught that there were no gods. 

We climbed the nine stories of the great tower, built in the late Tang, and made it to the very top, where a miniature pagoda holds the tiny dot which makes up the last remains of a brilliant theoretical mind, Sakyamuni. The various levels were filled with interesting asides to the main attraction: the footprint of Buddha, three times the size of a normal foot, and with each toe holding an etched lotus flower – the bronze statue of Buddha, given by some long-forgotten Napalese King (whose grandson is in so much trouble at the time) – and the introduction to the “Lotus Sutra” written in this very pagoda by the hand of the Emperor Wu of Tang.   

Bronze Bells

We called a taxi to take us to the Xian museum of history, thinking that it was a way down the road… the taxi driver took us around the block and charged us six yuan. My reason for seeking out this museum is because of a little book on ancient acoustics that I read while I was in Indianapolis and the mysteries that it ascribed to Qin, Zhou, Han, and Tang Dynasty bronze bells. I later found a book by the famous Chinese ethnomusicologist, Dr. Shen Sinyan, of the Chinese Music Association of North America, who described the same things and did not do any better explaining their phenomenon.

To understand this issue, a little background in music theory is helpful, along with a contrast that marks the difference between these two categories of bell. Bells in the west, made of all sorts of material, are noted by their lack of pure tone. They are normally relatively tuned to a cluster of overtones that are heard by the “tonally-challenged” as one tone, but are normally anathema to those who are sensitive to sound (to these people, a church bell in Mexico has the same effect to their ears that riding a bike down a hill and into a brick wall has on the rest of us). This is what sets bells apart from chimes, for chimes can be tuned to a higher degree of accuracy. However, Chinese bronze bells are in a category all their own – with overtones that are more reflective of the echoes of an orchestra than of the chaotic cluster chords that typify bells in the West.

 

 Apparently, physicists in the West still can not understand how the ancient Chinese were able to line up the overtone series of their bells to reflect such a high degree of order. Even today, with our metal smelting technology, no one has been able to reproduce the same effect in bells, even when casting them in identical molds. One interesting aside: the Chinese thought that their bells were the balance to an equation of heaven and earth, and that the proper sound would reveal the origin of principle and peace for an eternal kingdom. They saw their bells as portals to the hierarchies of heaven, and were so important that they were buried with the Emperors, and are found in complete sets, even if the tombs were later sacked… none dared to trifle with the mystic powers of the bells. As a musician, I tend to agree. 

Fat Concubine

While we were in the museum, one particular statuette stood out to me: that of Yang Guifei, the concubine of a hopelessly romantic emperor. The story is that this immensely beautiful woman (and I use “immense” is regards to proportion) so smote the emperor with love that he could not think straight or take care of the matters of state. Therefore, his counsel of wise and aged men decided to have the concubine kill herself. Yang Guifei, being an obedient and helpless girl, quietly did as she was told, and left her handsome young emperor to mourn her for the rest of his life… which makes me wonder if the affairs of state were ever managed any more adeptly by the poor, puppet emperor. This story, at least as stupid as “Romeo and Juliet”, has been the subject material for countless generations of Chinese opera, and was just performed again in Shanghai by one of China’s most popular singers, a nearly anorexic woman who is declared the beauty of our day! I overheard two girls  looking at the portly princess in the museum saying, “Don’t you wish that guys still thought that she was beautiful? It would make our lives so much easier!”

The Nestorian Stone

From my little book: “There is a place where an understanding is a perception and the universe is a mirror of the heart. This was my realization as I stood, with my hand on the black, cold surface of the Nestorian stone, the Stone of Alopen. I realized my life purpose was reflected in the history of this tablet, and new insights crowded around me like hands reaching back from the recesses of time. This is what all westerners long for… a sense of continuity, where all the influences felt throughout life converge like a hologram on one spot.

“I was moved to say one word, “Anakela”, which burst into my ears without my understanding, as I pressed my face near the worn Chinese and Syrian characters on the side of the obelisk, pressing the silver cross around my neck to the character for “Light”. I uttered a prayer, more of movement within my heart than one of words, as I touched an embodiment of a very abstract purpose that has become the meaning of my life. Tears welled up within me, and I immediately felt guilty for being moved so dramatically by a material object, feeling that I had betrayed my heart intent by some form of idolatry, as my Baptist ancestors would say… I have never been moved so reverentially by anything before. It was my one moment feeling as the isolated and confused Christians must have felt in the Roman world, when they started the practice of venerating relics, knowing that God could use a ‘thing’ of historical significance to connect to a non-thing, the Living God, in a deep and meaningful way. For a moment, I felt as if I were in the presence of  ‘The Lord Who Dwells in Light.’  

In my journal I wrote - “The front and sides were filled with inscriptions, listing the places of worship, the schools, and the monasteries that sprung up all over China, 1700 years before.  Its inscriptions were still as strong and vibrant as the day they were carved, and the motif of dragons eating each other at the top of the stele reminded me that this is the true course of evil – self-destruction. The style of the stone was almost haphazard, with the inscriber trying to fit a book upon a stone. I found out that the inscription had been turned into a book, and ferreted out a copy for myself as my only souvenir… its silk cover and fan-folded pages smelling like sandalwood and holding the reverse images of the characters blotted in creosote ink.”  

The story of what followed, after the tablet was written, is vague. Chinese historians tell of a great time of destruction and religious war. The Mohammedans arose out of Arabia in hordes of mounted Bedouins, conquering Egypt, the Holy Land, the Christian Kingdom of Iraq, Iran, the Indus, and later on, conquering Northern India, the Turks, the Mongols, and the whole of China’s frontier. Forced circumcision and compliance under the pain of death was routinely practiced, and the extinction of males and the replacement with Arabic missionary-husbands who whelped a generation of half-Arab children as a mode of cultural conversion. The Ugyers, the Nestorian people of the Chinese plain, were either wiped out or converted. All their churches were destroyed, and so effectively that while records exist, not one foundation has been discovered. 

 

Meanwhile, Buddhism had adopted all the forms and symbols of Taoism, the indigenous religion of China, and had changed its face from Indian to purely Tang Chinese. Therefore, when the Emperor felt the heat of Muslim breath down the neck of his western frontier, it was easy for a few well-placed Buddhist leaders to lump all middle-eastern religions together in the Emperor’s mind, and have all competition outlawed. Strangely enough, the Mosque of Xian was preserved while the great library and monastery of the Nestorian Church was utterly obliterated. Such a pattern of marked bias, “Tang Toleration”, towards the only religion that teaches civil obedience as a divine command continues today, and is the laughable condition of the West’s fear of Christianity and the “learned” embrace of a doubly evangelistic Islam.  

The 19^th – 

Taken for a Ride

We were at the Xian train station this morning, checking on ticket prices to Beijing (where we wanted to go, had a huge sand storm not hit it for a week), when we were told by a responsible looking lady that we could get a ticket for a round-trip to the Tomb of the First Emperor for 10 RMB. We, of course, were delighted to find out about this deal, and happily climbed on board the bus. The “tour guide” got on with us, and after telling us for an hour about the wonderful curative properties of Xian jade (“let a piece of our jade sit in a glass of water for 24 hours, then mix honey with the water and drink it for sore throat”), deposited us in front of a touristy mock-up of the tomb (the real one was only minutes away), and told us that we had to give her 200RMB to be taken to the real attractions, and that we needed to buy some “miracle jade” to take back to our family and elderly at home. Well, we knew that she was getting some kind of kick-back for bringing a captive audience into this dumpy place, and so we tried to fight with her about the price and insisted that she take us to the real place. Anyway, when her back was turned, Vic and I got out of there as quickly as we could, never looking back!    

The Tomb of Emperor Qin and the Terracotta Warriors 

There were a few things that impressed me about the Tomb of Qin Shi Huang: 

1) the distance between the main tomb and his terracotta arm was at least 2 km, meaning that the ground between the two places, not yet excavated, is full of such treasure. 

2) That all the bronze weaponry was electroplated with chrome and was still so sharp that you could not touch the blades without getting cut. 

3) That everything about the soldiers was modeled in absolute realism, down to the last strand of hair, and depicts a race of huge, well-muscled warriors at least two feet taller than the average Chinese person (6” taller than the average 6’ tall white man). These men have a noble bearing and amazingly expressive eyes, with features that remind me more of African faces than the present day Chinese.

4) That shoe laces, traction on shoe soles, and armor made of bronze plates laced together to fit athletic movements, and impeccable personal hygiene were all important and represented by the clay statues.

5) That all the accoutrements of war, which we used today, from artillery to armor-piercing technology, were present in the armory of the Qin Dynasty. This vastly superior armed force was contemporary with ancient Syria and the Lower Kingdom of Egypt, and yet their armor and technology, along with their penchant for clever invention (ball in socket swivels for crossbow turrets, kites for manned fly-over reconnaissance), far outstripped these ancient contemporary western civilizations.   

There are very few words to express the kind of shock that these great testimonies of Qin Dynasty pomp and grandeur bring to the minds of haughty modernists and cynical post-modernists; for here, in the ruins of an ancient world, are works of spiritual and social art that demand rapture and attention, and that explain the thoughts of a more aesthetic and noble race than ours in terms that are universally understood – body language. These men, who were probably incinerated when their war lord died, left behind indelible copies of their posture, their martial baring, and their way of life – far more entrancing and loyal that the Samurai’s or Kung Fu artists that would follow. They single-handedly united China for the first and only seconded time, with swords that are still unbroken today, gleaming with the light of their lightening covered plate. Their smiles and smirks reveal the kind of character celebrated in war, and the characteristic mark of those who survive the most horrific of clashes without fear, and their scars and the tender eyes tell of a soul that lay hidden beneath their loyalties. They remind us, contrary to the messages of a selfish generation, that there are some things worth dying for, and that nobility is not self-righteousness or pride, it is the revelation of a cause greater than self and willing sacrifice of singularity and uniqueness for the establishment of something eternal – a kingdom ruled by a worthy Emperor.

Some questions still haunt my mind concerning this window into an ancient mentality:

1. What was the significance of the statues, for while they are marvelous, they are not real? How did the worldview of the First Emperor expect them to serve him in the next life? What was the worldview that necessitated the use of such elaborate, semi-magical internment practices? 
2. This is, by all accounts, much less defined and spelled out than the worldview of the Egyptian Pharaohs, who believed that they would rise again. Did the ancient Chinese believe that they would rise again, or did they resign themselves to a shadowy underworld of ghosts living in the underground palaces that they had built in the first life?
3. Is this tomb the beginning of ancestor worship, as it is practiced in Chinese folk religion, and has been developed into a system of “ascended masters” by the less philosophical branches of Taoism? Was the burning of the tomb, which is not dated, actually a part of the burial process, much like today’s burning of paper money for the use of the dead in contemporary Chinese funerals? 
4. What happened to the real soldiers, who were traditionally slaughtered to accompany their lord into the next world? Why have they not found their tombs? Is it possible that they escaped this fate because of the substitution and sacrifice of the terracotta statues?

Singing Knives

That night, as we walked home from the bus stop, a moment of pure joy swept over me in an unexpected epiphany. As I walked in the falling light, the blue dusk quickly closing around me in folds, an old lady threw a bowl of dirty water on the pavement in front of me, startling me as much from the action as from the rancid smell still clinging wet in the air where it had flown, odious and noxious streamers wrapping around me for a split second. Then, when I looked up, I saw a high threshold, several feet off of the ground, where two Hui Muslim boys were bobbing up and down, sweating, and moving to the rhythm of some hidden radio blasting Arabic drum music. They were smiling, their curly hair pasted to their foreheads as their white caps barely clung to the back of their heads, and they were singing a kind of song through their grins, consisting of “Boo-ah, boo-ah, boo-ah”. I saw all of this in a glance, and it took me a fleeting moment to process this scene, backlit by a roaring cooking fire. When I looked back, the boys were still smiling, but my change in perspective showed me that they were not dancing, but sharpening knives on long whet stones, clasped between their legs. I had caught one of the rarest moments in China; when two boys were working and making music out of the joy of companionship, the thrill of a dessert tabla drum, and warmth of a fire on a cold spring night. They stopped by the time I came to a halt to listen, perhaps shy of performing for a gawking white man. But, as I walked away, I took a treasure with me, and the whole street looked at me strangely as I walked away laughing. This is life, such precious pictures that happen and then fly away, only to be kept in our hearts and imagination.

The 20^th – 

The Old and Ancient Bookstore 

It is not just Britney Spears who thinks of the 80’s as an ancient period in human development: I was in the Xian “Old and Ancient Bookstore” this morning and would be hard pressed to tell you of one volume (with the exception of some Russian books on Leninist thought, a few Cultural Revolution Dictionaries, and Maoist propaganda literature) that was printed before 1985. Not only were all the old books younger than I am, but they were all on an extremely narrow range of subjects – Non-lyrical music, minority people’s dance steps, calligraphy, understanding government policy and being a good citizen, and a few books written after the ‘90’s about the common life of people in other countries. Novels were not sparse, but of the kind and timbre that would make a housewife yawn. This probably would not strike many people as strange, but as a resident of Shanghai, it hit me funny…. Maybe just the irony of going to a bookstore expecting old books and finding a garage sale assortment of paperbacks was just too much. I still found a few bargain reprints of old books and managed to pick up a copy of a cartoon illustrated “Sun Zi Bing Fa” (“The Art of War”). 

Considerations of Face and Foreign Policy Tactics 

The poverty of printed word and the mention of tactics brings me to another point of interest during our trip to Xian, for while we were visiting the west of China, China was visiting the West. Hu Jintao, the still chairman-but-called-“President”-by-the-West, sat down with the real president of the United States, Bill Gates, (presumably to talk about copyright infringements) then with the political leader, President Bush. We had CNN in our room, and any time anything came on about President Hu, the screen was blanked out by the authorities. Apparently, Washington made three big mistakes by not acknowledging the points that I’ve been learning, painfully, while I am here in China… 1) No disrespect 2) No apparent disagreement 3) Self depreciation. 

While you keep these points of servitude, you are everyone’s best friend, and will be used in all occasion to give leaders a dose of “Mian Zi”, which is valued higher than gold. It is the commodity that both excludes foreigners from Chinese media, public life, and that gives such incredible opportunity to those willing to give it to the Chinese leaders and public. The Chinese have just a few points of pride that can not be encroached upon, without extreme reaction, and it is best to know what these are and how to handle them. After all, the only thing that Chinese worship more than former tyrants is their own culture.

1) The Unrivaled Beauty of Chinese Culture

2) The Ability of China to Develop

3) The Unquestioned Authority of the Government

4) The Rights of the Authority to Enforce His Position   

Chinese are of the mentality that if they have authority, they should only help if it gives them some major advantage; from the aunty who cleans the toilet to the mayor of a city. I just had an experience with the director of the Shanghai Conservatory’s Acting Division, and found this out the hard way. They only help out those who make the “entrance fee” a very lucrative prospect for those who hold the keys to enter.

There was a heckler on the White House lawn, giving President Hu a hard time (that was really, really stupid from the standpoint of any ambassadorial perspective), and they announced the wrong name for China, “The Republic of China” (Taiwan’s name). Both things were blanked out, and why? They were little things that were hilariously ludicrous to Americans! “Can you believe how dumb the White House staff must be?” We might joke. “No wonder foreign policy has been so strained under Bush!”  To the Chinese, such things are unimaginable offenses.

Face is a concept that is hard to communicate in a straightforward way, I guess because it is not a straightforward concept at all… it can be communicated in the way a hen-pecked husband treats his battleaxe wife, or in the posture beggars take with the wealthy. The sickly, pasted smile that you see on the faces of leaders in Asia all directly relate to the concept of face. People get killed over it, and kill themselves over it. The worst possible thing for any leader is to look like he is disrespected in China, while our whole political system is built off of disrespecting our leaders in the West. After seeing the Tomb of Qin Shi Huang, I laugh to think of what would happen to a heckler in his day.  One thing is sure, that the “Face” aspect of all that has happened to China and in China factors more than the western historians consider. I believe that most of all the human rights problems and governmental relationship blunders relate to this one fulcrum point in the culture: what could be called “Emperor Complex”, intolerant of the slightest affront to personal pride. But, this is understandable when the culture teaches that the only worth assigned to a person is what the group thinks of him. So, “face” is really the name given to the considerations of actions within a social structure that does not recognize singularity.     

Sake

In this culture, we are all 

Fake for fake sake

Thinking that if nothing’s real, we can 

Take for take sake

We justify the consequence as 

“Mistake for mistake sake”

And lie in bed at night a-wondering, 

Awake for awake sake

Mythos can not save us, 

But then again, who wants that?

We’ve forgotten that there was ever truth to be had

So we turn away our brothers 

Saying we tolerate and accept

But what they ask is a method to separate the good from bad

In the pain of this philosophy, we all 

Break for break sake

And see in life what we bring to it, what we 

Make for make sake 

While the idea is the universe ripples in the 

Wake for wake sake 

And a Zen-like purpose is found in nothing, 

Forsake for sake sake

And nothing is ever done for goodness sake

For we robbed it of personality

And when we think of cool

We think of celebrated fools

Who stole the answers in the questions

By saying that for sake forsake the rules

In this culture, we are all 

Fake for fake sake

Thinking that if nothing’s real, we can 

Take for take sake

We justify the consequence as 

“Mistake for mistake sake”

And we are none the wiser

Craving ache for ache’s sake

The Chinese Islamists

As we walked from the bookstore, up past the center of the walled Xian, past the “Drum Tower” and into the Muslim Quarter, we looked for a place to eat, but saw only those few that were sure to give us dysentery. So we swallowed our hunger, and walked down towards the oldest mosque in China, famous for how unlike a mosque it really is. 

I saw a store in one of the alleys that sold Muslim religious regalia, Korans, pictures of Mecca, and Arabic calligraphy and decided to go in. After looking around a while, the lady behind the counter asked if we were Muslim, and hearing that we were not, decided to tell us what the Koran had to say about unbelievers and those who believed the “Corrupt Book” used by Jews and Christians. She explained that the Holy Koran has never changed, was always in the Holy Arabic language, and that the Bible was corrupted into seventeen different books that made no sense and could not be trusted. I told her that I had read the Koran, but disagreed with her statements of the Bible being horribly corrupted, based on what I had studied myself.  Seeing that we were about on equal footing, and that debate wouldn’t get anywhere, she told us about the religious freedoms that the Hui people enjoyed in Xian, how they were able to have as many children as they wanted if they paid government fines, and how Islam was slowing becoming the biggest and greatest force on the face of the Planet. “Look at your America”, she said, “where new mosques are being built every day!” She then offered me a Koran in English, telling me that I could learn the truth from its pages… “But isn’t the Koran always in Arabic?” I asked. “Isn’t this a different translation?” “The meaning is the same”, she assured me, and never caught her self-contradiction. The whole reason she had used to disprove the Bible was now the method by which she was trying to make a convert for Islam. “No thanks”, I told her and said “Salam Alaikum” (“Peace be With You” in Arabic) as we walked out the door.

The Hui

From everything that I looked at while I was in Xian, the Hui people were originally Arabic speaking merchants from every corner of the Muslim world in the 8^th and 9^th Centuries; Persia, Turkey, Northern Africa, Morocco, Spain, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, and Arabia. They settled in the free spirit of the Tang court, became business, science, and astrological consultants to the Emperor, took Chinese wives, and became physically indistinguishable from the native Chinese after just a few generations (with the exception that their beards are a bit more abundant than the Han).

 

While many cultures and minority groups were folded into the Han Chinese ethnicity, like chocolate chips into cookie batter, the Hui remained distinct and independent through a thousand years of socio-political change and adversity. The kind of cultural might and steel that it takes to resist the majority culture for so long can only be attributed to their continued ties to Arabia through pilgrimages back to Mecca and their focus on teaching their sons how to read and speak Arabic, thus, culturally isolating themselves from the effects of the Chinese around them. Marriage is also another time tested way in which to accomplish this goal, for Muslim girls were never allowed to marry Chinese men, but Muslim boys always married Chinese girls. These traditions are still strong in Xian, and I found that the Hui culture’s ability to remain independent squarely depended on their ability to insolate against cultural overlap.  

The Great Mosque

The Mosque of Xian was built for the people of the Muslim Quarter by an Emperor of the Tang Dynasty, as a gift and token of friendship for an indispensable and valuable trade relationship that had been established with the Muslim Sultanates along the Silk Road. Because it was built by an infidel, it resembles a Chinese Taoist or Buddhist temple more than anything else, minus the normal abundance of carved figures. Despite this, it still abounds with imagery that is forbidden by the Koran: Dragons, Dogs, Gold Fish, Camels, and Horses, along with innumerable flowers, festoon the carved beams and decorate the inside of the pagoda-style minaret, used to broadcast the call to prayer all over the city. It is built in a rectangle, separated into  three parts. The front section has a huge wooden gate with the Mosques name in Chinese and Arabic (“Chang An Qing Zhen Si”) and two dedicatory stelii, which look almost identical to the Nestorian Stone. The center section has an enclosed bathing place for worshipers and a Mezerim’s Tower, which is made of five ascending roofs, where the Arabic call to prayer resounds five times a day. The inner sanctum, which consists of an ornamental bridge, a porch for discussion, and a large hall for prayer, looks very much like legal halls built for provincial Mandarin courtiers in the Qing Dynasty. 

We didn’t plan it, but we arrived right before the main prayer at noon on Friday. We stood to one side as we saw four generations of Hui men, from fourteen year olds with a few hairs proudly on their chins to aged centenarians, with long white beards to their waists, walked slowly into the mosque to the call of a microtonal prayer... “Allah-Lohu-Allah….” It did not sound like music, which it is not allowed to be, but it didn’t sound like chant either…. It was intoned in a scale of forty notes from E to E, with the strange twists and turns of vocal gymnastics obscuring the syllables and sending chills down my spine. They all lined up, row after row, and said with one voice, “The Lord is Great!” They all bowed and strained, all trying with their outward actions to show a silent Allah that they were obedient to him, and worthy of his salvation.      

The 21^ST – 

Rain in the Dessert

We woke this morning to the cold of dessert rain, which covered the face of the dun landscape with a scowl. With the cold came a shock of startling fresh air, without a hint of the dusty breath the day before. In the drizzle, the streets were clear, and we could see a personal Xian from our perch, in the window high above the Western Gate. Vic and I almost panicked at the thought of leaving… there was so much to see in rain! But we were still adventurous, getting breakfast on the fly and trekking off to our last few sites. 

The “Small Goose” Pagoda of Wu Zetian 

As we drove over to the little, crumbling site, the taxi driver told us that we are crazy for visiting the place. “Nothing to see there accept old bricks”, he mumbled, offering to take us to a more remote site, hoping for a good fare on an off day. We walked around in the mist and rain, seeing a honeysuckle vine that has been turned by hundreds of years of pruning into a mighty tree, and wander around the outside of a locked tower. As we walked, Vic told me a story of the first Female Emperor of China – not any pansy “Empress”, but of a warlike Amazonian Lady who built a tower as homage to her Buddhist faith. She was a concubine (weren’t they all) who found extreme favor in the eyes of an emperor and his son (uh-oh). Opposite of or pudgy tragedy of Yang Guifei, this scheming lady had her husband and his prince deposed, and rose to the celebrated heights of the greatest feminine tyrant China ever known.  The taxi driver said that there was nothing to see, but as we came around the corner, I was ecstatic at my discovery… the taxi driver didn’t know about my obsession with Chinese bells! 

A Squirrelly Philosopher  

When we came to the shops near the bell tower, behind the “Goose Pagoda”, there was a place where two men were carving cherry roots into all kinds of little figurine. I struck up a conversation with one of them, and he promptly put everything down and started talking with me intensely (people in Xian, are nothing if not intense). Within a few minutes he has sketched a picture of his artistic philosophy through the use of references to swords, yin-yang, poems, trees, and the Chinese philosopher Lao Zi. 

“The Cultures of America and China are fundamentally different,” he said to me, trying to look deep into my eyes. “Chinese culture is a way to see… American culture is a way to look.” He caught me off guard with this idea, for indeed, how we look is the most important fact of the image conscious American psyche. He went through a list of things that he had noticed, watching foreign tourists walk through his little display.

1. Chinese culture is learned
2. Western culture is copied (by westerners and Chinese alike)
3. Chinese culture is a worldview
4. Western culture is a lifestyle
5. Chinese balance creativity with control
6. Westerners balance chaos with popularity

“American history is too short to give you proper examples of what to do with power”, he summed up, taking a jibe at Iraq. “When you don’t have a thousand years of continuous culture under your belt, you don’t know when its best to leave things as they are and appreciate the little imperfections of life as marks of beauty.”

The crazy eyed carver took up a little squirrel in his hand, carved from a frayed root, its tail made of an unusable, splintered piece of wood. “Like this little one”, he said, with a point already forming on the tip of his tongue. “His tail is the ugliest piece of wood I’ve ever carved, and I couldn’t do anything with it because it is so frayed… if I tried to change it, the more I’d carve the more it would fall off. So, I looked at it for a long time, and just carved a squirrel head where I could carve… and the result is the most beautiful carving I have ever completed.” He sat down and held his serendipitous squirrel. “This root is like the situations in our lives: sometimes we can not change its ugliness, and so we can just carve a little out of the side that will hold a shape. Our imaginations can do the rest, for all we need to see beauty is a little suggestion of reality.”

The Hall of Eight Immortals 

We spent the rest of the day in a blur, seeing what little we could as the skies cleared and we readied to take a train back to Shanghai. We went to see the central Taoist Temple of Xian, a place called the “Hall of the Eight Immortals”, with an hour before we left to take the train. We walked in, immediately sensing the difference, as strange looking old men, with uncut hair and beards meandered aimlessly around a courtyard of weird, alchemical formulas scratched into black granite, describing the way to immortality. 

 Unlike the alchemists of the West, who looked for a way to turn lead into gold, the Chinese alchemists looked for a fountain of life that would never run dry. They called this mythic elixir the “Longevity Peach”, and pictured it as a fruit grown from a mysterious tree that would give whoever ate is eternal life.  Peaches adorn the Taoist Temple like Christmas ornaments, symbolizing man’s instinctive understanding that death is unnatural and unnecessary, and narrating a three thousand year search on the part of the Chinese herbalists and hermit sages to discover the composition of this fruit and ascend to the position of an “immortal”. After a while, not finding a fruit readily taking away the dreaded duty of death, the Taoist turned to a more symbolic concept of the Longevity Peach, deciding that it must refer to the cultivation of inward energies of the human body, and developed a system of martial arts that were meant to protect from adversaries physical and spiritual that might rob man of his precious life.  

Here at this temple, the walls were painted with esoteric books that described movements, diets, thought-processes, and surgeries that could be practiced to extend youth indefinitely. Although I have never heard anyone make this connection, I think it is similar to a thousand year old Californian Barnes & Noble, where the Atkins and South Beach Diets were ascribed with supernatural powers, and statues of “Immortalized” Arnold Schwarzenegger and various 21^st century underwear models were worshipped for their ability to stay young and beautiful (even though they long since passed). The only difference that would need to be pointed out is that Chinese symbols are decently clothed.   

  

The Theory of Taoist Harmony 

While we were standing in the courtyard, a flood of young men and woman, wearing the black and blue of the Daoshi priests, carried musical instruments into the main temple, and began to play and sing before the three seated idols – Green Dragon, White Tiger, and Heaven’s Wrath. It was sweet music, soft and longing, and we stood and listened for a while. I finally went and watched them play, reading a text that dealt with man’s eternal life from a fan-folded book, taking turns between the human voice, flute, harp, fiddle, all driven along with gongs and a big bass drum. While they sang, an old priest turned a huge pyramid of candles, which sat in the corner of the temple. Vic told me that they believe music creates a bridge to the land of the immortals, carrying along the prayers and petitions of the faithful (who, of course, pay money) to the ears of the ascended masters. The gently flowing Tang music ebbed back and forth, between flute and fiddle,  chant and drum, and we finally got up to leave, the drum fading into the distance through the open window of our taxi.  

While I see the whole process as an irreparably confused system, the theory of the Taoist music confirms one thought… it is the standard for dynastic and ethnic Chinese music, with a pentatonic basis and an intervallic system based on perfect octaves, fifths, fourths and root progression. While this has little to do with the philosophy of Taoism, as I listened to the music, the relationship that this worldview played with the Chinese concept of ancestor worship, starting with Emperor Qin and the tombs that I just visited, became clear to me. 

Just as the Chinese worship their ancestors, thinking that they will be able to become gods as their descendants increase their “spiritual authority” through offerings of burnt paper money, paper houses, and material symbols of wealth, so the Taoist deities were people who were worshipped after their death. The little placards beneath the idols themselves told that they were once real people. It was expected that they became gods because they were worshipped, not worshipped because they were gods! This is also why Buddhism had such an easy time of engrafting itself into the Chinese worldview, because it already acknowledged that through a certain ritual man could become an enlightened, eternal Buddha. 

The Chinese concept of “Face” extends into their beliefs on the next world, where authority is received through respect (bringing together the faces of the Terracotta Warriors with the plight of a Chinese President mocked by Falun Gong). The whole goal of man to become a god, the universal theme of man’s civilization (the whole purpose of the great tomb and the pleasurable life of communist officials), is tied intimately into the pursuit of a Fruit of Life. Strange that the idol most used to symbolize the promise of finding this immortality is that of a Dragon, who holds that secret wisdom that can make man into god. 

Man can never escape the feelings of the truth, even if he is confused with wrong doctrine. This is why he feels he must hold court in the presence of a God-Emperor. This is why the Buddhist, the Catholic, the Muslim, and the Taoist feel the necessity of a Mass; a form of motions, incense, offering, and music that connects with a heavenly order that they all aspire to find. While Buddhism strives for death to self, Taoism strives for everlasting life, and Islam strives for obedience and harmony with God. The realization to me is that the message of Christ completes all three through His work on the Cross. The cross was the first thing inscribed on that black, broken stone buried so long ago in the Tang Dynasty in old Xi An, at that time called, “The City of the Eternal Peace.”

The 21^st - 22^nd – 

The Train Home and the Chinese Countryside 

My first train! At first, I was overwhelmed with the harmony of motions that sent me into dizzy calculations of impinging forces; for while the train’s momentum carries everything along, the waver of the old train (like the rickety rails of the Cedar Point amusement ride that still makes me nauseous when I remember its utter insecurity) makes you feel that inertia will pull the wheels right off the tracks as you go around mountainous hairpin turns. Back and forth, side to side, with the occasional farmer bobbing up from his terraced wheat to glance at the faces of the privileged passing by, only to turn back to his work and fade into the green. It suddenly dawned on me that the theory of relativity must have been the idle wanderings of a train-bound imagination, for time really seem to go slower on the outside as you streak by…. I felt that I had been in time warp when I reached Shanghai. Sixteen hours have never passed as quickly for me. Perhaps it was not the time warp as much as it was the gentle rocking of the cabin made it hard for me to stay awake past the first few hours.

(In the first hour)

The blue, misty hills

Roll by me

In the dusk

As Tsunami waves

They hit my eyes

With an impact, that

Levels cities, and yet

I sit, and tremble a little

Merely rocked

By what should

Move me more

My thoughts turned to my children, after five days, and my adventurous spirit seemed to quell itself enough to think of the pleasures of home for a while…. But I still couldn’t believe it when we reached home, for after seeing the bones of Buddha, the stone of Alopen, the Mosque of the Chinese Sunnis, and realizing how this city of the East and its history is a metaphor for all that is contemporary and relevant to the West, I had just whet my appetite for the kind of study that only being in a place like this can afford – the difference between experience and reading books. 

The End