Have you ever seen the movie Golden Child with Eddie Murphy? It's from the 80's and Eddie Murphy plays a cop who gets mixed up in a journey to save a magical
Chinese kid and maybe the world - i don't exactly remember the details but I think Eddie starts off pretty skeptical and is pretty impressed when the kid floats. The highlight is when Eddie is walking on pillars which descend into darkness. He drops a coin to see how far down the pillars go and the coin never hits anything...
So the K
ung F
u monastery orphanage was kind of like that. One of the three 8 year
old's had been their 5 years and new more K
ung F
u and T
ai Chi then the 20 year
old's. The 20 year
old's were stronger and might be able to give the kid a Purple N
urple, but the kid had
taught them all the forms.
The hardest part of the day was either; getting up at dawn when the kids and monks start chanting at 6 so as to carry the stone up hill on your head, or not eating so much that you leave looking like "K
ung F
u Panda". Is that clear at all? The food was
soo good. And because they hate "wasting" food they kind of force feed you. If you thought that Jewish people and Chinese people had similarities then you were right - they want you to be fat but tell you to be skinny and its confusing. Anyway the food is really good but everyone eats as fast as can because they have to start chanting about 10 minutes after the mushroom-potato saute' hits the table. Can i catch my breath please? I was
consistently the last person at the three small tables. Unfortunately, or
fortunately - I cannot tell, being slow meant that the cooks would put all the left overs into my little bowl. Being the last basically meant starting dinner again.
Being about an hour hike up a mountain the practice grounds
look out over a vista. Is it
beautiful, or is it a little
disappointing, and why am I the only one who looks at it? You see flat land spread out with
dilapidated, white, randomly placed,
concrete houses -- Some people are very poor and some people are not so poor but from a distance it looks pretty struggling. The houses lead up to a lake which sits at the bottom of mountains. The mist in the area covers a different part of the view, in a different way,
every hour, so the view usually looks different. The sky on the last day was very grey but clear and when a crack in the clouds let streams of light down across the lake, and with blue ridged mountains for as far as the eye could see, i was impressed.
This moment was pointed out to me by the 24 year old Israeli named
Dor who had been studying
vigorously for two months. His favorite "ninja turtle" was Raphael and was suprised when I said mine was Donatello. He was my height; a towering 5 feet 4.563 inches of mostly muscle. I came to know his muscles well because for 30 minutes of every practice the students stretch and message
each other. Is it torture, is it gay, or is it awesome? Yes.
This issue of sexuality was
relevant because the place is a
monastery. Couples who come to stay cannot stay together. The monks are not
allowed to do it. So... maybe there is some stray sexual energy floating around, and maybe some of that spills out in K
ung F
u stretching. Sometimes it is a bit ambiguous, or uncomfortable, or cute. As the mis-quote written on the wall of my room says, "It's not good it's not bad it's just it".
What else can I say about the place. The temple itself is
beautiful, very old, but newly and intricately painted in bright colors. The outside door is guarded by one pink and one blue towering angry god. You then walk through an area and on both sides you are lined with many life size
Buddha hero's. My favorite one has an arm that stretched about eight feet too long and clutches a sun (I think... or just magic). The core of the temple has a small square with a water hole for gold fish, and a small table for tea. At the far end of the square is a temple structure with much nicer
Buddha sculptures,
incense always burning, monks always chanting, and the square is framed or surrounded by small bed rooms. My room is on the second and top story. The windows of my room have orange cloth instead of glass. As i sit under five blankets, perfectly warm, and write in my journal, my page and the rest of the room glows orange.
During the day the main temple structure with the nice
Buddha's is dark and after dinner as the light dies the candles and praying monks make the temple glow. The moon rises in the light blue sky increasingly surrounded by stars. The temple glowing more brightly as the outline of small shaved heads pace back and forth lighting
incense, praying, and singing. I sit across from them, across the small square and goldfish, digesting my huge dinner, and summoning giggles when the cooks who saw me last sitting curiously alone in the dinning space now see me watching the ceremony which must be as normal to them as chopsticks.
Despite the undeniable reality of strange and embedded customs, new structures and landscapes, I found myself non-s
halant through out the experience. The best
response to this reaction I found in Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay, "The Poet". Emerson's "self relience and other essays" has been my guide for the last months - in part because the book is small, light and dense. It's cool that so many classics are small and cheap. Too bad they aren't the published on super thin paper and made pocket size like all books in Japan.
"The Poet" Page 73,
"The spiritual fact remains unalterable, by many or by few particulars; as no mountain is of any appreciable
height to break the curve of the sphere. A Shrewd country boy goes to the city for the first time and the complacent citizen is not satisfied with his little wonder. It is not that he doesn't see the fine houses and know that he never saw such before, but he disposes of them as easily as the poet finds place for the railway. The chief value of the new fact is to enhance the great and constant fact of Life, which can dwarf any and every circumstance, and to which the belt of wampum and the commerce of America, are alike"
This section is from "the poet" and the "place for the railway" which the poet finds is within the "vital circles" of nature. This secondary point is in other words that the man made aspects of the world are as organic as the beehive. This point I found most dramatically made when looking out at Tokyo from the top of one of its many sky scrapers. Sam, the architect, said that he kind of wanted to poke it with a stick.
As to the main point of why I was not floored by the temple, my fathers point about travel seems like a
poignant addition to Emerson. I feel a bit greedy to waste it so soon in the blog,\ but since this could be the last post I ever make I might as well indulge:
When your world remains largely the same you notice changes in your self. When the world changes, as it does when traveling in Asia, you notice your
consistency.
So we must divide our amazement for new things between the newness of such and the sameness of us. Cleverly, or wisely i think, Emerson attributes the casualness of experience to the greatness of ourselves rather than the smallness of such and such.
A small side point here on Emerson and life:
Emerson always brings us back to the priority of ourselves before and above everything. My fathers echo is that you must take care of yourself if you are to help others - true. Emerson, and the "Tao Te Ting", my other great small book, might reply that if you take care of yourself properly you will take care of other people - and can stop worrying about your responsibility towards them.
In Stephen Mitchells comment on chapter 78 of the Tao Te Ting he says, "The greatest help is wholeheartedly trusting people to resolve their own problems. A true philanthropist, like a good parent, brings people to the point where they can help themselves." I think trusting someone is primarily an inward not an outward shift which is consistant with the point - i think. The quote I was looking for but could not find says; someone who is good does not try and be good but wonderfull accidents happen in their wake.
Back to my fathers point that when traveling I notice that in me which does not change so much: I also find that with a greater
awareness of that in me which is the same, I am more sensitive to my patterns and tendencies to change. My moods are dictated by sleep and food and my values quickly mold to the culture of a place. At the temple I worried about my will, my gracefulness, my capacity for wonder, my skill of meditation, my tendency to want more then I get. I wasn't back in town for two hours before I went to the bathroom and noticed a mirror for the first time in a week. I was sun burned, I had gained a little weight, my eyes were a watery from the mild allergies, i was unshaven. Almost
instantaneously I found myself caring much more about the way i looked than the priorities of the Monastery which felt somewhat quaint in town.
I won't stress this change too much. It will be nice to do laundry, shave, shower, and put lotion on my face before heading back tomorrow for another week of T
ai Chi. The town is a back packer paradise and well suited for the transition. The "Lonely Planet" writer I spoke with while writing emails looked less image conscience than me, and the French
Taoist, who runs a "
trecking business" explained, over the
reggae, that while in Europe his
appearance might be questionable in Yunnan people considered his scraggly beard distinguished. I thought he looked great -- to be said in grandma's voice; "and so thin."
