This one was larger and it had a name: Toumu Temple. Tou-mu was the Goddess of the Big Dipper, and she was in charge of making sure people lived out their allotted span of years. Being the home of spirits waiting for re-assignment, Taishan was where the bereaved came to pray for a good afterlife for their departed loved ones. And while they were making the effort, many of them stopped to ask Tou-mu for a few extra years for themselves. A stele outside the gate explained:
A man makes a name chop for the author’s son.
“Whom Heaven wishes to lift up, no person can cast down. The ups and downs of life are matters that can be ascertained, but not by human power. It is I who can see their source.” Everyone wanted to be on good terms with Tou-mu. But when I went inside her shrine hall, she was gone. She had been replaced by Kuan-yin, the Buddhist Goddess of Compassion. Apparently, even the gods were not able to forestall their own transience.
Musing on this thought, I continued up the trail and came to a sign that pointed away from the main trail to Sutra Rock. I followed a side path through a pine forest and across a stream to a huge rock face on which someone had carved the entire text of the Diamond Sutra. The characters were bigger than my hand, and they were carved there over 1,500 years before I had a hand. The stream I crossed on my way there had once flowed across the rock face and had worn away two-thirds of the sutra’s 3,000 or so characters. There was a small dam above the rock face now, blocking the water from cascading down. But I could still make out the hymn that ended the sutra: “As an illusion, a dewdrop, a bubble/a dream, a cloud, a flash of lightning/view all created things like this.” It was advice even Tou-mu could understand.
Back on the main trail, I came to another rock face. On this one were carved the words “High Mountains and Flowing Water.” These were the names of the two most famous songs for the zither composed by Yu Po-ya three thousand years earlier. Because only Chung Tzu-ch’i could understand what was in Yu Po-ya’s heart when he played them, the two men became the Damon and Pythias of China, representing the truest friendship. But as I continued on, all I could hear was the wind in the pines and the panting of my own breath.
A view of the summit of Mt. Taishan
It took me two and half hours to reach Middle Heaven, which was the halfway point on the trail. Climbing Taishan along with hundreds of pilgrims was not the same as climbing a mountain by myself. I was part of a long line of pilgrims stretching back thousands of years. And since pilgrims needed to eat and drink along the path, at Middle Heaven, there were dozens of stalls set up to accommodate them. I sat down at one next to several pilgrims who were eating something that looked good. I didn’t know what it was, but I ordered some too. It turned out to be hot, spicy tofu pudding. The weather was so cold and my throat so parched, it was ambrosia. I ordered a second bowl, and it was just as good as the first bowl. For those who weren’t able or who didn’t want to walk up the trail, this was where the road from town ended and where a cable car took over. But the cable car was expensive, and most people finished the second half on foot.
After catching my breath and restoring my well-being with the hot tofu pudding, I rejoined the other pilgrims on the trail. From Middle Heaven, the path continued along a long, fairly level stretch of trail that eventually led across Cloud Walk Bridge and then up a flight of steps to Five Pine Pavilion. In 219 BC, China’s first emperor sought shelter there beneath a pair of pine trees during a rainstorm. In gratitude, he made the pine trees ministers in his administration. Originally, there were only two pines. But both were washed away in another rainstorm. And they were replaced by five pines, only three of which remained. Obviously, Taishan was not a good place to be during a rainstorm. But the pavilion built to mark the spot was still called Five Pine Pavilion.
Further on, I paused to catch my breath again and sat down next to a stall where a man was hammering out name
chops on brass rings. He charged 5RMB, or seventy-five cents, and said it would only take five minutes, so I asked him to make one for my son. While I was waiting, an eighty-year-old man I had met earlier waved as he passed by. Gasping between words, he said it was just-a-matter-of-perseverance, one-step-at-a-time. As soon as my son’s name chop was done, I followed him, one step at a time.
Five hours after passing through the archway announcing Confucius’ ascent, I, too, reached the final archway, which was also where the cable car debouched its passengers. On the other side was a gauntlet of trinket sellers and food stalls. It had snowed the day before, and someone had made a snow buddha. I sat down nearby and ordered a bowl of hot cornmeal gruel and some fry bread. I was so famished, once more I had seconds. I was really enjoying being a pilgrim, instead of a lone hiker.
The summit was 1,500 meters high, and in addition to the stalls that supplied pilgrims with sustenance and trinkets, there were a number of shrine halls scattered across the ridge. Chief among them was one dedicated to the mountain spirit’s wife: the Primordial Princess of Rainbow Clouds. As I entered the courtyard, a Taoist priest hurried by on his way to conduct a ceremony inside. I stood outside the hall and watched as a half dozen priests chanted the daily liturgy to the accompaniment of drums and bells and chimes.
From above her shrine, the Yellow River was said to be visible on a clear day, and people often spent the night at one of the hostels near the summit to see the sunrise the next morning. But the lodgings were so flimsy, they reminded me of the big cardboard box that I kept in the garage when I was a boy and that I dragged into the backyard on nights when there was a meteor shower. I took a picture of the snow-covered roofs of the princess’ temple and followed Confucius back down to the civilization he helped establish.
CONFUCIUS
By the time I returned to the foot of Taishan, the sun was also on its way down. I picked up my bag from where I had left it at the train station’s luggage depository and caught the next bus headed for Chufu. It left as soon as it was full, and ninety minutes later, just as the last rays of the sun were disappearing, I checked into the Confucius Family Mansion. That was where Confucius’ lineal descendants lived, until they were evicted during the Cultural Revolution. Despite losing their home, the Sage’s relatives still controlled the town. Of Chufu’s 500,000 residents, 130,000 traced their ancestry to Confucius.
The current, direct male descendant, however, was not there. His name was K’ung Te-ch’eng, and he was in Taiwan. The Nationalists brought him to Taiwan in 1949 to support their claim to represent traditional Chinese culture. I first heard about him from my fellow graduate students in the philosophy department at the College of Chinese Culture outside Taipei. Every Sunday afternoon, they attended his private class on the Confucian classics. I once asked if I could join, but Master K’ung said he doubted if a foreigner could grasp the subtleties of his ancestor’s pronouncements, such as, “Man who sling mud at neighbor lose ground.”
But there I was living in K’ung Te-ch’eng’s house, which was now a hotel. It was a rambling one-story affair with numerous courtyards and corridors. At one time, it vied with the imperial residence in Beijing. But that was before the Cultural Revolution. Still, my room was so big, my bed looked lonesome. The Mansion was also the home of the Confucius Family Banquet, and I was just in time for dinner. The full banquet had to be ordered in advance and included nearly a hundred dishes representing every province of China. But it was for tour groups and party officials on an expense account, and I was alone. Still, I hardly felt slighted by the smoked tofu, for which Chufu was rightly famous, bamboo shoots with black mushrooms, stir-fried pea tendrils and rice pudding. As the Sage himself once said, “When it comes to food, it can never be too fine.”
Confucius
