my body shakes when a letter arrivesI can’t drink wine since he left
autumn I consume my tears instead
my thoughts vanish into distant mists
the Gate of Heaven is far closer
than my beloved south of the Yangtze.
Her husband served as magistrate of Nanching, not far upriver from where the Yangtze made its last bend and headed for Shanghai and the East China Sea. But not long afterwards, her husband died, leaving her grief-stricken:
Evenings find me with uncombed hair
I have a comb and a mirror
but now that my husband is gone
why should I waste my time
I try to sing but choke on my tears
I try to dream but my boat of flowers
can’t bear the weight of such sorrow.
Thinking I might translate the weight of such sorrow into English, I bought a book that included a commentary along with her poems. Then I walked back outside the hall and through the park and past the old city wall. Although most of Chinan’s springs had dried up, there was still plenty of water in the moat outside the wall, and I followed its snow-covered banks to Taminghu Lake. The lake was just inside the northern part of the wall. Near the entrance, I stopped to look at a huge stone on which someone had carved the golden calligraphy of Chairman Mao. My calligraphy teacher once described Mao’s style as “all guts and no bones.” I was never very good at calligraphy. I also had trouble with the bones.
Just past the calligraphy was the lake. I was surprised how big it was and how deserted. Then again, why would anyone want to visit a lake when the weather was so cold? There were still snowflakes in the air. The only other person there was a man who rented boats. Since I was also there, I decided I might as well go out on the water and row around. I rowed out to a small island and visited its lone pavilion. It was called Lihsia Pavilion, and it was immortalized after the poet Tu Fu and the calligrapher Li Yung spent a night there getting drunk in the year 745. The inscription that recorded what they wrote that night was too faint to read, and I was losing feeling in my feet again. I rowed back to the shore and walked out to the road and flagged down a taxi. I asked the driver to take me to the north edge of town to the bridge of barges that carried cars and buses and trucks across the Yellow River.
The bridge of barges was a jury-rigged affair that rocked back and forth every time a vehicle crossed. Pedestrians had to hold onto a chain that separated them from the traffic and that also kept them from falling into the river. I walked out and tried to take a photo, but I couldn’t let go of the chain long enough. In winter, the river shrank to the point where a person could throw a rock across. In fact, this was the narrowest section of the river on the entire floodplain. Even in summer, when the water level was at its highest, it was only 200 meters across in Chinan, which was the distance between the huge stone dikes on either side. According to a man who worked near the bridge, the bottom of the river was actually five meters higher than the city due to the constant deposit of silt – and that was just the bottom of the river, not the top of the river. He said every July an army of volunteers had to pile sandbags along the dikes and work around the clock to keep China’s city of springs from becoming a city of mud.
STONE BUDDHAS
The snow was still there the next morning. It illumined the otherwise dark slopes of Chienfoshan, or Thousand Buddha Mountain, which formed the southern boundary of Chinan. Buddhists started carving buddhas into its cliffs as early as the sixth century, and there were as many as a thousand of them at one time. But most of the buddhas have moved on to other buddhalands, and their numbers have dwindled to sixty or so, the survivors of art collectors, wars and purges. I took a taxi to the trail that led up the hill and started walking. As I walked past one buddha after another, I wondered who paid for all this carving. And why in Chinan? The carving was not especially fine, but the snow gave the buddhas a serenity that art alone had failed to convey.
I walked as far as I could, until my shoes began to disappear in the snow and my feet began to feel numb again. Halfway to the top, I turned and headed back. I hadn’t expected to see anyone else on the mountain. But on my way down, I met an old couple who said they walked up the mountain every day, rain or snow. When I told them I had hiked up the mountain to see the buddhas, they said there were much better buddhas in the mountains south of Chinan near the village of Liupu.
Carvings at Thousand Buddha Mountain
After I returned to my hotel and restored feeling to my feet, I checked out and hired a car to take me there. It wasn’t far, maybe thirty or forty kilometers south of the city. On the way there, the sun came out, and the snow disappeared from the road, as if it had never fallen. An hour after leaving Chinan, just past the village of Liupu, we turned into a side valley. The road ended near a lone stupa standing at the edge of a grove of ancient cedars. Stupas were built to contain the remains of Buddhist monks. In fact, the form originated in India from burial mounds. But it had evolved into shapes that reminded me of small rocket ships. Some were so big, they even had staircases inside leading to windows and balconies.
The stupa at Liupu was different. It was not a rocket ship. Or if it was, it was a fat, square one. Most stupas were made of brick, but this one was made of stone. It was built in 611 and was fifteen meters high, and it was almost as wide. On each side was an arched entrance, and inside each entrance was a statue of one of the buddhas of the four directions: Amitabha, who welcomes the faithful to his Pure Land, faced west; Akshobhya faced north; Ratnasambhava faced east; and Shakyamuni, the buddha of the current dispensation, faced south.
This stupa once marked the entrance to a major Buddhist center that had since vanished. But the stupa wasn’t the only relic from the past. A path led across the valley past another cliff face into which a dozen buddhas had been carved. There was an explanation below one of them that said it had been carved in 658 by the order of Li Fu, the thirteenth son of Emperor T’ai-tsung of the T’ang dynasty. The carving depicted Maitreya, the buddha who was prophesied to come after Shakyamuni. There was also an inscription carved inside the niche: “May all people live to old age, may their families and countries be at peace, and may all beings everywhere attain buddhahood.”
A stupa at Liupu
Past the cliff, the trail continued down a slope to a small grove of several more stupas. The biggest was eleven meters high and was also square. On the outside were carvings of dragons and tigers and the guardians of the four quarters. The setting, with mountains rising on three sides, would have been perfect for a monastery. But nothing except its cemetery remained.
My driver said there was an even bigger Buddhist cemetery west of Liupu across another range of mountains. However, there was no direct road. He said we would have to return to Chinan before we could head south again, which is what we did. Two hours later, we turned off the main highway that led south to T’ai-an onto a side road that led east into the mountains. A few minutes later, we arrived at Lingyen Temple. The temple was on a northern spur of Taishan, China’s most sacred mountain. There was a saying that a pilgrimage to Taishan wasn’t a pilgrimage if it didn’t include a visit to Lingyen Temple. Although this had been true in the past, when Lingyen Temple was still a center
