SUN SHUYUN
Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud

COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2003

Copyright © Sun Shuyun 2003

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Sun Shuyun asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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DEDICATION

For Robert, and my Chinese family

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

MAP

PREFACE

ONE: Bringing Back the Truth

TWO: Three Monks at the Big Wild Goose Pagoda

THREE: Fiction and Reality

FOUR: Exile and Exotica

FIVE: Land of Heavenly Mountains

SIX: Imagining the Buddha

SEVEN: Light from the Moon

EIGHT: Not a Man?

NINE: Nirvana

TEN: Battleground of the Faiths

ELEVEN: Lost Treasures, Lost Souls

TWELVE: Journey’s End

KEEP READING

SELECTED READINGS

INDEX

AUTHOR’S NOTE

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

MAP

PREFACE

Xuanzang, the subject of this book, could not have completed his epic journey without the help he received from kings, emperors and princes. I too have to thank a large number of people who made my journey possible; they helped me practically and intellectually. They include R. C. Agrawal, Daub Ali, Swati Barathe, Vasanta Bharucha, Bodhisen, Peter Coleridge, Joe Cribb, Mick Csaky, G. P. Deshpande, Toby Eady, Elizabeth Errington, Katie Espiner, Anthony Fitzherbert, Madhu Ghose, Richard Gombrich, Ruchira Gupta, Sue Hamilton, Hu Ji, Prem Jha, M. C. Joshi, Shah Nazar Khan, Robert Knox, Luo Feng, Philip Lutgendorf, Ma Shichang, Manidhamma, Robert Mason, Jean McNeil, Venerable Miaohua, Yumiko and Paul Mitchell, Vivek Nanda, Lolita Nehru, John Pell, M. C. Ranganathan, Harapasad Ray, Gowher Rizvi, Virginia Shapiro, Sarah Shaw, Romila Thapar, Judy and John Thompson, Uma Waide, Wang Qihan, Roderick Whitfield, Sally Wriggins, Zhang Jianhua, and many other friends and experts in China and elsewhere too numerous to list. I must single out Sally Wriggins, whose academic study of Xuanzang has been invaluable.

I owe an especially large debt to five people:

to Susan Watt, my editor at HarperCollins, who saw I had a book to write before I did, who had confidence in me before I acquired it myself and who led me through the new experience of writing with insight and assurance;

to Fang Xichen, who has been nothing less than an inspiration on the history and culture of my own people, a man of real wisdom and generosity;

to Venerable Dr Jingyin, who has been my guide and teacher in the vast canon of Buddhist writings, and who, with immense kindness, has shared with me his broad understanding of his faith;

to Tapan Raychaudhuri, whom I have troubled again and again, yet have always been received with warmth. He has put at my disposal his great knowledge of Indian history, not to speak of his expertise in Pali, Sanskrit, Indian literature and much else besides;

and above all to my husband, who kept encouraging me to write the book in the first place, who tolerated with the mildest of complaints my long absences abroad and who remained calm, patient and supportive throughout. Of all the people I know he comes closest to having the qualities of a Buddhist.

SUN SHUYUN

ONE

Bringing Back the Truth

I GREW UP in a small city in central China, in a time that now seems remote and strange. It was the 1960s. Life went by like scenes in a play I could not understand.

At first it was much the same every day, just Mother, Father, Grandmother and my two older sisters in our house in a military compound; nobody smiled much, never any treats. Things only livened up for the few days of the Chinese New Year. We ate sweets, and dumplings with meat in them; we had new clothes and a few pennies of pocket money; we bought firecrackers, watched puppet shows, put bright red posters on the front door and beautiful paper cut-outs in the windows.

Suddenly everything changed, and the streets were alive, as if every day was the New Year. There were posters, red, green, pink and yellow, waving in the wind, or blown along the road; flags flew on top of houses and workplaces; walls were painted with portraits of Mao. Loudspeakers blared out revolutionary songs from morning till night. Young men and women from Mao’s propaganda teams recited from his Little Red Book, twirled about in ‘loyalty dances’, and struck revolutionary poses – they never seemed to tire, but sometimes they fainted and had to be carried away. Some of them even pinned Mao’s portrait on their chests, and their blood dripped down. The Cultural Revolution was on the way.

Often the whole city turned out in force. People walked in ranks, some holding little paper flags, others carrying huge banners, everyone shouting slogans, young girls and women jumping up and down to the sound of cymbals and drums, with firecrackers sounding off. It was like the pageant shows during the New Year, with farmers walking on stilts, acting pantomime lions and donkeys, and dressing up as popular characters from folklore. When I asked my parents why they were marching today, the answer was nearly always the same. There was a new dictum from Mao! People stopped whatever they were doing and took to the streets, pledging their loyalty.

Another popular event was the frequent parading in the streets of what we called the ‘enemies’ of the people. They all wore dunces’ caps, and had huge placards hanging from their necks, the black characters of their names cancelled by big red crosses. There were landlords in their silk jackets, and their wives with painted faces and heads half-shaved; teachers had their shirts splashed with ink, black, blue and red; some women carried their shoes round their necks – these were bad women who had cheated their husbands; old monks with grey hair and beards wore their long robes torn and smeared with cow-dung. They were all like circus clowns with their make-up; I ran after them, shouting and laughing.

When they came to a big space, they would stop for struggle meetings, like public entertainments, drawing huge crowds. One day I dragged my grandmother along to watch. The ‘cow demons’ and ‘snake spirits’, as they were called, walked slowly round in a circle; they were reviled and spat on and a Red Guard whipped them with a belt. Some of the dunces’ caps fell off. The wires of their heavy placards cut into their flesh. The loudspeakers on the truck shouted: ‘Down with the reactionaries! Let them taste the strength of the proletarian dictatorship! And let them be trampled on for eternity!’ We were informed they were the agents of feudalism, capitalism, American imperialism and Soviet revisionism, who dreamed of toppling the dictatorship of the proletariat. So everyone must be on guard and think of class struggle hourly, daily, weekly, monthly – never forget it! I was hopping up and down, trying to get a better view. Grandmother was leaning on an electricity pole, her face white as ashes. She turned to me, looked me in the eye and said I would go to hell if I ever treated people like that. ‘Don’t frighten me. There is no hell,’ I answered back. When it was getting dark, the Red Guards marched off, the ‘enemies’ gathered up their caps and placards, and with their heads lowered, walked slowly back home. Tomorrow they might be paraded again.

I remember asking Grandmother, how could those people possibly topple the government? I did not understand. The old, bald priests in their long dirty robes looked so frail, as if they could collapse any minute under their heavy placards. My grandmother said they were the gentlest of men – they walked very carefully so they would not tread on ants; and in the old days, when they lit a lamp, they would cover it with a screen so that moths could not fly into it. But my father said I should not be fooled by appearances. ‘Even a dying cobra can bite,’ he warned me.

It was a fun time for kids. Schools were often closed, and all the children from the compound I lived in played together; we made up a unit of our own and my older sisters joined in. We wore mini-versions of military tunics – Mother sewed them from an old uniform of Father’s, and put a belt round the waist. She said, ‘If they ask you, just say your father is in the army and you will be safe; nobody will dare to touch you.’

My sisters did not study much when they did go to school. Reading and writing, addition, subtraction – there was not too much of these. Books were burnt, school libraries set on fire. Students who rebelled against their teachers were good, they were role models. Handing in a blank exam paper was heroic. The teachers’ job was to groom the successors of Communism. If they did not, they were sent away to be ‘reeducated’. They had to instil the right ideas from day one. Better socialist weeds than capitalist seeds, illiterate rebels rather than educated pupils bent on scholastic achievement. What was the point of a brilliant mind that could not tell grass from wheat?

It was the same when I started school. We did not have many normal lessons; instead we learned from peasants and workers. ‘Eat with them, sleep with them, work with them.’ We served apprenticeships in factories, making simple tools, such as hammers and chisels – half the things we made were useless, but it did not matter. We were learning the right attitude. We went to the countryside at harvest-time, helping the farmers to bring in the wheat. At least we thought we were helping: in fact, we were in the way and the farmers worried they would be in trouble if we cut ourselves on their sickles; they had to feed us; and when they were worn out at night, they had to stay up lecturing us about the bitter past and the sweet life that the revolution had brought. We did reward them: every day we went out after lunch to collect animal droppings for them, and we took night-soil from the school cesspit to their fields. That taught us something.

Then life on the streets became fiercer. The Cultural Revolution had taken on a more sinister twist. It was ‘Smash the Old’ time. The Red Guards were in full spate, storming temples, demolishing pagodas, removing traces of capitalism – old shop signs, neon lights on top of department stores, even the rotating lights outside barber shops. They took down the old street signs, which normally had auspicious names in one form or another, and replaced them with ‘struggle’ themes. They patrolled the roads and stopped anyone with curly hair, high heels or tight trousers – they shaved their heads, broke the heels and cut the trousers open. There was a small temple near home: it was very familiar – Grandmother used to take me there. I liked it; at festival times there were paper lanterns and paper animals to entertain us. Now the temple was broken up and sealed off. Then the Red Guards began ransacking people’s homes, throwing out posters, record players, clocks, antique furniture, any books that were not by Mao or Marx and Lenin – everything was piled in the streets and sent up in flames.

In one of the piles Grandmother found something special for me. I was thrilled – it was a comic-strip version of a novel, The Monkey King. The front cover was gone and some pages were missing.

The Monkey King tells the epic story of a monkey, a pig and a novice accompanying a monk to India to seek sutras, sacred writings. The monk is utterly useless. He is kind and pious, but weak, bumbling and, as the Chinese say, with a mind as narrow as a chicken’s intestine. He cannot tell right from wrong. But it is reputed that eating his flesh will guarantee immortality, so demons and vampires are all out to get him. He is in luck though: soon after he sets off, he runs into the monkey, sent to help him by the Goddess of Compassion. Without the monkey, he would not stand a chance of saving his skin, let alone getting his job done. The monkey looks like any other, but he is far from ordinary. His eyes are the sun and the moon. He appeases his hunger with iron-pills and slakes his thirst with copper-juice. In one somersault he covers 180,000 leagues. Reciting a spell, he can turn himself into anything he desires: a cloud shrouding everything in darkness, an insect hidden in a peach, a giant so big that even hurricanes cannot blow him away. No weapon can harm him, and a contingent of 100,000 heavenly troops fails to catch him. Even alchemical fire cannot burn him. He is inviolable and he gives himself a fitting title – ‘The Great Sage, Equal to Heaven’. He is submissive only to the Buddha and the monk – whenever the monk recites a spell from a sutra, the monkey curls up and cries with unbearable pain. After eighty-one titanic battles the monkey finally finds the sutras and brings them back with the monk on a magic wind. The monk, the monkey, the pig and the novice all became Buddhas.

I showed the book to my father when he came back from work. ‘It is a good book,’ he said. ‘Chairman Mao loves it. He even wrote a poem about it: “The monk is confused but can be reformed; the vampire is vicious and must be killed. The golden monkey strikes with his cudgel, and Heaven is cleared of all evil. Welcome, welcome, Monkey King, for the battle against new demons.” ’

‘What are the sutras? Why did the monkey go all that way to get them? Are they like Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book?’ I asked. I had heard adults use the word ‘sutra’ to describe the latest instruction from Chairman Mao.

‘Sutras are the words of the Buddha,’ my father told me.

‘Who is the Buddha? Is he like Chairman Mao, very important?’

Father was suddenly very irritated. ‘These are not things for children. You cannot understand them. And you mustn’t talk about them outside this house.’

Many Red Guards took Mao’s poem as their cue and called their factions ‘The Magic Cudgel’ or ‘The Golden Monkey’. Little did I know that they created more havoc and unleashed more terror than the monkey could have done.

As it went on, the Cultural Revolution became ever more extreme. There was no more singing and dancing, no parading. It progressed to blows, bloody noses and bruised eyes; from debates to vituperation and violence. I often ran home, scared. Then barricades began to appear in the streets, and rifles and cannons. I was no longer allowed out of the house, which was almost like a fortress, with sandbags at the door and all the windows boarded up. Only my father could sneak off in his officer’s uniform and buy groceries. At night we huddled together in the dark, listening to the gunshots snapping like fireworks. Grandmother was confused. ‘Are the Japanese invading us again?’ she asked my father. ‘Why are people killing each other?’ He did not answer. It was no circus any more.

I retreated to my book. I still remember reading The Monkey King for the first time. It was sheer magic: every step of the way was an adventure, replete with hordes of gods and goddesses, fairies and spirits, humans and demons. I felt transported to another world where nothing was impossible.

But I felt irritated too. I could not see why the monkey wanted to protect a hopeless, feeble monk. He had to go through ‘mountains of knives and seas of flame’ to find the sutras. What were they for? Why did he not just forget about them? Besides, how could the powerless monk have control over the almighty monkey simply by reciting a spell? Who was the Buddha anyway?

In the evening, I raised these questions with Grandmother. She hesitated, but I insisted. She asked me to close the door. ‘Sutras are very important. That’s why the monk risked his life getting them.’

‘But the monkey found them for him, really,’ I protested.

‘That is the story. In real life, the monk went on his own,’ Grandmother said quietly.

‘How do you know so much?’ I asked Grandmother.

‘Oh, a monk in our temple in the village was a great fan of Master Xuanzang. He told us a lot about him.’

‘It isn’t possible. Devils were waiting for him every step of the way. He would have been dead a hundred times over. He was so useless.’

While Grandmother was explaining to me what the monk really did, I felt my eyes were closing. I slept, and dreamed I was very thirsty, as if I were struggling in the desert and could not find the way. For a long time afterwards, I saw the monkey and the monk in my dreams.

They remained vividly in my memory. But it was no more than that until many years later, when I met an Indian history student in my college’s common room in Oxford.

‘I know about someone from China.’

‘You have friends there?’

‘No.’

‘Do you mean Mao?’

He shook his head. There was a look of disappointment on his face, as if it was obvious and I ought to know. He straightened up, and put down his drink. ‘It is Xuanzang. You must know about him.’

‘Of course, he is the monk in The Monkey King. It’s one of the most popular Chinese novels,’ I explained.

‘He is India’s great friend. We love him. He was an extraordinary man. He preserved a large part of our history for us.’

I must have looked surprised, and I felt embarrassed. ‘I know who you mean,’ I said.

But I was puzzled. Could this be the same Xuanzang? I dimly remembered from school that Xuanzang had written about his journey, but we were never taught about him, nor did we read his book, The Record of the Western Regions. The next day I went to the Bodleian Library to see if I could find it. It was there, of course, and also The Life of Xuanzang, the biography written by his disciple, Hui Li, both in English. I sat down at once in the Upper Reading Room and began to read.

I became completely absorbed. For the next three days I hardly did anything else. I felt I was on a treasure hunt, each page its own reward, but giving me a clue to the next discovery. I could not believe the wealth of information contained in the two books. The sheer number of cities and towns he visited, the history and legends associated with each place, the kings who ruled with righteousness, the Buddhist masters and their luminous wisdom – his Record is an encyclopaedia of the history and culture of the time; it is the testimony to a lost world. I wondered how much of it remained to be rediscovered.

The Record gives you no impression of Xuanzang himself nor of his adventures on the journey; those you find in the biography. It was a total revelation. Xuanzang was lost in the desert for four days without water. He was robbed many times – once pirates even threatened to throw him into the river as a sacrifice to the river goddess. He was almost killed by an avalanche in the Heavenly Mountains. At one point he even had to go on hunger strike to be allowed to continue his journey. The monk whose biography I was reading bore no relation to the one I had known from childhood. In fact, he was the very opposite of the helpless man in The Monkey King. He embodied determination, perseverance and wisdom. They were both monks, and both went to India in search of sutras – but there the resemblance ended.

Grandmother was right after all. There was a real Xuanzang. He was born into a scholarly Confucian family in 600 AD, in Henan Province, the cradle of Chinese civilization. He was the youngest of four sons and lost his parents when he was an infant. A serious child, he did not want to play with other children; even at festival times he stayed in and read. He soon became fascinated by monastic life – one of his brothers was initiated as a monk early in his life, and Xuanzang often went to stay with him in his monastery.

When he was thirteen years old, an imperial decree announced that fourteen monks were to be trained and supported by the state at his brother’s monastery. Several hundred candidates applied. Xuanzang was too young to qualify but he had set his mind on it. He lingered round the examination hall all day until the imperial invigilator noticed him and called him in. When asked why he was so keen on becoming a monk, he replied: ‘I wish to continue the task of the Buddha and glorify the teachings he bequeathed.’ The invigilator was surprised by this answer from a young boy who seemed to know his mind so well. He made an exception for him.

Xuanzang took to monastic life like a fish to water. He studied day and night, with little sleep or food. After hearing a sutra only twice, he could remember every word. But his studies were soon interrupted by a major peasant uprising. ‘The capital has become a nest of bandits,’ as he later told Hui Li. ‘Law and order has broken down completely. The magistrates have been killed and the priests have perished or taken flight. The streets are filled with bleached bones and the rubble of burned buildings.’

He and his brother fled first to the capital, Chang’an, today’s Xian, but there were few monks there: most had gone to Sichuan in the southwest, where, isolated by high mountains and the Three Gorges of the Yangzi River, life was unaffected by the war. Xuanzang followed them and was able to learn from monks from all over the country who had taken refuge there. Within two or three years, he mastered all the Buddhist scriptures of different schools and soon made a reputation for himself. He and his brother preached with an ease and eloquence that the local people had never heard before. And Xuanzang in particular made a strong impact. He was almost six feet tall, with bright eyes and a clear complexion, and he cut an impressive figure in his Buddhist robe, graceful, serious and dignified. When he spoke, his sonorous voice had a hypnotic effect. His loftiness of mind, his lack of attachment to worldly things, his insatiable curiosity about the metaphysical aspects of the cosmos, and his ambition to clarify the meaning of life left a deep impression on everyone who came into contact with him.

But Xuanzang was far from content. The more he studied, the more dissatisfied he felt. Chan masters, or Zen as the world now calls the school, would tell him that we all had in us the purest, unspoiled mind, the Buddha-nature, but it was defiled by erroneous thoughts; if only we could get rid of them, we would experience awakening. This could happen any time, at any place – while you were drinking tea, hearing a bell ring, working in the field, or washing your clothes. But Zen placed much emphasis on meditation that enabled one to go beyond logic and reason, the stumbling-blocks to enlightenment. How do you get a goose out of a bottle without breaking the bottle? This was the sort of question, or koan, that Zen masters would ask their disciples to jolt them out of their analytical and conceptual way of thinking, and to lead them back to their natural and spontaneous faculties. Reciting the sutras – the teachings of the Buddha – and worshipping his images were no use at all. As a famous Zen master said, ‘If you should meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.’

But Xuanzang was told by masters of the Pure Land School that practising Zen was difficult and laborious, like an ant climbing a mountain. Instead he should simply recite the name of Amitabha Buddha, who presided over the Pure Land of the Western Paradise. The Bodhisattva of Compassion, Guanyin, is his chief minister. Often portrayed in Chinese temples with ten thousand hands and eyes, Guanyin is ever ready to go anywhere and lead the faithful to the land of purity and bliss. Once there, in the company of Amitabha, anyone can swiftly achieve enlightenment. Guanyin became Xuanzang’s favourite deity and he would pray to her whenever he was in difficulty. She was also Grandmother’s favourite, and that of all Chinese Buddhists.

The followers of the Tiantai School, based in the Tiantai Mountains in eastern China, claimed, however, that they had found the true way. Buddhism was introduced into China in the first century AD and with the help of Indian and Central Asian monks, most of the major sutras had been translated into Chinese by Xuanzang’s time. The Tiantai School made the first comprehensive catalogue of the large number of sutras and synthesized all the various thoughts and ideas. They came to the conclusion that the entire universe was the revelation of the absolute mind, that everyone possessed the Buddha-nature, and that all truth was contained in the Lotus Sutra alone. You could forget about all the others.

Xuanzang never ceased to examine the different schools, but he told Hui Li that despite all his efforts, he was never free from doubts. Each of the schools claimed to know the quickest way to enlightenment, but he found them wildly at odds with each other. Was it because the sutras they read were in different translations? The early Indian and Central Asian monks did not speak Chinese and the sutras they had translated were not always accurate. But what troubled him even more was whether all the schools were authentic. The Chinese were very practical and down-to-earth, not given to abstract concepts and metaphysical speculation, and had no time for abstruse doctrines and convoluted logical debates. This was why they preferred the instant enlightenment of Chan or winning a place in paradise through recitation. It seemed all too easy. Xuanzang knew well that the Buddha’s path to enlightenment was long and arduous. He was far from sure that everyone had the Buddha-nature, and he could not believe enlightenment was to be reached without fundamental understanding of the nature of reality and the mind.

Xuanzang decided to go back to Chang’an where the head of the rebels, Li Yuan, had crowned himself the emperor in 618 and established a new dynasty, the Tang. He thought he might find some masters there who would help him clear the doubts in his mind. He was particularly keen on Yogacara, the most abstract and intellectual school of Buddhism which held that everything in the world was created by the mind. But no one could shed light on it. His brother did not want to leave: they had already acquired a reputation for themselves and he thought they should stay put. So without telling him, Xuanzang left with some merchants.

Back in the capital, he studied with two masters ‘whose reputation spread beyond the sea and whose followers were as numerous as the clouds’. But even their interpretations differed and he told Hui Li that he was at a loss to know whom to follow. One day he met an Indian monk, who told him that Yogacara was very popular in India, particularly in Nalanda, the biggest monastic university. Xuanzang’s interest was aroused. He had long sensed there was a vast ocean of Buddhist wisdom, which he could perceive only dimly. A pilgrimage to India would give him direct knowledge of Buddhism and clear all his doubts. Once he set his mind on the journey, he started making preparations: taking Sanskrit lessons from Indian monks, gathering information about the countries along the way from the Silk Road merchants in Chang’an, reading accounts of early pilgrims to India, looking for fellow-travellers, and exercising to make himself fit. Meanwhile he sent a request to the imperial court for permission to go abroad, but in vain. There was a coup in the imperial palace: the young Emperor Taizong had just come to the throne after killing his brothers and forcing his father to abdicate. People were not happy; there was the threat of more rebellions. Everything was in flux and nobody was allowed to travel.

But Xuanzang had to leave, imperial approval or not. One day he had a dream in which he saw Mount Sumeru, the sacred mountain at the centre of the universe in Indian and Buddhist mythology. It was surrounded by sea but there was neither ship nor raft. Lotus flowers of stone supported him as he crossed the waters, but so slippery and steep was the way up the mountain that each time he tried to climb he slid back. Then suddenly a powerful whirlwind raised him to the summit where he saw an unending horizon. In an ecstasy of joy he woke up; he believed he had been shown a vision of what he must do – he must go to India and learn the teaching of the Buddha at its source.

I returned again and again to reading about Xuanzang. It was as if a new person was entering my life, someone to whom I was strongly drawn, wise and calm, brave and resourceful. He did go to India, but on his own, with no magical protector. The more I learned about him, the more extraordinary I found him, and the more puzzled I was. Why had I known so little about him? After all, my education was full of the emulation of one hero after another. What was it that had kept him away from me, and from most Chinese? I had to find out. I had to separate fact from fiction. Gradually I realized all the clues were in my own family. Only I was part of it, and could not see them.

My father was an ardent Communist. He joined the People’s Liberation Army in 1946, when he was sixteen, and marched from northern China to the southern coast, helping to bring the whole country under Communist control. Then he saw duty in Korea for eight years. In the process, he joined the Communist Party, rose through the ranks and became a firm believer in Marx, Lenin and Chairman Mao. When he came back from Korea in 1958, he divorced the wife arranged by his parents, and fell in love with and married my mother, a beauty twelve years his junior.

My maternal grandmother was a Buddhist, the only one in our family. Most men and women of her generation believed in Buddhism one way or another. Mao’s own mother did, and under her influence the young Mao worshipped the Buddha too, even attempting to convert his father. Ever since Buddhism spread to China in the first century AD, it had struck a chord in the hearts of the Chinese. They had their indigenous beliefs, Confucianism and Daoism. While Confucianism emphasized the order and harmony of society where everyone had their place, with the emperor at the apex, Daoism concentrated on the search for the eternal, unchanging nature that unifies the individual with the universe, with the ultimate goal of achieving immortality in this world. Neither said anything about the question most of us wanted answered: what would be waiting for us after we departed from this world? The Buddhist doctrine of karma and paradise allayed Chinese anxieties about the afterlife, and satisfied their desires for longevity, for justice, and also for compassion. In the end, in this land already possessed of a long history and strong culture of its own, Buddhism adapted, survived and blossomed, despite opposition and frequent persecution.

Father had a deep affection for Grandmother. He never talked about it but he was full of regret and remorse about abandoning his own parents – he never saw them again after he joined the army; his mother went mad missing him and drowned herself, and his father died too while he was in Korea. He treated Grandmother with enormous respect and kindness. She had bound feet and it was very hard to buy shoes for her. Every time he went on a work trip somewhere, he would search all the department stores and always came back with a few pairs. Grandmother was very grateful; she would say to my mother: ‘How lucky you are to have such a wonderful husband! Kindness and prayer do pay.’

For all his affection, Father found Grandmother’s behaviour embarrassing. She made no secret of her faith and was kind to people who were in political trouble and shunned by everyone else. Father asked my mother to talk to her about the matter. My mother worked in the nursery of my father’s regiment and she was very aware of the political pressures. She had seen too many people being denounced for an innocent remark or for no reason at all. Grandmother was a potential threat to Father’s career in the army. The Party had its eyes and ears in the neighbourhood committees, which knew exactly what went on in every household. Father could get into trouble for not ‘keeping his house in order’ and not taking a firm stand against feudal practices and the enemies of the people. Long before I was born, my parents had persuaded Grandmother not to go to the temples, or burn incense at home. My father even sold her ‘superstitious article’ – a little bronze statue of Guanyin and her most precious possession – to the rag-and-bone man.

Grandmother was deeply hurt. The statue was her amulet. She thought her prayers had been effective: her children and grandchildren were healthy; her daughter was lucky to have found a good husband; her son-in-law was safe from political persecution. Perhaps she got the point from my mother’s explanation. Particularly at that time, when my father’s job in military supply was keeping the family fed while so many were going hungry. The great famine which began in 1959 and claimed over thirty million people was coming to an end, but the country was still suffering. Farmers back in Grandmother’s village were too weak to plough the fields; factories were shut down; very few children were born – starvation had made women infertile. On top of everything, parts of China were going through appalling drought, while others were afflicted by severe floods.

Reluctantly, in the face of all the misery the Party relaxed its grip, not only in its economic policy but also in its ideological control. But what followed took Mao and the Party by surprise: the masses who had survived the hunger immediately returned to their old gods and goddesses for solace and divination – they even built new temples. They were not just old ladies like Grandmother, but even Party members. Mao must have found this very discouraging, particularly after thirteen years of intensive campaigns to educate the masses and implant socialist ideas. He had lost confidence in the Marxist-Leninist ‘law’ that religion would fade as socialism developed – it was on this basis that a guarantee of freedom of religious belief had been included in the Constitution. Mao resorted to his old method, mass campaigns. The Campaign against Superstitious Activities and the Socialist Education Campaign began in 1963, the year I was born.

They were some of the biggest programmes Mao launched prior to the Cultural Revolution. Hundreds of thousands of civil servants, teachers, doctors, artists, engineers and soldiers were sent to the rural areas to reinforce the Communist ideology. My father went to a commune near his military base. For four months he helped the farmers with their work, ate with them, and slept in their huts to gain their confidence. He spent days and nights persuading the activists of the village to target what the Party regarded as the residue of feudalism: traditional Chinese medicinal practice and funeral customs, fortune-telling and arranged marriage, and visiting local temples. Father lectured them not to put their faith in God, but in the Party, echoing a verse of the time written by a loyal farmer:

God, O God, be not angry,

Step down as quickly as you can.

I revered you for a long time,

And yet you changed nothing

And our farms were still ploughed by the ox.

Mechanization is now being carried out,

I request you to transform yourself.

But instead of helping him root out the die-hard believers, the locals took advantage of the struggle meetings he organized to voice their grievances. They told him about the suffering and deaths in their villages during the recent famine – the worst they could remember. They begged him to go back and tell the Party the real problems in the countryside. Superstition was not on their minds – survival was.

Father had a frustrating four months, and he was even more disappointed when he returned home. I was born, his third daughter. Despite Mao’s claim that women were half the sky and the absolute equal of men, my father desperately wished for a son to keep the Sun family line going. A veteran Communist, he none the less believed in a dictum of Confucius, as all Chinese had done for more than two thousand years: the biggest shame for a family is to fail to produce a son. Now my mother had borne yet another girl, instead of the much-wanted boy. Father was so disappointed he did not even visit Mother and me in hospital. We were left there for three days and it was Grandmother who brought us food and took us home. Years later Grandmother told me what happened – the only fight she ever had with Father.

She prepared a special meal to welcome Father, Mother and me home. But Father, even while he was gulping down the dishes that Grandmother conjured up, could talk about nothing but his headaches and successes during the campaign. ‘They were really backward in the villages. Even the cadres weren’t good Communists. They allowed temples and family shrines to be rebuilt. We had a good go at them. We banged away at the village officials, then we asked them to identify the most superstitious people. If they didn’t cooperate, we would take away their jobs. There were some really stubborn ones; you can guess where they ended up.’

When Father had finished his meal, he cast a casual glance at me in the pram, shook his head, and sighed. He turned to my mother. ‘Why didn’t you give me a son?’

My mother was very apologetic. Back in her village, there was a saying: ‘A hen lays eggs. A woman who cannot produce a son is not worth even a hen.’ Years ago Father could simply have taken a concubine to give himself another chance. He could not do that now but he had other ways of showing his displeasure. And I, the unwanted girl, could not be drowned as in the bad old days; instead I would bear the brunt of his disappointment.

Then Grandmother made a rare intervention; ‘It wasn’t her fault. You should blame me.’

‘What has it got to do with you?’ Father asked impatiently.

Grandmother said she felt responsible for my birth. In the Lotus Sutra there is a passage which many Chinese, Buddhist and even non-Buddhist, passionately believe: ‘If there is a woman who desires to have a son, then she should pray to Guanyin with reverence and respect, and in due time she will give birth to a son endowed with blessings, virtues and wisdom.’ My mother desired a son as much as my father and grandmother, but she was a Communist and would never think that praying, even to Chairman Mao, let alone to anyone else, would get her a son. So Grandmother decided it was her job to do the praying for our family. But she could only say her prayers at home, silently and late at night. She could not go to the temples and bow in front of the statue of Guanyin; she could not offer incense to send a message to her – Mao had all the incense factories switched to making toilet paper in 1963. Grandmother thought it was unpropitious: if the goddess did not hear her prayers or receive her message, how could she ensure a much-desired son for our family? That was why my parents were given a girl, an inferior being.

Father looked at her in disbelief, apparently wondering whether Grandmother was serious. He had been fighting superstition in the countryside, but here it was, rampant in his own home. Suddenly he thumped the table.

‘What nonsense are you talking?’ he yelled. ‘To hell with all your superstitious crap. What is so good about your gods up there? If they’re as good as you boast, how come they let people live in such misery before? How come they were so useless in protecting your children? You know what? They are not worth a dog’s fart.’

Grandmother was shocked by the anger in Father’s voice – they were the harshest words she ever heard from him. She picked me up and went quietly back to our room.

From very early years, I had felt I was the unwanted daughter in my family. The one person who always cared for me was Grandmother. I shared a bed with her, head to toe, until I went away to university. My earliest and most enduring memory was of her bound feet in my face. The first thing I learned to do for her, and continued doing right up to my teens, was to bring her a kettle of hot water every evening to soak her feet. The water was boiling and her feet were red like pigs’ trotters, but she did not seem to feel it – she was letting the numbness take over from the pain, the pain that had never gone away since the age of seven when her mother bound her feet. It was done to make her more appealing to men. The arch of her foot was broken, and all her toes except for the big one were crushed and folded underneath the sole, as if to shape the foot like a closed lotus flower. On these tiny, crippled feet, she worked non-stop every day from five o’clock in the morning: making breakfast, washing clothes in cold water, cleaning the house and preparing lunch and supper seven days a week – both my parents were too busy with their work and the endless struggle meetings they had to attend. The only time she gave to herself was this daily ritual of foot-soaking to soothe the pain, restore her strength and prepare her for another day. She took her time. She massaged her feet gently and slowly, unbent the crushed toes one by one, washed them thoroughly, and carefully cut away the dead skin. After I took away the dirty water she would lie down and we would chat for a while. She would say to me sometimes, pointing at her feet: ‘It is tough to be a woman. I’m glad you did not have to go through this.’ Then she would add: ‘Life will be hard for you too. But if you can take whatever life throws at you, you will be strong.’

I was not sure what she meant. Father was very harsh with me; he would slap my face if I reached for food at table before everybody else, or had a fight with my sisters. I thought she was sympathizing with me for what he did; she was powerless to protect me, however much she wanted to. I was too young then to be able to imagine the trials life might hold – I knew no real pain, nothing like that Grandmother had suffered.

She was born in 1898 in a small village in Shandong, a great centre of Buddhism on the eastern coast. There were three temples in her village; the biggest one, the temple of Guandi, the God of Fortune, was only a hundred metres from her house. She saw it every morning when she woke up. It was tall; the statue alone was three metres high, carved by the village men in stone from the nearby mountain. It was always bustling with people who came to pray that Guandi, with his indomitable power, would help them to make a fortune. But it had no place for women; the temples for the God of Earth and for Guanyin were where Grandmother went and prayed, for rain and sunshine, for a good harvest, for sons instead of daughters, and for evil spirits to stay away. April, October and the third day of the Chinese New Year were particularly busy in these two temples. People came with clothes, carts, horses, cows, boats, money and anything else you could think of, all made of paper. They were burned to commemorate the dead. In April you changed your summer clothes and in October your winter outfit; and nobody should go without money for the New Year, particularly the dead.

Grandmother was married at the age of seventeen to a boy of thirteen; such was the custom in that part of China. The boy’s family gained a daughter-in-law, a servant, a labourer and a child-minder all at once. Grandmother cooked for the whole family, did all the chores in the house and helped with work in the field. She took over from her mother-in-law the responsibility of looking after her child-husband. She dressed him in the morning, took him to school, washed his feet in the evening and made sure he did not wet the bed. She cuddled him at night and told him about things between men and women. Occasionally he tried to put this information into practice but it did not come to much. In Grandmother’s words, ‘It was more water than sperm.’ But she was not annoyed because her husband really was a child. Bringing him up and making him a man was expected of every woman in Grandmother’s world. And then, when their husbands were in their prime, the women were often old and exhausted, which gave the men the perfect excuse to take concubines. It was a rotten deal for women but Grandmother did not feel it that way. She accepted it. When her young husband finally acquired the knack of lovemaking at the age of sixteen, they had their first child, and then eight more in the next seven years. With one acre of land, two donkeys and a mule, nine children and one ‘big child’ – her nickname for Grandfather – life, as Grandmother said, was ‘sweet as moon-cake’.

Then terror struck. Within a week, three of her children caught smallpox. There was no doctor, and an old woman in the village told Grandmother to mix ashes with cow’s urine as a medicine. The eldest son and two of his sisters died, choking on the mixture. The village had a custom that if you placed mirrors on your roof, the devils would be too dazzled by the light to come in and trouble your family. She did that and also put peach branches under her children’s pillows to ward off any hungry ghosts. But none of it worked. In the following two years, dysentery took away another four of her children. She cried for days on end; her hair turned white and she became almost blind. She wanted to take her own life but she had to live on for her remaining two children. She was so scared of losing them that she had them adopted. My uncle went to a family of eight boys and three girls, and my mother to a family of five girls and two boys. Grandmother hoped that the sheer number of healthy children in those two households would give her son and daughter some protection. If the others could survive, hers would too. Her children spent most of their time with their adoptive families, playing, eating and sleeping in their houses and giving a hand in their fields. They were hardly hers any more. She was heartbroken, but they were alive and she was happy for them.

As if she had not suffered enough, my grandfather died of an unknown disease, probably stomach cancer, when Grandmother was still young – she lived well into her nineties. A good-looking woman with seven dead children and a dead husband could not be a good omen. People in the village began to shun her, as if contact with her would bring them bad luck. They would go the other way when they saw her coming; the foster-parents of my uncle and mother forbade their children to visit her house; even farm labourers did not want to work on her land. She was half blind; now she hardly spoke.

Grandmother was desperate to know what crimes she had committed to deserve such harsh punishment and what she should do now to make sure her son and daughter would survive. One day she met an itinerant monk who was passing through her village. He told her that she must have done something terrible in her previous life and now it had caught up with her. He took out a small statue of Guanyin and gave it to her. If she prayed hard and recited the name of Amitabha, her son and daughter would be safe and she would unite with all her children in the Western Paradise. From that day on, Grandmother was a changed woman. She no longer burst into tears when she saw children playing in the street. She stopped reminiscing about the deaths in her family to anyone who cared to listen. To support herself and her children, she spun silk from cocoons for a local middleman who sold it to the big cities. And she prayed and recited Amitabha’s name day and night.

Even today, I can remember clearly the night when Grandmother told me all this. Grandmother did not sleep very much. Whenever I woke up in the middle of the night, I always found her sitting there. Most of the time it was too dark to see her but occasionally her face hovered above me in the faint light of the moon. She looked serene; her eyes, almost blind, looked up as if searching for something; her white hair glowed in the moonlight; her lips were moving quickly but silently while she dropped things continuously into a bowl in front of her. Once I asked her what she was doing and she said she was counting beans to pass the time because she could not sleep. I said I could ask my parents to get some sleeping pills for her. ‘Don’t bother. Old people don’t need much sleep,’ she told me with a gentle smile. ‘Please don’t tell your father about it. He has quite a lot to worry about as it is.’

I thought nothing of Grandmother’s sleepless nights until one day in the early 1980s. When life resumed its normality after the tumult of the Cultural Revolution, The Monkey King was the first classic Chinese novel adapted for television – an ideal medium for bringing alive its colourful characters, fantastic stories and magical elements. It was an astonishing success. I, like the whole country, was glued to the box for two months. Every boy in our neighbourhood had a plastic cudgel; everyone could sing the theme song; adults talked about nothing but last night’s television. Even Grandmother, who was half-blind, joined us. The magic was still there, and I was lifted once again out of the mundane world.

One night I woke up to find Grandmother in her usual position and counting the beans. Her posture and expression struck me at once as familiar, not because I had seen them so many times but because they reminded me of something. But what? Then it occurred to me that the monk in The Monkey King sat like this to pray whenever he was in trouble, with the same concentration and calmness; the only difference was that he had a long string of beads round his neck, which he never stopped counting. Was Grandmother praying? I asked her; she nodded. She was counting the beans to remember how many prayers she had said. I asked her what she was praying for. She said for her dead children and husband, for her to join them in paradise, for me not to suffer too much as the unwanted daughter, for my brother, for us all to be healthy, for us to have enough to eat, and for Father not to be a target in the endless political campaigns.

I was astonished. I did not know whether to laugh or to cry. Looking at her, fragile as a reed and with deep lines of sorrow on her face as though carved by a knife, I felt immensely sad. I wanted to shake her by her slender shoulders and wake her up. How could she be so stupid? How could she be sure there was a god up there who would answer her prayers? How could she bank all her hopes on the next world that did not even exist? Why did she blame herself for my being a girl instead of a boy? Why had I never heard her claiming credit for the birth of my brother born four years after me? Besides, what was the point of having gods and goddesses who did nothing for her but made her feel she never did enough to please them? Somehow, though, I knew I would never convince her. My father did not succeed. Those beliefs sustained her all her life. They were her life, her very being. We were worlds apart.

Grandmother must have felt very lonely among us. Despite her love and affection for me, I and my sisters always sided with Father and made fun of her Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The relentless political drill that ran throughout my education had turned me, like most Chinese born after 1949, into a complete atheist. Buddhism was not only bad, it was dead, part of the old life, like the last emperor. As the Internationale says: ‘There is no saviour, nor can we depend on gods and emperors. Only we can create happiness for ourselves.’ The teachers told us that the only Heaven would be a Communist one and we must work for it. China had suffered centuries of wretchedness with no help from the Buddha. Chairman Mao changed our lives. We memorized a verse that was supposed to have been composed by Mao after he took up Communism:

What is a Buddha?

One clay body,

With two blank eyes,

Three meals a day are wasted on him,

With four feeble limbs,

He cannot name five cereals,

His six nearest relatives he does not know …

What should we do with him?

Smash him!

I recited the poem to Grandmother one night when we were following her foot-washing ritual. She did not say anything; instead she asked me if I wanted to hear a story. I nodded for I always liked her stories; some were as magical as those in The Monkey King.

A long, long time ago, Grandmother said, a pigeon was flying about searching for food. Suddenly it saw this huge vulture hovering over it. Frightened, it began to look for a place to hide but could find none. It could see no trees, no houses, just a group of hunters on their way to the forest. In desperation, the pigeon dropped in front of a handsome prince in the hunting party, begging for protection. The vulture descended too and asked for its prey back. ‘I am hungry,’ it pleaded. ‘I have had no luck for days and if I don’t eat something, I will die of hunger. Please have pity on me too.’ The prince thought for a while and said to the vulture: ‘I cannot let you starve. Let’s weigh the pigeon. I will give you the same amount of flesh from my own body.’ His courtiers were shocked, but the prince insisted and sent one of his ministers for a set of scales. Meanwhile he had a knife sharpened. The pigeon was put in one scale, and the prince’s flesh in the other. But no matter how much of himself the prince put on the scale, the pigeon was always heavier. The vulture was so moved by the noble prince he decided not to eat the pigeon.

‘What happened to the handsome prince? Did he die of bleeding?’ I asked Grandmother impatiently, forgetting all about the poem and the clay Buddha. ‘He did not die,’ she said. ‘He was the Buddha in disguise.’ I was so relieved, and got up to take the basin of water away. Grandmother told me many stories like this. At the time I thought that was all they were, tales of animals and heroes. But she was teaching me humility, self-sacrifice, kindness, tolerance: looking back, I can see now how much she influenced me.

My father left the army in early 1966, when I was three, and the whole family moved with him from Harbin in the far north, where I was born, to Handan. It is a small city, with a history going back to the sixth century BC – the remains of the ancient citadel are still at its heart. It is most famous among the Chinese for the numerous idioms which permeate our language. Everyone knows the phrase ‘Learn to walk in Handan’ – it means if you learn something new, learn it properly, otherwise you are just a dilettante. Father said we were lucky to live in this old, civilized place.

Father was made head of production in a state timber factory employing 400 people – but there was no production. Hardly had he settled down in his new job, when the Cultural Revolution began. It was to purge the Communist Party of anyone who was not sufficiently progressive, to shake the country out of its complacency, and to revive enthusiasm for the Communist cause. The Red Guards were the front-runners but the real players were the workers. My father’s workforce was busy grabbing power from the municipal government; people fought each other, armed with guns stolen from military barracks. The city and the timber plant were divided into two factions, the United and the Alliance, with the former in control and the latter trying to oust them. My father tried to persuade the two sides to go back to work but nobody listened to him. ‘Chairman Mao says revolution first, production second. How dare you oppose our great leader?’ one of his workers warned him. Eventually, Father joined the United faction: nobody could sit on the fence or they would be targets themselves. All our neighbours were United members.

My father often told us how much he regretted leaving the army. At least we would have felt safe inside the barracks. Our new home town reminded him of a battlefield, with machine-guns, cannons and explosives going off day and night. In this escalating violence, my mother was about to give birth to her fourth child. Grandmother was happy, her face all smiles. She told Father that all the signs of the pregnancy indicated that Mother would produce a son this time: her reactions were very strong, unlike the previous three times; she insisted on vinegar and pickled cabbage with every meal; her stomach was pointed but not very big; most importantly, two pale marks like butterflies had appeared on her cheeks. My father could not conceal his delight – he did not lose his temper as often as before. He spent many months deliberating on a suitable name and in the end he chose Zhaodong, ‘Sunshine in the East’. To him, a son would be as precious as the sun – but it had a double meaning: all Chinese had been singing ‘East is Red’ in praise of the Great Leader, Chairman Mao, who was like the sun rising in the east to bring China out of darkness.

The birth was complicated. Almost all doctors had been labelled ‘Capitalist experts’ and sent to the country or to labour camps for re-education; hospitals were taken over by the Red Guards, who were more interested in saving people’s souls than their lives. The constant fighting in the streets and the blockades put up by all the factions made the journey to the hospital impossible. Mother consulted with Father and decided it would be better to use the woman from a nearby village who served as a midwife – experienced if not trained. Unfortunately the baby’s legs came out first and the midwife panicked. She asked Mother to breathe deeply and push hard. The baby reluctantly showed a bit more of itself: it was a boy indeed but there he stuck, seemingly unwilling to come into this turbulent world.

Then Mother started bleeding heavily. Father was frightened to death and kept asking Grandmother what to do. Grandmother tried to calm him down but her teeth were chattering like castanets. While Father was pacing about like a caged animal, Grandmother knelt down and began to pray loudly to Guanyin, holding tight to Mother’s hand. ‘I have been praying to you for more than fifty years,’ she pleaded urgently. ‘If you have too much to do and can only help me once, please do it now. I need you more than ever. I am begging you.’ She promised she would do anything if the boy was delivered safely: she would produce a thanksgiving banquet for Guanyin for seven days; she would go on a pilgrimage to her place of abode in southern China even if she had to pawn her bracelet, her only piece of jade; she would tell her grandchildren to remember the loving kindness of the Bodhisattva for ever. While Grandmother was praying fervently, the midwife was pulling hard, as if it did not matter if a limb was broken as long as the boy was alive. When he was finally dragged out, he had his arms above his head, looking as though he had surrendered to the world.

With the baby’s first cry, Father fell on his knees beside Grandmother, thumping the floor with his fist and murmuring softly. He did not stand up until the midwife handed his son to him. He was beside himself: at last he had an heir. He was overcome with gratitude – but to whom? To Heaven, to earth, to Grandmother’s deity, to the midwife? Grandmother was still on her knees, praying. Tired or overwhelmed, Father knelt again beside her, praying too, or at least appearing to.

Of course Father did not believe for a moment it was the Bodhisattva Guanyin who saved his wife and son. But he was very grateful to Grandmother. Perhaps her prayer did help him psychologically: it gave him a gleam of hope when everything else seemed to have failed; it kept him calm and it had a soothing effect on my mother and the midwife. Some time later when I reported to my parents that Grandmother was muttering her prayer again in our room, my father told me not to tell anybody else. Then he said to my mother: ‘I guess praying is better than killing people and burning factories.’

After the birth of my brother, my father changed into a different person. He was not as enthusiastic about his job as before. He used to work really hard, going out before I got up and coming home when I was asleep. Now he often drank on his own. He even had time to play with us. He seemed to have lost interest in the revolution that was going on. As a soldier he had killed his enemies, but that was to liberate the country. In the land reform of 1950, tens of thousands of landlords and rich farmers were executed because they were the enemies of the people, threatening the stability of the new China. He did not think twice even when his own father was labelled a landlord, though his family had hardly more than four acres of land and employed only two labourers. He could understand why Mao sent half a million intellectuals to labour camps in 1957 after they had criticized the Party openly and fiercely. But what was it all for now?

My father often said that in the thirty years of his revolutionary career, he had never seen so much harm done in the name of a cause. He could not understand how an ideal that had inspired so much devotion in him had gone so terribly wrong. He never said much but it was obvious he was losing heart. He did not mind Grandmother praying at home; he even bought her candles for the Day of Ghosts.

After I entered middle school, my teacher encouraged me to join the Communist Youth League, as an induction into the Party: it was not good enough simply to get good marks; the most important thing was to have the right political attitude – only then could our knowledge be truly useful. Father had insisted that my two sisters join. But when I asked him whether I should follow them, he was vague. ‘There is no hurry. You should concentrate on your studies,’ he told me. I never did join the Youth League.

In 1982, I gained a place in the English Department in Beijing University. I felt like the old Confucian scholar I read of in the Chinese classics, who finally made it in the imperial exams and wanted to tell the whole world about his happiness. Out of millions, only a few hundred were chosen. I had heard of Oxford and Cambridge, both of which were considerably older, but perhaps no university occupied the unique position of Beijing University, absolutely the academic and spiritual nerve of the country. Perhaps only a Chinese would fully appreciate my good fortune. It was students of Beijing University in 1919 who first created the slogan ‘Democracy and Science’, as the cure for the ills of a China at the mercy of all the Western powers. It was two professors from Beijing University who started the Communist Party of China. Mao went there to study at their feet. It was one of the fiercest battlegrounds in the Cultural Revolution, and again it was there that the deepest introspection on the Cultural Revolution took place, just when I arrived.

Self-searching was rampant throughout the country: its most public form was the Scar Literature, the outpouring of novels and memoirs describing the unbelievable cruelty of the Cultural Revolution, suffered by individuals as well as the whole nation. The students went a step further. What caused this suffering, unprecedented in Chinese history? Never before was the whole nation, hundreds of millions of people, allowed to think only one thought, speak with one voice, read only one man’s works, be judged by one man’s criteria. Never before were our traditions so thoroughly shaken up, destroying families, setting husbands against wives, and children against parents. Never before was our society turned so completely upside down. The Party was barely in control, with all its senior members locked up or killed. Workers did not work; farmers did not produce; scientists and artists were in labour camps; not criminals, but judges, lawyers and policemen were in prison; and young men and women were sent to the countryside in droves for re-education. On top of the physical devastation, the psychological impact on everyone was even more poisonous. The Cultural Revolution brought out the worst in people. They spied on, reported, betrayed and murdered each other – strangers, friends, comrades and families alike – and all in the name of revolution. So much hope, so much suffering and sacrifice, and for what?

There were heated debates in our dormitory, in the lecture halls, in the seminars after class, and in a tiny triangular space right in the heart of the campus. Freedom to think and openness to all schools of thought – the ethos of Beijing University from its very birth – were in full flower. Coming from a small sleepy city, I was like Alice in Wonderland, bewildered and exhilarated at the same time. Thoughts and ideas flooded in with the opening up of China to the outside world, after decades of isolation – we breathed them in like oxygen. ‘Democracy and Science’, the slogan raised seventy years earlier, came to the forefront again. Could this be the solution for China? Certainly it seemed time to try something new.

When I described to my parents the stimulating life on campus, my father wrote back immediately, warning me not to follow the crowd. ‘You’re still young,’ he said, ‘and have just begun your life in the wider world. You have no idea how politics work in China. I’ve been through it all. Liberal thinking is never a good thing. The crushing of the intellectuals in 1957 is a lesson. Find some books in the library and read them, you will see what I mean. As Mao said, students should study. I think you should talk to the Party Secretary in your department, reporting to him your wish to be educated, judged and accepted by the Party. You perhaps know that being a member will be of great help to you if you want to stay in Beijing and get a job in government departments after your graduation.’ He ended the letter with ‘These are words from my heart. I hope you remember them.’

While the students in Beijing University were busy exploring how democracy could be adapted to suit Chinese conditions, I was given the chance to go to Oxford. It was 1986. When Grandmother heard the news, she could not sleep for days: ‘You are just like the monk, going to the West for new ideas,’ she enthused. ‘It won’t be easy but if you are determined to do good, you will have people helping you. You will get there in the end. When you come back, you can help the country.’

Father was very happy for me too. He had learned that the West was not a dungeon as he had been made to believe. Nevertheless he still warned me, in the only language he knew – that of Communist jargon: decaying capitalist society was no Heaven, and I should be vigilant and not allow decadent bourgeois thoughts to corrupt me. He insisted on coming to Beijing to see me off. I thought it was unnecessary: his health was poor and the train to Beijing was slow and crowded and anyway I would be back in one year. Then he said something that made me understand. Just before I boarded the plane, I gave him a hug and asked him to take care of himself. For only the second time in my life I saw tears in his eyes – the first was when my brother was born. ‘Don’t worry about me. This is your big chance, you’ve got to take it. Look at me, look at your sisters, look at what society has come to. Don’t get homesick. There is nothing here for you to come back to.’ When I turned around and waved him goodbye, I was shocked, and sad. As someone who had devoted his entire life to the revolution, he must have been in total despair.

My father died in 1997. He was strong and had never taken a day’s sick leave. But his depression ruined his health. He came down with diabetes, and soon was paralysed and became blind. His old work unit, which was supposed to look after him, could not afford to pay his medical bills and he refused to let me do it for him. His last wish was to be buried not in a Western suit I had bought for him, nor a traditional Chinese outfit, but in a dark blue Mao suit. It was a difficult wish to gratify – nobody wore one any more. We searched for three days before we finally found one in a little shop on the outskirts of the city. We wanted him to be buried in it because it embodied his lifelong hopes, his ideals and unbounded faith, even though he had died a broken man.

Many of my father’s friends, colleagues and comrades from the army came to his funeral. The occasion, the gathering, brought out their own anger and frustration. I could understand their feelings; they were just as my father’s had been. They had sacrificed so much, gone through so much suffering and deprivation for the revolution – and now they were told what they had done was wrong. They must embrace this new world of markets and reform – but they could not; they felt they had no place in it; it was against all the beliefs they had held throughout their lives. Their whole raison d’être had been taken away. They were betrayed; they were even being blamed for what had gone wrong. The bitterness of loss was crushing and the void left in their hearts was deep. They found it impossible to cope with a past that had been cancelled and a future so uncertain.

As is the custom, my mother and my sisters prepared a meal with several dishes to thank the visitors for their sympathy and support – they had all brought presents, and gifts of money that was later used to pay off my father’s medical bills. Mother was moved – their lives were not easy either. To her surprise, many of them left the meat dishes and ate only the vegetables. These were people who used to drink with my father, and feast on all kinds of delicacies such as pig’s trotters and ox tails. ‘How come you have all turned into monks?’ she joked with them.

‘We can’t be monks. We are old Communists,’ one of them laughed, and then added, ‘it’s good for our health. And it’s better not to kill anything.’

I wanted to ask the old men about what they believed. In his last years my father often reminisced about Grandmother, and regretted his harshness towards her, especially selling her little statue of Guanyin. He did not become a Buddhist but in the twilight of their lives, I knew some of his oldest friends had actually turned to Buddhism, the very target of their earlier revolutionary fervour.

But before I had a chance to question them, they asked me if I had become a Christian. I shook my head, telling them I still did not know what to believe. ‘Many Chinese are going to church. You live in England and you don’t go to church?’ one of them said. ‘She should be a Buddhist,’ another one interrupted him. ‘She is Chinese after all. Buddhism is the best religion.’

Buddhism was making a come-back in China. In the early 1980s, the government had issued a decree allowing a limited revival of religion. As a Marxist would put it, the base had changed so the superstructure had to change too. The decree allowed for the 142 most important Buddhist monasteries damaged or destroyed in the Cultural Revolution to be restored or rebuilt. Monks and nuns in their orange and brown robes once more became a regular sight in towns and villages. In the cinema and on television, young people watched for the first time the lives of great Buddhist masters, albeit all kung fu wizards or martial arts heroes, who used their fantastic skills to save a pretty woman or impoverished villagers. The faithful could go to the temples, make offerings to the Buddha, draw bamboo slips to tell their families’ fortunes, and join monks and nuns in their chanting of the sutras and other Buddhist rituals. In a way, it resembled the old days when Buddhist monasteries were among the most important centres of Chinese life. They were a source of spiritual comfort but also of practical help with birth, illness, death and other crucial events in life. They received the infirm and the insane who were abandoned by their families and reviled by society. They gave the disillusioned and the discontented the perfect retreat, where they were asked no questions and given the space they needed. Many Communists, including senior Chinese leaders, had been sheltered in monasteries when they were hunted by the Nationalist government.

Observing these changes, I found myself thinking more and more about Grandmother. When I visited a temple, I would light incense for her; in the swirling smoke, the image of her counting beans in the night came back to me again and again. Sometimes I read a sutra and found the stories in it very familiar – they were among those she had told me in our long foot-washing sessions. The forbearance, the kindness, the suffering, the faith and the compassion were what she embodied. I felt many of the elements she had tried to instil in me were slowly becoming part of me. I began to see how extraordinary her faith was. She had suffered so much, enough to crush anyone, let alone such a frail person. Her faith kept her going, even though all she could do was to pray on her own in the dark, without temples and monks to guide her, and derided by her own family. Her beliefs made her strong despite her lifelong privations. She was illiterate but she knew the message that lies at the heart of Chinese Buddhism, the certainty and the solace. That is why she wanted me to follow her faith and acquire the strength it gave her. I never gave it a chance, rejecting it early on without really knowing what it was. Now I wished I could believe something so profoundly.

It was about the time of Father’s death that I decided to go on my journey and follow Xuanzang. I had been inspired through my early education by the idealism of Communism, but the intellectual ferment and questioning I was exposed to at Beijing University stayed with me. With Father’s death and the collapse of his world I lost all that remained of my attachment to the cause he gave his life to. I knew I was lucky, I was free and I had not suffered like my forebears and my fellow-countrymen. But like so many Chinese, I felt strongly that something was missing. The idea of a confirming faith dies hard. I was increasingly unsure of where I was going, why I was doing the things I did; I was at a loss, and pondering. Probably when I made the decision to go I wanted some clarity in my life, and the journey would give me a very clear objective.

Of course, I could have just sat in libraries and read about Xuanzang. But I knew that would not be enough. I did not think I could find a different outlook just by reading. The Chinese have a saying: ‘Read ten thousand books; walk ten thousand miles.’ I wanted to explore for myself, to make sense of everything I had been reading about Xuanzang and about Buddhism. He found his truth by going in search of the sutras – I had to go and look for mine.

It would be a spiritual journey for me but physically demanding too. Travelling along Xuanzang’s route would not be easy. In his time, covering those 16,000 miles through some of the world’s most inhospitable terrain, not knowing what he would encounter, required enormous courage and strength of will. What inspired him to brave the unknown and keep going for eighteen years, and what did he inspire in others? Was it the same faith that had sustained Grandmother? How did he maintain his equanimity and remain indifferent to flattering royalty and aggressive bandits? How did he manage to achieve so much? If I followed him, perhaps I would come to understand his life, his world and the tenets of Buddhism. I would also learn how much Buddhism has contributed to Chinese society, a fact well hidden from me and my fellow-countrymen. And perhaps I would find what I was missing.

When I told my mother about my plan, she exploded. Why was I going alone to those God-forsaken places in search of a man who died more than a thousand years ago? I must be out of my mind. Was I unhappy living in England? What was it for anyway? But she knew she could not stop me. I told her I would not be away for eighteen years. Many of the places Xuanzang visited no longer exist, or at least no one knows where they are; some, like Afghanistan, I could not visit. I would go only to the key places that mattered to him personally, and were important for the history of Buddhism. I would be travelling for no more than a year.

My little nephew Si Cong was also concerned. He had been completely gripped by yet another cartoon series of The Monkey King on television. It looked magnificent with the latest computer graphics and special effects. It was on every day at five o’clock when children came back from school. Would I have someone like the monkey to protect me? he asked me, while his eyes were fixed on the television. I said no. He quickly turned around. ‘What happens if you run into demons? They’re everywhere. Even the monkey can’t always beat them. You’ll be in big trouble.’ I told him the demons would not eat me because my flesh was not as tasty as the monk’s and it would not guarantee their longevity. He seemed relieved and went back to the magical world of The Monkey King.

It set me thinking, watching with him and looking at the steep mountains clad with snow, the deep turbulent rivers, the sandstorms that swept away everything in their path. Soon I would have to encounter them myself, not in fiction but in real life. I would pass through dangerous and strife-torn places; I might be robbed, or put in situations beyond my control. Whatever might happen, I would try to face it. Xuanzang would be my model and my guide.

TWO

Three Monks at the Big Wild Goose Pagoda

IN AUGUST 1999 I took a late-afternoon train from Handan, my home town, to Xian, the capital of the early emperors for much of the first millennium. It was where Xuanzang began and ended his travels. I was conscious that I was starting the most important journey of my life. But for the other people in my hard-sleeper compartment, the first order of business was food. As soon as the train started moving, the man opposite me produced a big plastic bag and unwrapped the contents. An amazing banquet slowly appeared: roast chicken, sausages, pot noodles, pickled eggs, cucumbers, tomatoes, melons and dried melon seeds, apples, pears, bananas and six cans of beer. The Chinese have suffered so much from starvation and famine that eating is rarely far from their minds. Everyone followed suit. Before long, they were sharing food, finding out each other’s names, where they were going, and why.

Privacy is not a concept we understand in China. We have lived far too long on top of each other, as in this six-bunk compartment, off a narrow corridor without doors. Conversation reduces the tension and makes life tolerable, but it is not small talk; more like an interrogation. After ten years in England where you can choose to live and die without knowing your neighbours, I was uncomfortable with the intrusion. I took out a book about Xuanzang and tried to read, but that was no protection. A single woman travelling on her own makes her fellow-passengers curious. Whether for business or pleasure, the Chinese like to do it in groups. Xuanzang tried very hard to find companions, but in vain, owing to the emperor’s prohibition against travelling abroad. I had also asked several monks myself. They were over the moon; pilgrimage to the land of the Buddha was the dream of every Buddhist – they would even gain merit from it should they need it for their rebirth in the Western Paradise. And to follow in the footsteps of Master Xuanzang! He was a model for them. His indomitability was an inspiration for them in their struggle for enlightenment. Many of the sutras they read every day, their spiritual sustenance, were his translations. His selflessness in giving his life to spreading Buddhism, not seeking his own salvation, was the ideal of the Bodhisattva, and of all Chinese monks. And for me, to see their reactions, to hear their thoughts, to ponder their reflections and to ask them questions – I would have learned so much more and understood Xuanzang better. I was not so fortunate, oddly enough for the same reason as Xuanzang: Chinese monks were not allowed to go abroad, unless they were on an official mission.

The men and women in my compartment quickly determined they were all going to Xian for business: the men were in engineering and the women in quality control. Then they turned to quizzing me, firing rapid questions like well-trained detectives. Who are you? Where are you going? Why? I told them I was following Xuanzang. They fell silent for a moment, then erupted into questions.

‘You mean you are really following that monk in The Monkey King, the one who went to India? Are you really going all that way?’

I nodded.

‘Why? Are you a Buddhist?’

I had hardly finished answering him when the man sitting next to me put his hand on my forehead. I stiffened. ‘I want to see if you are running a fever,’ he said. His colleagues laughed and I relaxed.

‘If you really want to travel, why don’t you go to Europe, or America or Australia? I wouldn’t go to India if you paid me! It is so dirty, so poor, worse than China.’

‘If you want to write about Xuanzang, why don’t you talk to some academics in Xian and make it up? Do you really think all the scholars do such hard work? You must be joking.’

They went on for some time, trying to dissuade me. After the lights were switched off the woman above me knocked on the edge of my bunk. ‘You really shouldn’t make this trip,’ she said. ‘It’s too dangerous. Why don’t you join our group and have a good time in Xian?’

We arrived in Xian early next morning, by which point my companions seemed to have become used to the idea that I really was going on my journey. Perhaps they thought I was a bit crazy. The men all helped me with my luggage. I told them I could manage on my own. ‘Save your energy. You have a long way to go. You don’t have the Monkey King to help you. You must take care of yourself,’ they said, smiling and waving from the platform.

Just outside the railway station stands the old city wall. I asked the taxi-driver to take me first alongside the wall to the main North Gate. I sat in the front seat, keen to see everything. The wall is weighty and ancient, towering high above the car, and made me feel that once inside it, I would be safe, but also in a place of mystery, full of the secrets of the past. Most of the wall is seven hundred years old, part of it even older, going back another six hundred years to Xuanzang’s time. No other large Chinese city has anything comparable. Beijing’s, for example, was completely destroyed on Mao’s orders, to make way for a new ring-road.

The North Gate is vast, surmounted by a three-eaved tower. It was dark going through it; because of its dense traffic it took some minutes to emerge into the light, into the modern city. A wide boulevard leads to the Bell Tower at its centre. Every old Chinese city has one, or used to have one. From it the ancient city received its wake-up call at sunrise. It is an imposing sight, over a hundred feet high with its three flying rooftops and an arch at its base. But it was not what Xuanzang would have seen. Then, the imperial city stood within these walls, and extended well to the north, with all the palaces and buildings of government. He would have come here to ask for travel passes for his journey to India, but his monastery was beyond the southern wall, where the rest of the city lay.

Even the commoners’ city was spacious and grand in those days. Wide avenues ran north to south, crossed by boulevards east and west, dividing the capital into geometrical wards, which bore propitious names: Lustrous Virtue, Tranquil Way, Eternal Peace. Xian, or Chang’an as it was called back then, was neither tranquil nor peaceful when the young Xuanzang arrived here in 625 AD. The new dynasty, the Tang, was founded at a great cost. Over twenty million people, two-thirds of the population, perished in the uprisings, famines and epidemics that followed. Xuanzang was deeply affected. He remembered how his old monastery had been razed to the ground, and when he was fleeing from it, skeletons were everywhere on the roads and deserted villages and devastated fields stretched for hundreds of miles. Old people told him that no turmoil and destruction like it had happened since the First Emperor eight hundred years before. In Chang’an, people came to his monastery – each ward would have one – fervently praying for certainty, for the calamities to go away, and for the return to a peaceful life. Buddhism was supposed to save people from all this suffering. Why was it so rampant? Was there something wrong with the doctrines the Chinese believed? Were they the true teachings of the Buddha? As he said, he ‘desired to investigate thoroughly the meaning of the teachings of the holy ones, and to restore the lost doctrines and give people back the real faith’.

Very little remains of the old Chang’an beyond the South Gate. The imposing avenues have shrunk, through the centuries, to narrow streets lined with restaurants, shops and government offices. One of them brought me to the Monastery of Great Benevolence, where the Big Wild Goose Pagoda stands. This is Xuanzang’s monastery, where he spent many years of his life. This was where I wanted to be in Xian, to learn as much as possible about him.

It was much smaller than I expected, containing little more than the pagoda, a single shrine hall, and the monks’ quarters, surrounded by village houses and fields. Clouds of smoke wafted up from the altar in front of the main temple. Long queues of people were waiting to light candles and burn incense. The hypnotic sound of monks chanting sutras reached me from the loudspeakers in the temple shop. Busloads of tourists, foreign and Chinese, poured through the gate and rushed to get their pictures taken: this is Xian’s second most popular tourist attraction, after the famous Terracotta Army. The pagoda is what they come to see, and there is a good view of the city from the top. Xuanzang designed it himself in a graceful and slightly austere style, reminiscent of India.

Sixty-four metres up, from the topmost of its imposing seven storeys, I could see the whole of Xian – low houses lining the street leading to the pagoda, streams of people and cars moving at a snail’s pace, high-rise buildings dwarfing the magnificent city wall, and vast stretches of fertile land to the south that have nourished the city for more than two thousand years. No wonder that after the pagoda was built in the seventh century, young men used to climb up here to celebrate when they had passed the imperial exam and joined the ruling class. They must have felt the world was at their feet and their ambition could soar into the sky. Even today, the Big Wild Goose Pagoda is one of the tallest structures in Xian, dominating the scene – in fact it is the city’s symbol.

I used to go to monasteries as a tourist myself, enjoying the quietness, the chanting and the old trees in the courtyards. I would look around, take a picture or two, and then go away, vaguely comforted. Now, having learned something of Grandmother’s faith and Xuanzang’s, I began to understand what it was to feel reverence for this place. There are three treasures of Buddhism: the Buddha; the Dharma, the Buddha’s teachings; and the Sangha, the community of monks who make up the monastery. The monastery is the outward symbol of Buddhism. It tells the world a different way of life does exist – we crave love, fortune and fame; the monks and nuns live happily without them. As Grandmother used to say, it was the centre of our life. I had to try and find out what that means.

From a row of traditional courtyards on the left, one or two monks appeared now and then and disappeared quickly back inside. That was where they ate, slept, prayed and meditated, and where they could not be disturbed. I decided to be bold, and the next time I saw one, I went up to him and greeted him. I asked him where the abbot’s office was. He pointed to one of the courtyards on the left. But the abbot was away, he told me and he asked if he could help me. I told him I wanted to find out more about the monastery and Xuanzang. ‘You definitely should go and talk to an old man in the village outside. His name is Mr Duan,’ he said. How would I find him? ‘No problem, if you ask for the ex-monk.’

It was indeed very easy to find Duan’s house, barely a hundred yards from the monastery, down a small lane. Casual workers were squatting on the ground. They had just finished their lunch and were washing out their bowls in a bucket of grey water and emptying the bowls on to the hard-baked road. Dogs and chickens came up looking interested. Mothers were screaming at their children and shouting threats of punishment. It was just the kind of hectic scene which Duan must have become a monk to get away from. I asked an old lady who was busy chatting with her neighbour and she said Mr Duan was meditating. She was his wife. Did I mind waiting? Or could I come back in an hour?

I asked her if she knew the monastery well. ‘My family has been living here for almost a hundred years,’ she said, ‘and I am married to one of its monks.’ We went off and sat on a bench. She pointed to the dusty square in front of the monastery and the fields in the distance. ‘All this area used to be the monastery’s land. We leased it from them and gave them grain as rent after the harvest. The monks were really kind – they let us use their mills for free and take water from their well. There weren’t many of them, only six or seven.’

The land became the villagers’ in the Land Reform of 1950. Monasteries used to be among the biggest landowners in China and so were the first targets. Monks were told to give up their ‘parasitic’ life and work just like everyone else, growing what they ate and weaving what they wore. Mrs Duan found the turn of events puzzling. ‘Their job was to pray, meditate and perform ceremonies for the dead and the living. How could they know about growing soya beans?’ She shook her head. ‘We wanted to help them, but the village Party Secretary told us we were masters of the new China and shouldn’t allow ourselves to be exploited by them any more.’

I asked Mrs Duan what happened to the monks. She said that her husband would know more about it. He should have finished his midday meditation. ‘Eight hours a day he does it. Three in the morning, two around now and three in the evening. He might just as well be in another world. But it’s what keeps him going,’ she sighed.

Just then I saw a man walking slowly towards us from across the street. I told Mrs Duan her husband was coming. She looked over her shoulder. ‘Yes, that’s my old man.’ She turned back to me. ‘How did you know it was him? Have you seen him before or seen his picture?’ I didn’t know what to say, but I just knew it was him. He was thin, even stick-like. Behind a pair of dirty glasses were sunken eyes in a wizened face, and his straggling hair came down to his neck. He had on a threadbare blue Mao suit, faded from what must have been hundreds of washings, and an ancient pair of soldier’s shoes, which he wore without socks. He looked as if he were sleepwalking – perhaps he was still meditating. ‘Come on, hurry up!’ his wife shouted. ‘This lady wants to talk to you about Xuanzang and the monastery.’

He ambled up to us murmuring, ‘I am a sinner. I am a sinner. What is there to talk about?’ As we walked back to their house, I asked him if he would tell me about his meditation.

‘He’s been doing it for thirty years,’ Mrs Duan said petulantly, pulling at Duan’s sleeve until he sat down next to her. ‘Nothing distracts him. Even if a bolt of lightning dropped on his head he still wouldn’t move.’

‘She’s exaggerating,’ Mr Duan said, looking at his wife fondly. ‘I am just a worldly man distracted by mundane thoughts. So you want to know about Xuanzang?’ He paused, then continued, his voice becoming more animated at the sound of the monk’s name. ‘Now there was a great man. He was above it all. When I worked in the monastery I used to walk around the pagoda whenever I had problems. But really, they were so trivial. Master Xuanzang was very brave to go on that journey, risking his life. He never gave up, he came back with the sutras. All I have to do is to sit and meditate in a comfortable room – I don’t call that difficult.’

I told him I was surprised that he loved the monastery so much, yet he had given it up and returned to secular life.

‘It is a long story. You are too young to understand,’ Duan said, his voice suddenly sombre.

After the Land Reform in 1950, the monasteries were left with very little land, barely enough for the monks to live on. Donations and fees for religious rituals – a considerable proportion of the monastic income in the old days – were drying up. Monks were warned against ‘making a business out of superstition’. In a monastery in northeastern China they were forced to put up this poster:

Do not think that through the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas you can obtain good fortune, cure disease or avoid disaster. No matter how big a donation you make, they cannot grant you such requests. Keep your good money for buying patriotic bonds and you can create infinite happiness for society.

Hunger made many monks return to secular life. By 1958, nine years after the revolution, ninety per cent of Chinese monks and nuns had left their monasteries for the world outside, or had died of starvation. The abbot of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda was forced to leave the monastery and had to make a living selling coal from a handcart. Duan was an orphan and had nowhere to go, so he stayed on where he was, barely surviving on cornflour porridge and vegetable leaves.

His old monastery was shut down in the 1960s and the government Religious Bureau assigned him to the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. There were three other monks and also four cadres from the Xian Municipal Cultural Bureau, ostensibly to protect the pagoda but also to keep an eye on the monks. They forbade them to shave their heads, wear their robes, make offerings to the Buddha and Bodhisattvas, or conduct the morning and evening services in the shrine hall. In fact the shrine hall could be used only for political study sessions or struggle meetings. They did allow the monks to say prayers in their own rooms, but not too loudly – that would disturb other people working in the monastery.

Normal religious life was resumed, however, when there were foreign Buddhist delegations. Buddhism helped China to develop friendly foreign relations, especially with Japan, Sri Lanka, Burma, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. The monks’ presence would show that the Communist Party, though not religious itself, respected religious freedom for its people. When there was an important visit, the cadres would collect monks from all over Xian to simulate the appearance of a functioning monastery. The monks were carefully rehearsed in the questions that might be asked.

Duan was even trained at the Chinese Buddhist Seminary in Beijing to answer every kind of question. ‘That was when I learned a lot about Xuanzang and how important he is, not just for us monks, but for Buddhists throughout Asia,’ he remembered. ‘They told us Master Xuanzang was a trump card, very important. In fact he was our only card. We were not allowed to talk about anything but him. I guess there was nothing to say about our religious observance – we did not have any. So all we could do was to show the delegates the sutras that Xuanzang translated, which we were not allowed to read. Then we brought them to the pagoda and told them how we remembered the great man on his anniversary with special ceremonies – which of course we could not hold. Before they left, we gave them a portrait of Xuanzang from a rubbing and told them how we were carrying forward his great legacy. All the time Party officials watched us. Then the delegation left, convinced of our freedom of worship, and we returned to our so-called normal life.’

Much of Duan’s life was taken up by relentless political studies. ‘We were asked to surrender our black heart in exchange for a red heart faithful to the Communist Party,’ Duan said. Week after week, sometimes for months on end, they studied the works of Mao and editorials in the People’s Daily. Then they had to hand in reports of what they learned from their studies.

I asked how much he had really taken on board.

‘A lot of it was beyond me,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t see why we should spend weeks studying the new marriage law. It had absolutely nothing to do with us. Perhaps they knew all along we were going to be sent home and get married so it would do us good to know what our rights were as husbands.’ He gave an awkward laugh.

Was there a lot of pressure for him to marry?

‘Plenty,’ he sighed. ‘Sometimes monks and nuns were put in a room together and were told they couldn’t leave until they agreed to marry.’ There was a nunnery on the outskirts of Xian. One day the abbess came to see Duan and asked if he would take care of one of the novices. ‘The nuns suffered more than us monks. Officials spread rumours about them, saying the nunnery was a den of vice and the nuns were prostitutes. Many could not bear it and left, and the nunnery had only two novices and the old and weak staying on,’ Duan said. He told the abbess that he would think about it, and eventually he agreed. But then the girl died suddenly. He thought it might have been suicide. ‘I felt very guilty; maybe if I had agreed sooner, I would have saved her life.’

Under the unremitting pressure from the government, two of Duan’s fellow-monks finally gave in and got married. Then officials badgered him daily, asking him when he would make up his mind. There was a woman, a water-seller outside the monastery, whom Duan had seen around for ages. She was a widow from the village, with four children to support. He thought, why not?

By then he had been a monk for nearly thirty years. That was the only life he knew: simple, quiet living, with just enough to eat and three items of clothing; content and secure, sheltered by the high monastic walls. Now the routine and the structure were gone – no drum to wake him up in the morning, no services and prayers to shape his day, and no beautiful chanting and great masters to reinforce his belief. He must have found it terribly hard in the real world. I looked round the room we were sitting in – it was antiquated, as if it had not been touched for decades. There was practically no furniture, just a saggy, torn sofa and a refrigerator standing in a corner. Next to it, a small rickety altar with a tiny statue of Guanyin. The bare walls held only a huge Mao portrait dominating the room.

‘He was born to be a monk,’ Mrs Duan interjected before her husband had a chance to say anything more. ‘When we got engaged, a dreadful woman in the village started slandering us, saying we weren’t really man and wife because monks are like eunuchs. I begged him to do something.’

‘What did you do?’ I asked.

‘What’s there to explain? What does it matter?’ Duan said.

Their honeymoon was hardly over when the Cultural Revolution began. Duan still remembered the day when the Red Guards stormed the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. It was early one evening in the summer of 1966 and they were about to have supper. Suddenly there was a thunderous noise outside. Before they realized what was happening, a group of Red Guards broke in, shouting, ‘Smash the old world, build a brand-new one!’ Two of them came into his cell and grabbed the scriptures from his table and threw them on the floor. They ordered him to tread on them to show his support. ‘How could I? They were the holy words of the Buddha. I would incur so much wrath, I would be condemned to hell for ever.’ He refused.

The Red Guards stamped on the sutras themselves. ‘Confess, and we will deal with you leniently; resist, and we will punish you severely. Think carefully. We will come back for you tomorrow.’ With that warning, they left the cell.

Outside, some Red Guards were putting up Mao’s portrait and posters in large characters, while others were throwing ropes on to the big Buddha and Bodhisattva statues in the shrine hall. The cadres from the Cultural Relics Bureau rushed in to stop them, saying those and the Big Wild Goose Pagoda were not feudal objects but the nation’s treasures, from the time of the Monkey King – they had a certificate from the State Council to prove it. The Red Guards were caught by surprise and stood there, not sure what to do. Then one of them started pulling down the silk banners that were hanging from the ceiling. ‘These cannot possibly be state treasures,’ she said harshly. In a few minutes all the banners were thrown outside, joined by the monastery’s precious collection of sutras, many of them Xuanzang’s own translations, and other ancient manuscripts. They asked the monks and cadres to come out and stand around the pile, as witnesses to their revolutionary action. Amid mad shouting and clapping, they set the lot on fire. The fire went on all night.

The Big Wild Goose Pagoda survived, but the loss for the whole country was unbelievable. In 1949, there were some two hundred thousand Buddhist monasteries throughout China. One campaign after another accounted for many of them – they were either demolished or turned into schools, factories, houses and museums. By the time the Red Guards finished their work and the Cultural Revolution was over, barely a hundred remained intact. In Beijing, there were, once, more than a hundred monasteries and temples, and now only five belong to the monks. Grandmother was very upset that the three temples in her village were destroyed and the farmers used the stones to build pig-sties and houses. In Tibet, the destruction was almost total. Gone with them was a large part of our history, culture and life – a part we had denounced as antiquated, feudal and backward, a part whose value we did not know until it was gone.

But Duan did not share my sadness and regrets. ‘I am so pleased the pagoda has survived,’ he said, ‘but even that will go one day. Nothing is permanent. When you look at our monastery today, you think it is great. When I first came here, the monastery was run-down and overgrown with weeds; wolves hovered at the gates. It has been repaired a few times since then. And now it looks its best. But in Master Xuanzang’s time, this was just the monastery’s cemetery, where they buried the ashes of distinguished monks. The monastery itself was a hundred times bigger, if not more, with thousands of rooms, and any number of halls, all connected by streams like in a garden. It could even compete with the imperial palaces in beauty and grandeur. But it is all gone. So what we think of as lasting does not actually last.’ He gave me time to take in this very Buddhist view. ‘Didn’t Chairman Mao say, “Without destruction, there is no construction”? The destruction of the Cultural Revolution gave us Buddhists the opportunity to show our devotion and to accumulate merit for the next life by building new monasteries, bigger and better.’ He paused. ‘You know, when the Buddha first began promulgating the Dharma two thousand five hundred years ago, he and his disciples simply slept under the trees and begged for alms. We don’t even have to have monasteries.’

Did he ever think of resuming monastic life now religion was allowed again? Duan did not hesitate for a moment. ‘My wife was very good to take me on in difficult times and has looked after me all these years. The Dharma teaches us to show compassion for all sentient beings. She is getting old and needs me more than ever. How can I leave her? If I have no compassion for her, how can I talk about compassion for anybody else?’ He paused, and then added, looking at his wife: ‘If she passes away ahead of me, I would like to return to a monastery to spend my remaining days there: that is, if any monastery will take me.’ Mrs Duan was all smiles now.

As a Buddhist, Duan attributed his return to secular life to his bad karma. ‘I must have left some important task unfinished in my previous life, or obstructed someone unintentionally,’ he said. ‘That’s why I could only spend half of my life as a monk. You can’t escape your karma.’

I find it difficult to accept that Duan was being punished for past sins, that all those people during the Cultural Revolution had done something wrong to deserve their suffering, just as I cannot accept that Grandmother’s misfortunes were due to the wrongs of her previous lives. I am still struggling with the idea of karma, a linchpin of Buddhism. For Buddhists, the differences and inequalities in the world can not be explained as simple accidents: they are the working of karma. Why is one born a millionaire, another a pauper? How could Mozart write such heavenly melodies in his teens while others are tone deaf? The Buddha said you reap what you sow: we are the result of our karma, although we can make it better or worse through our own efforts. What I can appreciate is the virtuous effect of believing in it: instead of blaming others and bearing grudges, Duan would always look deeply inside himself and think how he could improve.

They offered me a glass of hot water, with a spoonful of sugar in it – it was all they could afford. I thought about everything he had told me. ‘You have had such a hard life,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I won’t say it has been easy. We were very poor when I was small. We lived by begging, and slept at the city gate. I often passed out with the cold; sometimes I woke up with frozen corpses around me. Then my parents died of starvation and my uncle, who could not even feed his own children, left me outside a monastery, and the monks took me in. At least I had food, clothes, a roof over my head. I survived. Life improved after the revolution.’

‘But how about everything that happened to the monasteries and the monks? Was that not suffering?’

‘We went through many painful things. But the Buddha says suffering is a fact of life. It depends on how we look at it. To me, not to have anything to eat is suffering. I haven’t starved since I became a monk, so I can’t say I have suffered.’

That night in my hotel room, I could see the pagoda from my window. Mr Duan must be doing his meditation and saying his prayer now, I thought. Before we parted, I had asked him what he prayed for. ‘To be a monk again in my next life,’ he said. I had meant to ask him about Xuanzang and his teachings and find out what exactly were the doctrines he went to India to find. I did not. But Duan’s life had given me something more to think about. Monasteries would be destroyed, but he had a shrine inside himself which was inviolate. In his room, he prayed silently, holding fast to his belief, living by it, unperturbed by all that happened to him. For him, the whole world is a meditation hall, where he put the teaching of the Buddha into ultimate practice. In my eyes, he was a real monk, though a monk without a robe.

I went back to the monastery the next day to have a closer look at it. It was hard to appreciate that what I saw was only the cemetery of the original community. There was still a group of stupas to the right of the pagoda. Originally stupas were built to house the ashes and bones of the Buddha. But gradually over the centuries, they were devoted to lesser and lesser beings, but still of great distinction: the masters who had come closest to enlightenment, the heads of Buddhist sects, the abbots and revered monks of the monasteries. Stupas are supposed not only to commemorate the departed but also to inspire future generations. They are distinguishable by their size but above all by the number of tiers on the spires above the base, with the highest being nine for the Buddha himself. According to my guidebook, Xuanzang’s relic stupa was in a separate monastery built specifically for it. The stupas here were all very similar except for one in the shape of a truncated obelisk standing on a lotus flower. The monk’s name, Pu Ci, was carved on one side, while the others bore the date of dedication and decorative flowers. It was delicately made. But there were no tiers, suggesting someone of lowly status. And unlike all the others, there was no epitaph giving information about the deceased. I was wondering what this stupa was doing here in this distinguished company when a young monk walked by. I stopped him and asked if he could tell me anything about Pu Ci.

‘You don’t know about him?’ he retorted. Then he seemed to consider something. ‘But then, why should you, I suppose? He saved us. Without him, I would not be here today. The Big Wild Goose Pagoda would have been just for you tourists. He was a brave man, a true Buddhist.’

I must have looked as puzzled as I felt, when he launched into an explanation of how the government had decreed in 1982 that any monastery with no monks in residence by the end of the Cultural Revolution would be used for public purposes. ‘Pu Ci managed to stay on here, so the Big Wild Goose Pagoda is still a monastery. Without him, it would have been turned into a park or a garden. But he suffered for it.’

If Duan had suffered so much, I could not bear to think what this monk must have gone through.

The young monk said that Pu Ci was the only one who wore his robe throughout the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards ordered him not to but he simply ignored them. They organized struggle meetings in the shrine hall and made him kneel on the floor and confess his motives for carrying on his ‘feudal practices’. He refused to say a word. What was there to say? He had been a monk for so many years and the robe was like his skin. Outraged by his silence, the Red Guards started beating him. Every time they hit him, he uttered the name of Amitabha. They did not know what to do with him. He was locked up to repent but he just meditated all the time. They thought he was mad so eventually they left him alone. I asked how he would have dealt with the blows raining down on him?

‘He probably would think of one of the ten attributes of a Bodhisattva. It is called khanti, meaning patient endurance of suffering inflicted upon oneself by others and forbearance for their wrongs. There are lots of stories about khanti in the scriptures and it is one of the qualities that monks try to cultivate. And he obviously achieved it,’ said the young monk humbly.

I remembered one of the old priests at the struggle meetings in my childhood. I could not forget how serene he was. Now I understood what kept him so calm when he was spat on, when he was made to kneel on broken glass. Deep inside, he would have prayed not for the stilling of his pain but for the heart to conquer it. He perhaps would think that the spit was raindrops and they would dry up when the sun came out. Or would he think that the attacks on him might be the result of his bad karma? If so, they were the outcome of his own actions and he should not harbour bitterness towards his attackers. He was in a different world from us, in the midst of pain, yet above it.

I looked at the stupa again, next to the giant Big Wild Goose Pagoda, not even the size of its foundation. Dappled sunshine fell on it through the thick pine trees. I stared at it, thinking of the story I had just heard. I had the sensation that the stupa was expanding, billowing out into a larger dimension, until it was huge. The Big Wild Goose Pagoda embodied Xuanzang’s spirit, and the Buddhism he disseminated. It could still be a Buddhist institution carrying on the propagation – because of this ordinary monk. He did not despair perhaps because of a simple belief: if the monks were alive, Buddhism would live on, despite the total destruction of monasteries, statues and scriptures. Xuanzang built the pagoda, Pu Ci preserved it. The spirit they stood for, the faith that sustained them, the spreading of the Dharma they carried out determinedly – the hope of Chinese Buddhism.

But the young monk said there were monks who totally despaired. He showed me a stupa next to Pu Ci’s, which looked no different from the half dozen standing there, but with an inscription longer than any of the others. It read as follows:

Lang Zhao, Secretary of the Xian Buddhist Association, was born in 1893 into a wealthy family in northeastern China, came to Xian and took vows at the age of eighteen; abbot of Wolong Monastery; made donations for the aeroplane that was used to fight against the Americans and supported the Korean people; did farming and built a commune for monks and nuns who lived on their own products and wore their own woven cloth; suffered maltreatment during the Cultural Revolution in 1966 and took his own life on August 18 of that year, at the age of seventy-two, after fifty-five years as a monk.

There is something strange about this – it simply is not how a Buddhist master’s epitaph usually reads. It seems only to refer to his patriotism, not to his contributions to Buddhism. But what I found even more bewildering is the remark I have italicized near the end: he actually committed suicide – a cardinal sin, a capital offence in Buddhism. Why did he do it?

The first rule of Buddhism is not to kill any living creature, not to take one’s own life, and not to help with any killing. ‘Rare is birth as a human being. Hard is the life of mortals. Do not let slip this opportunity,’ is the advice of the Buddha. I had read that the Vinaya, the Buddhist code of conduct, forbids monks to commit suicide, in any form and for any reason. Those who do forfeit the possibility of a good rebirth, let alone that of entering the Western Paradise. What made Lang Zhao do it?

The young monk explained. Lang Zhao was a very good man. He left home out of compassion for the poor, searching for a way to end suffering. He supported the Party for the same reason – to bring about a better life for millions of Chinese. He raised money for ‘Chinese Buddhist’ – the fighter plane that Buddhists throughout China had been asked to contribute to the Korean War effort – and he went to the front line to comfort the troops. He tried hard to help the Party realize the Communist ideal of ‘paradise on earth’. He was rewarded: he was made the head of the Xian Buddhist Association, the most senior monk in the city.

But for all his efforts, he was one of the first targets of the Red Guards – August 18, 1966, the day he took his life, was when Mao received one million Red Guards on Tiananmen Square, openly showing his support for them. They would be his vanguards for the Cultural Revolution. He met some of them in person afterwards, including a girl called Binbin, meaning ‘the polite one’. Mao told her that revolution was not a gentle business and she should change her name to Yaowu, ‘with force’. There could not have been a clearer signal for the use of violence. As soon as they heard the message on the radio, the Red Guards in Xian stormed Lang Zhao’s monastery, destroying it completely. He felt a great injustice had been done: he had been so loyal to the Party; he had really tried to use Buddhism in helping to build the new China and he had allowed himself to be showcased as an example of a remodelled monk. And in the end, he was repaid for good with evil. He despaired. That very night, he killed himself.

The two monks’ stories were grim, but telling. Standing next to each other, their stupas, and lives, invite a comparison. Pu Ci was a simple man, but a true Buddhist monk; Lang Zhao was a master, but in the end shamed himself, however understandably. He was too conscious of his achievements and his sacrifices, too attached to the world and his role in it. He could not bear being reviled after all he had done, by the very people he had tried to support. He was only human. He died, and his monastery with him. Pu Ci just did what he had to do. He raised himself above all his pain and lived; he saved Xuanzang’s Big Wild Goose Pagoda and never knew he would be buried and honoured alongside it.

The queue to climb the Big Wild Goose Pagoda was long and those who came down were panting and fanning themselves vigorously, sharing their experiences up there with their friends who were content to admire it from below. They would not bother to stop and examine these little stupas. Perhaps this was why the young monk was happy to spend nearly an hour and a half talking to me. ‘The Buddha preached to those who were willing to listen,’ he said, when I apologized for taking so much of his time. ‘I’m pleased you are so keen on Buddhism. I hope all the visitors will share your interest.’

He had been enormously helpful. I had learned so much from what he told me. It was well past lunchtime and I offered to take him for a meal. He happily agreed, and chose a tiny family restaurant nearby which served nothing but noodles. While we ate, he asked why I was so interested in the stupas. Most people would come, climb the pagoda, have their picture taken and leave. I laughed and told him it was different for me. When he heard that I was going to India, his eyes lit up and he exclaimed, ‘Really? Can I come with you? Next year will be Master Xuanzang’s fourteen-hundredth anniversary. Won’t it be a great thing to do if I could follow in his footsteps too?’ But like Xuanzang, he could not get the permission from the government to travel abroad. For a moment, he looked crestfallen, but soon he cheered up. ‘You know we are doing something about Master Xuanzang too?’ I had heard a little about a Memorial Hall. ‘Have you seen the construction behind the pagoda? I’ll show you after lunch.’

Against the back wall of the monastery, builders were working away on three huge halls in traditional Chinese style. ‘We’ve always felt ashamed about not doing something special for Master Xuanzang. I am sure you understand why. Now things have changed.’ He was getting excited. ‘Just imagine. The walls will be decorated with carvings and statues by the best artists and craftsmen in China. The ones at the two ends will show the master’s life, his journey to India, his studies in the land of the Buddha, his return to Xian and his translation of the sutras. The middle one will hold the master’s statue and on the white marble wall will be carved scenes of the Tushita, the paradise of Maitreya Buddha, the Buddha to Come. This will be the fulfilment of a dream.’ He seemed intoxicated by the prospect. ‘You will end your journey here, won’t you, as the Master did? When you come back, all this will be finished. Then the visitors will learn about the real Xuanzang and all the amazing things he did. No more Monkey King rubbish,’ he said with a big smile.

It was near closing time when the young monk finished showing me the site and the monastery. There were very few visitors left. Quiet was descending on the temple and the air was full of the fragrance of flowers and shrubs. Monks walked about briskly on a security round. In the early-evening light, the pagoda looked ever more imposing, austere and majestic. It was extraordinary that it had been standing here for nearly fourteen hundred years. Now I realized its survival was far from being just good fortune.

There were four major persecutions in earlier Chinese history, two before Xuanzang, and two after him in 845 and 955. That in 845 was the most devastating and the most complete. In just one month, almost all the monasteries in the country, some 44,600, were destroyed; the entire Buddhist community, over 260,000 monks and nuns, was forced to return to lay life. It was such a heavy blow, Buddhism was yet to recover from it. The Cultural Revolution effectively demolished what was left. Duan told me a story which showed the low point that had been reached by its end. In the early 1970s, the Chinese government was looking for a rapprochement with Japan. A delegation of over a hundred Japanese monks was invited. They wanted to come to Xian, which they recognized as the fountainhead of their own Buddhism. There was only one problem: where could an equal number of monks be found to meet the visitors? Party officials from the Religious Bureau looked up the records and found where the former monks had been exiled. They combed the countryside – eventually more than a hundred were assembled, many of them now married, disabled or decrepit. And when they had to perform an appropriately grand ceremony, it was soon clear that they had forgotten their sutras and how to chant and play the drums and cymbals. Experts were drafted from Beijing to help rehearse them to an acceptable level. The shaky ensemble managed to perform adequately, and honour was satisfied.

The Big Wild Goose Pagoda has weathered all the storms. Xuanzang was the inspiration. Monks like Pu Ci defended it at whatever cost. If monasteries were destroyed, they would be rebuilt. Even without monasteries, monks like Duan could carry on the faith. Because of people like them, Buddhism has survived in China for almost two thousand years, and will continue to be an important part of Chinese life. I had received a powerful lesson right at the start of my journey: the strength of faith. This was what motivated and sustained Xuanzang. The three monks at the Big Wild Goose Pagoda were his followers. They had already given me an impression of what it was in Buddhism that made them, and Xuanzang, so different, so special. I began to understand what Grandmother had said about monks being the gentlest of men. But they were also the toughest. I began to grasp what our minds could do if we indeed could cultivate them as the Buddha said.

Clack! Clack! There was a sharp, hard sound: a monk walked past us, banging two pieces of wood together. The young monk said it was time for the evening services. Before we said goodbye, he went back to his room and returned with a little book. It had a folded paper in it. ‘This has the Heart Sutra translated by Master Xuanzang himself,’ he said. ‘It is the core of Chinese Buddhism. Whenever Xuanzang was in trouble, he always recited it. Please use it as your guide too. It won’t be easy, but keep going. And when you begin to understand this sutra, you will be getting somewhere. I hope you will find the way.’

Late that night, I went back through the city gates, and headed for the station, catching a late-night train for the next stage of my journey, the Jade Gate, the frontier of the Chinese empire in Xuanzang’s time. After I had settled down in my hard-sleeper booth, I took out the monk’s little book. I opened the folded paper first and found myself face to face with Xuanzang: young, energetic and purposeful, his eyes firmly on the road ahead and his backpack full of scriptures – it was a rubbing of Xuanzang’s portrait from a stele in the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. But his gifts felt heavy in my hands. Perhaps I should not just make the journey for myself. I should try to help bring the real Xuanzang back for my fellow-Chinese, just as the abbot and monks of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda are doing. It would be like restoring a part of our heritage.

THREE

Fiction and Reality

IT WAS AUGUST 627. The great Western Gate of Chang’an closed at nightfall. On the drum tower, the watchman was ready to strike the hour. The streets were emptying. Traders in the Western Market were putting up their shutters and seductive attendants were waiting outside taverns to lure them in. Among the throng of people leaving the capital were Xuanzang and another monk, clad in long robes. They had all their belongings wrapped in cloths slung over their shoulders. They walked briskly, with their heads down, trying to avoid the gaze of the officials, who were checking travellers’ passes at random.

Once on the road, Xuanzang took a last look back at Chang’an in the twilight. He was excited; his dream of going to the land of the Buddha was beginning to come true. He had failed to get permission to travel and was leaving in defiance of the emperor’s edict, but that could not dampen his spirits. He felt free. How he wished he could fly like a bird to India. But he would have to make his way laboriously, on foot or on horseback, along all the thousands of miles lying ahead.

As the train pulled out of Xian station in the middle of the night, I was excited too. This was the start of my journey in his footsteps. I could have flown, but I liked the pace of the train – I could not walk as he did but at least I would see what he saw. The rhythmical rattling of the wheels sounded a bit like footsteps, though the train did in one hour what took him two days or so. Still, 1,400 years apart, we were on the same highway, the famous Silk Road.

Xuanzang would have known the Silk Road well. It acquired the name in the late nineteenth century, long after its demise, from the German scholar Ferdinand von Richthofen, but its history usually begins with the mission of Zhang Qian in 139 BC, almost seven hundred years before Xuanzang. Zhang, an official in the Chinese court of the Han dynasty, was assigned to seek an alliance in Central Asia to fight against the foremost threat to China, the marauding Huns. He was captured and imprisoned by the enemy, but he never forgot his mission, and managed to escape after thirteen years in captivity. His report and the tale of his adventures inspired the emperor. Before long, watchtowers were built and manned along the way within the Chinese empire. Sogdian merchants began braving the arduous journey to China regularly, trading the most treasured and valuable commodity: silk.

The ancient world, the Romans in particular, could not get enough silk, alluring to the eye and delicate to the touch. They spent colossal sums on it – it was half of their imports. The Emperor Tiberius was so worried that he tried to ban people from wearing it – the Romans would have nothing of that. But they would not have minded paying less for the fabric, which was said to cost as much as gold by the time it travelled the whole length of the Silk Road. Agents were sent out, trying to reach directly the distant land that they called Sere, from which came sericus, silken, but they never made it. Although the Chinese were willing to sell silk to the barbarians, they did not want to relinquish the secret of how it was made. Pliny, the Roman historian, wrote: ‘The Seres are famous for the wool of their forests. They remove the down from leaves with the help of water and weave it into silk.’ As late as the mid-sixth century AD, the Romans believed his account.

The Silk Road was not a single road but many, stretching from Chang’an, across the Taklamakan Desert, over the Pamir Mountains, through the grasslands of Central Asia, into Persia and then to the Mediterranean, with spurs into the northern Eurasian steppes and India. Over 5,000 miles long, it traversed some of the most inhospitable terrain, and linked up some of the greatest empires in the ancient world: Rome, Persia, India and China. This was where Xuanzang’s journey would lie.

When the day broke and the sun came into my compartment, I saw ranges of mountains, brown and dusty, with terraced fields stepping up them. Walnut and persimmon trees, laden with their fruit, stood here and there in clusters, sheltering old brick houses, their chimneys smoking as people cooked the morning meal. When we left the villages behind, the farmers walking on the windy mountain paths made me think of the Silk Road again.

The Silk Road no longer exists, and most Chinese have forgotten it, although every one of us is familiar with silk. Even I had raised silkworms as pets. One winter, Grandmother came back from a visit to her village and brought us apples, peanuts, chestnuts and a small bag of strange, fluffy white balls – silk cocoons. She said if we looked after them very carefully, putting them in a clean place not too hot, not too cold, and making sure insects would not bite them, we would have butterflies and then silkworms when the spring came.

I put my cocoons in a shoe box next to my pillow and examined them every day. They looked dry and dead. How could butterflies ever come out of them? Grandmother said not to worry, they were only sleeping and would wake up soon. I waited as eagerly as I did for the Chinese New Year. One day when I came back from school, the cocoons were open and there were some white moths. I was fascinated but disappointed; they were quite ugly, not at all pretty like butterflies. Grandmother said I should just wait. And then very soon the moths dropped tiny white blobs on the bottom of the shoe box and a few days later some ant-like creatures appeared. Before long they began to crawl, tiny caterpillars, shedding their skins like snakes. It seemed an extraordinary process, and it was magical to see the beginning of their life.

Every day I ran back as soon as school was over to check them. Grandmother said they liked mulberry leaves best but our city had so few mulberry trees, we had to make do with cabbage leaves. My sisters and I had a competition among us to see who had the fattest and whitest silkworms. But the most fascinating part was when they secreted a shiny thread, which seemed just to go on and on. We asked Grandmother what the thread was for. She said it was silk, and it made the most wonderful material. We did not believe her. Then she opened the wardrobe and pulled out a bright red quilted jacket which I had never seen anyone wearing. ‘This was what your mother wore when she got married,’ she said happily. ‘This is made of silk. You feel it.’ It was so smooth and shiny, like my hair. It was hard to imagine such beautiful cloth could have come from those insects in my shoe box.

Looking back, it is equally hard to imagine that the thread from the silkworms could have been the source of so much wealth and beauty, and changed history. Today the Silk Road has declined, but something else, something more enduring, still touches our lives. For over a millennium, religions, technology, philosophy, culture and art were transmitted along its branches. It was through this highway that four of China’s greatest contributions spread westward – paper-making, printing, gunpowder and the compass – and it was along the same road, in the other direction, that Buddhism came to China. The seeds of ideas travelled across the barriers of mountains, deserts and languages. Some took root; others died; some flourished and spread extensively. What each traveller carried was small, but wave succeeded wave; and in the process, all the peoples along the Silk Road enjoyed the fruits of the diffusion.

The Silk Road was possible because there were strings of oases to supply the caravans. One of the biggest oases in the region west of the Yellow River was Liangzhou, the capital of several short-lived dynasties set up by nomads as well as the Chinese. It was very popular with the merchants, who had long used it as their base from which to make forays into the rest of China. Mostly they prospered. But things could go wrong. In the early fourth century AD, a merchant based in Liangzhou sent a letter home to Samarkand, reporting that many of his fellow-merchants had died of starvation because of a peasant revolt and war in China, and claiming that he himself was on the verge of death too. ‘Sirs, if I were to write to you everything about how China has fared, it would be beyond grief.’ He asked his business partners to look after a large sum of money he had left with them, to invest it on behalf of his motherless son, and to give his son a wife when he grew up.

But for all the dangers the lure of the Silk Road and its high profits was irresistible. When Xuanzang arrived in Liangzhou from Chang’an in 627, after travelling over seven hundred miles in one month, he found a bustling city of over 200,000 people, many of them foreign merchants who took up five of the seven wards within the walled city. He was pleased to see monks from as far as India, Central Asia and the Western Regions, in monasteries, temples and caves in and outside Liangzhou. He decided to spend some time there and find out from them, and from the merchants, about their countries and the border crossing.

The local people were delighted to have a master from the capital, and they pleaded with Xuanzang to preach the Dharma. Although he was worried about being exposed as an unauthorized traveller, he could not refuse. Impressed with his clear and eloquent preaching, they showered him with gold, silver and horses to show their appreciation. He kept one horse and some money for his journey ahead and gave the rest to the monastery where he was staying. But as he had feared, his popularity brought him unwanted attention. Warned of his intention of going to India, the Governor of Liangzhou sent for him and ordered him to return to the capital. ‘The emperor has just come to the throne and the borders are yet to be secured. No one is allowed to go beyond here,’ the governor reiterated the imperial edict. That night, Xuanzang slipped out of Liangzhou, secretly guided by two disciples of a senior monk who had listened to his preaching and sympathized with his ambition.

My train arrived in Liangzhou, or Wuwei as it is called today, the next afternoon, fifteen hours after leaving Xian. The loudspeakers in the compartment were blaring out a potted history of this ancient, glorious city, and its emblem, the bronze Flying Horse, which is about the only thing that ordinary Chinese know about Wuwei. A few peddlers were trying to shove a replica through the train windows. It originates in one of our most famous archaeological discoveries, a pit with eighty of the magnificent steeds: they are shown taking prancing steps on powerful long legs, with defiant expressions and flared nostrils. In real life they were renowned for their stamina and agility, far superior to China’s short, stocky steppe ponies. They were the ideal mount for Chinese cavalry defending against the nomadic tribes, who could not be stopped by the Great Wall. They were so important, they were worthy of a lengthy comment from Si Maqian, the most famous Chinese historian, in his Record of History.

The Son of Heaven greatly loved the horses of Kokand [today’s Ferghana valley, shared by Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan], and embassies set out one after the other on the road to that country. The largest of them comprised several hundred men; the smallest fewer than a hundred … When they were refused, the Son of Heaven sent a great quantity of silver and a horse made of solid gold in exchange for the horses. The king accepted the presents but refused to part with his horses – he reckoned that he was out of reach of the Chinese army. The ambassador was murdered. So the emperor sent 60,000 men … and a commissariat well stocked with supplies besides cross-bows and other arms … Only half the army survived the journey and laid siege to Kokand in 102 BC. After 40 days, they succeeded, and were offered 30 superior or heavenly horses and 3,000 of lower quality. Less than half these survived the return journey but sufficient to provide for judicious breeding under the imperial eye.

I decided not to stop in Wuwei. It is no longer the cosmopolitan city of old, whose music was enjoyed by emperors and commoners alike, whose wine was relished by the rich and powerful in Chang’an, whose inhabitants drank from silver ewers decorated with figures from Greek mythology, and whose remoteness and exotic blend of peoples and cultures fired the imagination of any number of poets. Like many cities in western China, it has languished into a long slumber, and all its ancient past has been erased. The station was just a low building and a dusty platform with a semi-abandoned air. When the train moved off, it sounded a soft peep, instead of the usual strident whistle, as if not to wake anyone in the sleepy town.

I got off at Liuyuan, the Willow Station, in the early morning. It was in the middle of the desert without a tree in sight. I could not understand why the station was here nor how it came by its name. Perhaps it was wishful thinking, taking its inspiration from a Chinese saying: ‘Drop one sprig of willow on the ground and a whole forest will come up.’

At least my taxi-driver was happy after sleeping at the station overnight in the hope of a fare. I told him I wanted to go to the Jade Gate, and I was about to explain to him where it was. He cut me off: ‘No problem. It’s so famous. All the tourists want to go there.’ Off we went, into the desert that seemed one endless dusty grey world. Surrounded by a void, it was hard to imagine that we were on what was once a thriving commercial thoroughfare. At least it was a good road.

In less than an hour we were in the district of Anxi, or Guazhou as Xuanzang knew it. This was the oasis he came to after Liangzhou. Here he found himself in serious trouble. His horse died suddenly; the two novices who accompanied him became frightened: one left him and the other was sent back to his master for his own good. Then orders reached Guazhou to arrest him and send him back to the capital. The local governor was a pious Buddhist and after hearing the monk’s story, he tore up the warrant and urged Xuanzang to leave as quickly as possible. But Xuanzang did not know the way through the desert and he could not find anyone who dared to challenge the imperial edict and take him past the Jade Gate and the five watchtowers beyond it, the last frontier posts. Finally, after a month’s wait, the monks in the monastery where he stayed found Pantuo, a Sogdian merchant, who was willing to be his guide.

We drove through Anxi. It was a quiet town, small and orderly, with few buildings higher than three storeys. The wide featureless streets were empty of cars and bicycles. A scattering of people could be seen walking slowly along its pavements, or lingering to speak to each other before the few shopfronts. There was none of the life of the Silk Road I imagined from my reading. And this was not the actual town where Xuanzang was beleaguered – that is now a ruin out in the desert. I told the driver not to stop and go straight to the Jade Gate.

The gate was the frontier in Xuanzang’s time. For the Chinese, it marked the divide between the ‘centre of the world’ and the ‘periphery’, the ‘civilized’ and the ‘barbarians’. Over the centuries our poets had poured out their fears of the unknown world, their yearnings for home, their sadness at saying goodbye to friends who ventured further west to conquer the barbarians, and their pity for the royal princesses who were given to the barbarian chieftains as brides and as the price of peace. The poems are beautiful, sad, evocative and haunting, and they live in our memories and imaginations, even today, more than a thousand years later. ‘The crescent moon, hung in the void, is all that can be seen in this wild desert, where the dew crystallizes on the polished steel of swords and breastplates. Many a day will pass before the men return. Do not sigh, young women, for you would have to sigh too long.’

Xuanzang shared none of these sentiments. The world beyond the Jade Gate was one of knowledge, learning and wisdom. The earliest Buddhist missionaries came from there, bringing copies of the scriptures and votive images. Then they devoted the rest of their lives to translating the scriptures into Chinese – he and all Chinese Buddhists had been reading their translations for centuries; they had changed Chinese life and culture fundamentally. He could not wait to see this world for himself.

We had been driving nearly an hour and I was worried. The gate should have been very near Anxi. Where was he taking me? ‘Are you sure we’re going to the right place?’

‘Don’t worry, Miss. We’ll be there very soon.’ He turned and gave me a friendly smile, as if to reassure me.

Half an hour later, I caught sight of the Jade Gate from a long distance away. I was greatly relieved. I could see its tower, standing like a vast ruined chimney in the middle of nowhere. My heart began to beat faster as I came near. Once Xuanzang passed it, he would have left China behind. We drove right up to the site. There were railings surrounding it, and at the entrance, a man in a blue Mao suit was sitting in the sun. Behind him was a big sign: ‘Ruins of the Jade Gate, Han Dynasty.’ I almost exploded. This was the wrong gate, already seven hundred years old and abandoned by Xuanzang’s time. ‘Where is the Tang dynasty gate?’ I asked the watchman.

‘It’s near Anxi,’ he said.

I rounded on the driver. ‘What have you brought me here for?’

‘You want to see the Jade Gate. Does it matter if it is a Han or Tang dynasty one? Anyway, everybody comes here.’

I tried to calm myself. It was really my fault; I should have explained and made it clear. At least my mistake had cost me only a few pounds for the unnecessary ride. I put it down to experience. I would have to be more careful – this was only the first stop from Xian and I had gone wrong already. But it was odd that the people of the Tang dynasty chose the same name for the new gate; they must have loved it so much.

Having come all this way, I thought I should at least take a look; it would have been similar to the right one. This gate was a fortified military post in the Great Wall, with a courtyard and quarters for soldiers. When I looked left and right, I could see, for miles in a straight line, low ledges of rubble, even neat piles of reeds and desert-willow branches for making repairs, now covered in sand. It was all that was left of the Great Wall here, reduced by time and nature. Once the threat to China had shifted from the nomads in the west to those in the north near Beijing, there was no incentive to maintain it. But in the Han dynasty, this place was crowded with travellers. ‘Messengers come and go every season and month, foreign traders and merchants knock on the gates of the Great Wall every day,’ say the Han Annals of History. The soldiers checked their passes, and kept bonfires ready to send smoke signals for reinforcements if danger threatened.

I entered the watchtower through a doorway as wide as my arms could stretch. Inside, it was spacious, big enough for a platoon to exercise in. I could see clear up to the sky; the roof had long since collapsed. Through the gaping holes in the thick mud-and-lath walls, I looked out across the desert, shimmering in the heat haze, stretching to the horizon. It was a similar forbidding prospect that faced Xuanzang, and he did not even have a road to follow across it.

The driver felt bad. ‘I can take you to where they think the Tang gate was, but why are you interested?’ I explained to him as I ought to have done sooner that I was following Xuanzang’s route. ‘You should have said. Anyway, let’s go back. There is really nothing left of the gate, but I think we should go to the watchtower. There’s a little museum there. I won’t charge you extra.’

We went back the way we had come, and he brought me to another ruin which archaeologists believe was the first watchtower outside the Jade Gate, now just huge piles of mud and straw. This was where Xuanzang faced the next danger on his journey. You could see why – apart from a large hut next to it, which turned out to be the museum, there was nothing within miles. Any traveller here would be totally exposed. Half of the museum is devoted to the Communist Long Marchers who passed through here in 1936. But the other end has paintings on the walls showing Xuanzang crossing the desert. Colourful as they are, the pictures hardly capture the real drama.

Xuanzang had already had a close shave before he even reached the first watchtower, at his bivouac with his guide Pantuo. They had skirted the Jade Gate in the middle of the night, by crossing a river four miles away, with a raft made of tree branches and reeds. Then Pantuo suggested they rest for a few hours before tackling the five watchtowers beyond. He seemed a perfect guide; he knew the terrain, the habits of the soldiers, where and when they might be able to slip by unnoticed. Xuanzang was relieved, said a short prayer, and fell asleep in no time. But before long he was woken by a noise; he opened his eyes and saw Pantuo creeping towards him, drawing his sword, then hesitating and returning to his sleeping-mat.

Once up at the crack of dawn, Pantuo pleaded with Xuanzang not to proceed. ‘This track is long and fraught with danger. There is neither water nor grass except near the watchtowers. We can only reach them at night. And if discovered, we are dead men! Please, let’s go back.’ Xuanzang refused. Finally Pantuo told the truth: he regretted his decision to break the law and now was worried about being caught; he must leave. His strange behaviour last night now made sense: if Pantuo had killed him in the midst of the desert, nobody would have known. But either from superstitious fear or from a last remnant of piety, he changed his mind. He asked Xuanzang to promise not to mention his name if he was caught by the frontier guards. Then he turned back, leaving Xuanzang an old horse that had made the journey many times – it knew the way, Pantuo said.

And so, abandoned and alone, Xuanzang pressed slowly and painfully on through the Gobi Desert, unsure of his direction and guided only by heaps of bones and piles of camel-dung. The frontier poet Cen Sen left us a description of what Xuanzang had to go through: ‘Travellers lost their way in the endless yellow sand. Looking up, they saw nothing but clouds. This was not only the end of earth but also of heaven. Alas, they had to go further west after Anxi.’ Through exhaustion, and the heat, Xuanzang saw what appeared to be hundreds of armed troops coming towards him. ‘On one side were camels and richly caparisoned horses; on the other, gleaming lances and shining standards. Soon there appeared fresh figures, and at every moment the shifting spectacle underwent a thousand transformations. But as soon as one drew near, all vanished.’ Xuanzang believed himself to be in the presence of the army of Mara, the demon in Buddhist mythology who had attempted to distract the Buddha while he was in deep meditation to achieve enlightenment. But it was only a mirage.

A more immediate danger was this watchtower, the first of the five he had to pass. He waited until nightfall and found the little spring that Pantuo had told him about. It is still there today, clear and cool, surrounding the watchtower’s ruins. He went down to drink at it and wash his hands. Then, as he was filling his water bag, he heard the whistle of an arrow, which nearly hit him in the knee. A second later, another arrow followed. Knowing he was discovered, he shouted with all his might: ‘I am a monk from the capital. Do not shoot at me!’

Xuanzang was brought before the captain, who was a lay Buddhist. On hearing the monk’s plan, he too told him to turn back. The road was dangerous and he did not think the pilgrim would be able to reach India at all. Xuanzang was grateful for his concern but told him that he was so troubled with doubts, he just had to go. ‘You, a benevolent man, instead of encouraging me, urge me to abandon my efforts. This cannot be called an act of compassion,’ he said to the captain, and then added: ‘You can detain me if you want to, but Xuanzang will not take a single step in the direction of China!’

Impressed by Xuanzang’s determination and fearlessness, the officer decided to help the pilgrim. Xuanzang stayed with him for the night and began his journey with a good supply of food, water and fodder for his horse. He was given an introduction for the fourth watchtower, but was warned against the fifth because the officer there had no sympathy for Buddhism. Instead, he should head for the Wild Horse Spring sixty miles to the west of it, and from there all paths would be clear. But with no experience of travelling in the desert, Xuanzang soon got lost. To add to his grief, his water bag slipped from his hand as he lifted it to drink. In an instant, his whole supply of water vanished into the sand. In total confusion and despair, he turned back and started retracing his footprints. But after a few miles he stopped. He remembered his vow: ‘Never take one step back towards China before reaching India.’

I had to keep going westwards too. I could resume my train journey from the Willow Station, and asked the driver to take me back there. When I looked out of the train window I saw nothing apart from the cloudless blue sky, a few lonely white aspens along the railway line, and a vast expanse of sand and gravel, grey, featureless; craggy mountains hemmed a distant horizon, topped with snow, but they looked impossibly aloof. Crossing the Gobi Desert even on a modern train is forbidding. I found it incredible that Xuanzang had journeyed through it alone, with no guide but his own shadow and his faith. I talked to the young man opposite me and told him about Xuanzang’s adventure in the Gobi.

‘I thought the emperor had all sorts of arrangements made for him. It says so in The Monkey King.’

‘That is fiction,’ I said.

‘I know the monkey is a fictional creation. But Xuanzang must have had a lot of protection and companions. You aren’t telling me he did it all on his own.’ He shook his head vehemently. ‘You remember what happened to the famous scientist who disappeared in the desert in the 1980s? He even had satellite communication. But he never came back. Such a waste of a life.’

Xuanzang almost suffered the same fate. For four days he was lost in the Gobi, without a single drop of water. The burning heat and the punishing winds brought him to the verge of collapse. On the fifth day he fell on the sand, unable to take a single step further. His horse fell too. All he had strength for was to mutter a few prayers. He desperately turned to Guanyin: ‘In venturing on this journey, I do not seek riches, worldly profit or fame; my heart longs to find the true Law. Your heart, O Bodhisattva, forever yearns to deliver all creatures from misery. I am in such danger. Can you not hear my prayers?’

This was the worst moment in his entire journey. He was young, only twenty-seven, and had never faced the real dangers of life and death. He was determined and thought he was prepared, but he had not expected so much hardship so soon, before even leaving China. The emperor and nature itself had joined forces to put an end to his journey almost before it had begun. He was alone; he was lost; and he was dying. He remembered a sutra with the story of Guanyin saving a merchant who had been shipwrecked in the open sea for seven days. But his favourite Bodhisattva seemed to be ignoring his plea for help, although he prayed all the time to her. Was she really up there somewhere? If so, why would she not come to rescue him? The vast desert looked ready to swallow him up; death could be hours or minutes away. He would become just another pile of bones in the sand.

After praying to Guanyin, Xuanzang began to recite the Heart Sutra. He had learned it many years before from a sick man he had tended. It is the shortest sutra in the Buddhist canon but is regarded as the essence of Chinese Buddhism. He was told to recite it when he was in danger and when everything else had failed. Now he needed it more than ever. When he approached the end, these were the words he would have spoken to himself: ‘The world is ultimately empty. The wisdom of the Bodhisattva is such that he has no illusions in his mind, hence, no fear.’

The Buddha taught that having no illusions means seeing things as they really are, which in turn means recognizing the impermanence of everything. The Buddha often told his disciples that life is only a single breath. It is momentary, changing every second, and in one continuum with death. And for a Buddhist death is not an end, just a point between this world and the next. One will be reborn – though in what form depends on one’s karma. Xuanzang could hope that he would still be able to carry on his mission in his next life.

So he calmed himself. His panic was behind him, and he could think about what to do next. He picked himself up, and pulled hard on the horse’s reins. To his amazement, the old roan staggered up and set off. They struggled for nearly four miles when suddenly the horse turned in a different direction, and no matter how hard Xuanzang tried, he could not make it change its path. He let himself be guided by the creature’s instinct. Before long he saw green grass a little way off, and a shining pool, bright as a mirror. He was saved. Old horses indeed know the way.

In the Gobi, Xuanzang had passed the ultimate test. In this contest between nature and will, he triumphed over his anxiety, fear and despair. It had nearly cost him his life, but it gave him confidence. From then on, he felt there was nothing he could not face. I could hardly believe the story, and when I told it to the young man sitting opposite me, he could not believe it either. He thought I was pulling the wool over his eyes, or telling him an episode from the story of The Monkey King.

From the Wild Horse Spring, Xuanzang and his horse drank long and deep. Then they followed the beaten track. After two days he was out of the Gobi, and outside China. He was now in the Western Region, a vast territory between the Jade Gate and the Pamir Mountains, consisting mainly of the Taklamakan Desert, the second biggest in the world, with a string of independent oasis city-states along its edge, all depending on the Silk Road for their survival and wealth. Xuanzang would have known the history of the region well. China took it in the first century BC after the Silk Road was opened, but lost it to various nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppes. At the point at which Xuanzang arrived, the Turks were the overlords, but the Chinese wanted it back.

Today the area is called the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. The Uighurs were a nomadic tribe of Turkic origin, who migrated from the Eurasian steppes to the Taklamakan in the ninth century AD, not long after Xuanzang passed through the region. It was the Uighurs who have left us some of the most splendid Buddhist art, Nestorian Christian artefacts, and rare Manichaean documents and paintings. Eventually they took to Islam with the same zeal as they had embraced other religions of the Silk Road. Highly mobile with their versatile and speedy horses, they were one of the biggest threats to China on its northern and northwestern borders. But unlike many other powerful nomadic peoples, the Uighurs never managed to rule China. In the eighteenth century, after the longest military campaign in Chinese history, the region finally became part of the empire again.

Turfan is one of the biggest oases and cities in Xinjiang, situated on the eastern edge of the Taklamakan. A guide from a travel agency would meet me at the station. ‘How will I recognize you?’ I asked him on the phone after I had told him what I wanted to see in Turfan. ‘I’m fat, like a laughing Buddha outside a temple. People call me Fat Ma.’ The description was accurate. At the exit of my compartment, I spotted him immediately. He was dressed in a t-shirt and wiping sweat from his face. We looked at each other and smiled.

‘You need some rest in the hotel?’ he asked, taking my rucksack from me. ‘You said you’re interested in history and what Xuanzang did in Turfan. You’re in for a big treat. Anyway you can make your mind up later, we are still fifty miles from the city.’ While we walked to his car I mentioned the oddness of the location of the station, both here and in Anxi. ‘Perhaps they could only build straight lines in those days,’ he laughed, and then added more seriously: ‘We did so many crazy things back then. I wouldn’t be surprised if the decision where to put the stations was completely random.’

In five minutes his battered Beijing jeep was out of the station and driving at 100 kph on a tar road as soft as melting butter. It was late summer but Fat Ma was panting more than the old engine. I was a bit worried. ‘You should have seen me a few weeks ago. It was over fifty degrees every day. I hardly dared to move. Do you know how officials conducted their business in the old days?’ I shook my head. ‘They read their papers in the bath-tub soaking in ice-cold water.’ But the extreme weather here is not due to global warming. The city is right in the centre of a depression – in fact, it is the second lowest spot on earth, after the Dead Sea. Fat Ma told me Turfan means ‘lowland’ in the Uighur language. It has been called the Oasis of Fire.

I told him I did not need a rest – he was so entertaining I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep anyway. So he suggested we head for the ruins of Gaochang city. ‘Your monk really had a hell of a time there,’ he said. We were back in the middle of the desert. There were no trees, no farms, not a speck of green anywhere. Perhaps if you are brought up there you learn to spot small details and it seems infinitely variegated. But to the unaccustomed eye it is sad in its monotony, a faceless plain of unrelieved sameness. Surrounded by a void, it was hard to imagine that we were on what was once a thriving commercial thoroughfare, or that this poem, written in the seventh century, actually described what Xuanzang would have seen on his journey through the area:

A good day to start on a long journey,

Wagon after wagon passes through.

The camels-bells never stop,

They are carrying the white chain (silk) to Anxi*.

After driving for twenty miles in the desert, my eyes caught some trees in the distance. ‘The oasis,’ I nearly shouted, pointing to a spot of green on the horizon. ‘Don’t get too excited,’ Fat Ma said, ‘It’s still quite a way off.’

We drove for another ten miles. Then I saw poplar trees and suddenly – fields of melons; plantations of vines inside and outside courtyards, spreading on to the walls; children playing by the road, carts loaded with cotton. I had not travelled in the blazing sun for days on end like the old caravans, nor did I experience any danger, but I was overwhelmed by the sudden fertility of the oasis – the renewal of life and succour for the traveller in the midst of the desert. I could only imagine how Xuanzang would have felt when he stepped from the sterility of his Gobi trek into the luxuriance of Gaochang.

The remains of Gaochang city are very grand, fitting for one of the oldest and wealthiest Silk Road kingdoms. For centuries, it was the second major oasis outside China, the starting point for the grassland Silk Road, and an obligatory stop for travellers. The mud walls that surrounded it, now broken in places, were more than ten metres high and five kilometres long. We entered from the western gate – quite a small one, but it opened up a broad, impressive view of the city within. The fallen houses and lonely pillars made it look even bigger. Under the blue sky, clouds flew past as if speeded up by a special-effects camera. As far as the eye could see, rugged walls stood erect after more than a thousand years. It was hard to believe that something built of mud could last so long. Straight ahead of us in the centre of the city was a tall, impressive terrace built of baked red clay bricks, the remaining foundations alone more than fifteen metres high. ‘We think this is King Qu Wentai’s royal palace,’ Fat Ma said. I felt my pulse quicken. This was it – the place where Xuanzang had one of his most dramatic experiences on his journey.

The King of Gaochang was a fervent Buddhist and so his capital was a city of temples: Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Manichaean, with one for every hundred inhabitants. There were thousands of monks in the kingdom, but the king felt the country lacked a great master. He was inspired when he heard the praises that caravan traders heaped on Xuanzang after they had listened to his preaching in Liangzhou. It reminded him of the wonderful monasteries and profound masters he had encountered in the Chinese capital: he had gone there to pay tribute to the Chinese court three years earlier. A close relationship with his powerful neighbour was vital for the survival of his small kingdom. He was also very impressed with the way the Chinese conducted themselves – on his return, he ordered all his people to adopt the hairstyles of the gentlemen and ladies in Chang’an. Now he could have an erudite Chinese master from the very centre of learning to enlighten him and his people. How exciting it would be! The Chinese have a saying: ‘Something you could only meet but not seek.’ He felt this was his chance. He sent his envoys to meet Xuanzang. They abducted him to Gaochang, despite his plans to travel by a different route.

It was here, in this very palace, that the king paced about when he heard the Chinese master would be arriving that night. He forgot to eat, or sleep. At midnight, the guards announced Xuanzang’s arrival and he proceeded by torchlight to meet him. The king was so excited that despite Xuanzang’s fatigue, he insisted on talking to him all night and for the next ten days, for one purpose alone: to ask him to stay on as the master for his people.

Xuanzang thanked the king profusely for the invitation, but he could not accept it. He must go to India to find out what was missing from the teachings in China, he explained. But the king was unyielding: ‘It would be easier to shift the mountains of Pamir than to make me change my mind.’

Seeing how keen the king was to keep the Chinese master, his ministers also put their minds to it and came up with an ingenious idea. Xuanzang was young and single; so was the princess royal. She was beautiful, pious, cultivated, and very fond of Chinese culture and dress. Surely Xuanzang could not refuse such a wonderful bride. When the king broached the subject with his sister, she was only too happy to oblige. She had listened to the clear, deep and profound preaching by the handsome Chinese master. She had nothing but admiration for him; and to spend the rest of her life with such an enlightened man would indeed be yuan, her destiny.

But Xuanzang explained to the king that he regarded it as his destiny to fulfil his mission to bring back the sacred sutras that were needed in China and circulate them to his fellow-countrymen. Surely the king would not stand in the way of his destiny?

But the king – typically for kings – was unused to his decrees being questioned, not to mention defied. He grew angrier with Xuanzang’s obstinacy until at last he issued an ultimatum: ‘I am determined to retain you by force, or else to have you escorted back to your own country. I invite you to think the matter over; it is best to accept my offer.’

Without hesitation, Xuanzang replied: ‘The king will only be able to keep my bones; he has no power over my spirit nor my will!’

To make the king let him go, Xuanzang began a fast. For three days, he meditated and refused to take food or water. On the fourth day, he was getting weak and had trouble breathing. The king was shocked. He had seen many monks come and go through his kingdom, but never one like Xuanzang – so learned, spiritual and determined, and so fearless, ready even to sacrifice his life for the faith. A true Buddhist, a living example of the enlightened mind. As the Dhammapada, the Sayings of the Buddha, described:

From attachment springs grief,

From attachment springs fear,

For him who is totally free

There is no grief, and where is fear?

The king begged Xuanzang to eat. He would let him continue his journey; perhaps the master could contemplate stopping in Gaochang on his way back from India. Xuanzang had already decided to do that: he was deeply moved by the king’s piety and devotion to the Buddha, and the sincerity of his wish for a better understanding of the Dharma. While he was taking some food, the king looked at him, weakened and exhausted by his hunger strike and months of travelling in secret and getting lost in the desert. He recognized the greatness of this young man but wondered whether he could achieve his purpose penniless and alone. In a remarkable reversal, he decided to help the young Chinese monk. He asked Xuanzang to preach for a month, while preparations were being made for his journey.

Fat Ma was melting in the midday sun. He suggested we have lunch in a restaurant outside the gate where we parked the car. It was an oasis in itself; everywhere you looked there was green: pots with fragrant-leaved plants dotted over the floor, an overhead trellis spilling grapevines and casting a welcome weave of shadows on the ground. The grapes hung low enough for you to reach up and pick them. Water gushed in runnels at your feet, circling the place. After the dust, the heat and the ruins, I felt I could breathe again. We ordered a real Silk Road meal: noodles from China, Turkish kebabs and nans from India. After a couple of cold beers, Fat Ma revived, joking and calling for the car-radiator to be filled with water. We were doing just what Xuanzang and all Silk Road travellers would do when they arrived in Gaochang: refuelling with shade, water and food.

Here merchants and travellers from as far as Syria and southern India would check into one of many caravanserais inside the city. After a wash and a meal, they would inspect their pack animals to see if they needed to change them for healthy, rested ones, or simply to trade in one type of animal for another more suitable for the next stage of the journey – Bactrian camels were the favourite for this stretch of the Silk Road: they could sniff out subterranean springs and predict sandstorms; if they bunched together and buried their mouths in the sand, you knew one was coming. In the bustling bazaars the travellers would sell their goods, buy local specialities and stock up on food and supplies. If they had completed a profitable deal, they could go into one of the many taverns. Gorgeous women from Kucha, the next oasis, and even from as far away as Samarkand, entertained them with whirlwind dances and melodious songs, as they filled their glasses with the delicious Gaochang wine made from ‘mare’s teat’ grapes.

Gaochang, like all oasis kingdoms on the Silk Road, depended on levies from the caravans passing through. On entering the city gate, everyone was asked to show their passes issued in their country of origin. Then the merchants would be charged on the spot by their animal loads and then again when they sold their goods in the bazaars. A camel could carry an average of three hundred pounds, and a horse or a donkey half of that. Caravans could be as small as a dozen travellers or as big as several thousands – the bigger, the safer because the merchants could afford to pay for protection. An annual customs report of Gaochang from Xuanzang’s time recorded buoyant trade in large quantities: a man selling five hundred and seventy-two pounds of spices, another eighty pounds of raw silk and a third eight pounds of silver. The list goes on, giving us the most direct evidence of how the oasis kingdoms like Gaochang earned their income. The wealth of Gaochang was such that when China conquered it in the first century BC, its annual revenues could finance the defence and running costs of the entire Western Region.

After lunch we set out for Bezeklik. ‘The locals call it “the place with paintings”,’ Fat Ma said. It is one of the biggest Buddhist cave complexes in the Western Region, dating from the fifth century to the thirteenth century when Islam became the dominant religion in the area. Originally built by monks for meditating in a quiet valley, it soon became a famous centre of worship for lay followers, and the travellers of the Silk Road, who would pray for a safe journey by making offerings to the images of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Xuanzang did not mention it in his record but Fat Ma was absolutely certain that he visited it. ‘It was just over twenty kilometres from Gaochang city,’ he said, ‘and it would have taken only an hour or two on horseback. The king was so keen to impress Xuanzang, I’m sure he would grab any opportunity to persuade the monk to stay. Judging from the pictures of the murals, it must have been a splendid place.’

I also had seen pictures of the Bezeklik murals and they looked spectacular. Larger than life-size, they were painted in meticulous detail and exuberant colours and seemed as if they had been finished yesterday. Kings and queens, princes and princesses, Indian monks, Persian and Roman traders stood piously in their best costumes on the side walls, facing the altar where the image of the Buddha would be. Their names were written by their heads: they were the donors who had paid for the caves and the splendid paintings. Those murals were mostly painted after Xuanzang’s time, but a Tang dynasty record of Gaochang gives us a vivid account of Bezeklik, which it called Ningrong Cave Monastery. This is undoubtedly the Bezeklik Xuanzang would have seen. ‘Everywhere you look, there are mountains. Long, open corridors connect the monastery and the caves, with a clear stream running rapidly down below. Tall trees, morning mist and clouds make them invisible at first sight. This monastery has been known for a long time.’

We reached the valley quickly. The mountain is stark, barren and bald. I could hear the sound of water gushing at the bottom of the gully although I could not see it. We were picking our way over a rocky road more suitable for goats than cars when suddenly it opened up to a wide space where half a dozen cars were parked. I rushed to get out; Fat Ma made no move.

‘I think I’ll wait for you here,’ he said. ‘The thing with Bezeklik is: if you don’t see it, you will regret it; after you’ve seen it, you’ll regret it even more. Go and find out for yourself.’

The caves were indeed a terrible letdown, even with Fat Ma’s warning. Gone were the fantastic murals, the pictures of which I so loved. The majority of the fifty-odd caves were barred over, like a zoo without animals; the ‘good’ ones were virtually bare, just here and there a faint trace of a mural, a featureless Buddha, or a broken flower petal. All I could see clearly were the chisel marks made by the German explorer Albert von Le Coq and his colleagues as they divested the caves of their treasures to take them back to Europe.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century Bezeklik and other treasures of Xinjiang became the target of frenzied international exploration. This was the age of adventure. As one scholar put it, ‘No heroes stood taller in the Victorian pantheon than explorers. These explorers were the dashing film stars of the imperial era. Tinting unknown lands on a nation’s map became the embodiment of cultural virility. Plants, animals, falls, rivers, and even entire mountain ranges were named for these peerless travellers. Museums and galleries vied to display their collections. Readers never seemed to have enough books about these far-flung places.’

In Xinjiang, it all started as part of a broader geo-political rivalry between the British in India and Russia’s ambitions to the east. But no big power wanted to be left out of the glory, so for almost half a century, adventurers and explorers – Russian, British, Swedish, German, French, Japanese and American – raced against each other to unearth the antiquities of a lost and immensely rich civilization, buried under the sands of the Taklamakan Desert and untouched for more than a millennium. The chase, often with Xuanzang’s record as their guide, was all the more intense because of the Greco-Roman origins of many of the treasures – almost as if that made them theirs to despoil. And they were not disappointed. Their finds, measured in tons and thousands of camel loads, have filled major museums around the world and reveal the glorious past of Buddhist history.

The Germans carved out Turfan, Karashar, Kucha and Tumshuq, the major oases on the northern route of the Silk Road, as their sphere of influence. Their man was Albert von Le Coq, who spoke several oriental languages and worked for the Berlin Ethnographic Museum. He and his assistant spent two years from 1904 to 1906 combing through all the ancient sites of Turfan, which were mostly ruins or buried by sand. They heard about Bezeklik from a shepherd and found the caves filled to the ceiling with sand. They were overcome by the murals once they removed the sand: ‘If we could secure these pictures,’ Le Coq wrote in Buried Treasures of Chinese Turkestan, the record of his explorations, ‘the success of the expedition was assured.’ With a hammer, a chisel, a knife and a fox-tail saw, he and his assistant managed to remove all the best-preserved murals of Bezeklik, which filled 103 huge trunks, each weighing well over a hundred kilograms. After twenty months of travelling they arrived safely in Berlin, where they occupied an entire room of the museum. ‘This is one of the few temples whose sum-total of paintings has been brought to Berlin,’ he wrote with a great deal of satisfaction. Moreover, he thought he was doing the Chinese a favour by his crude archaeological theft. ‘It cannot be too often emphasized that it is solely due to European archaeologists that any of the Buddhist treasures of Turkestan have been saved.’ He would never have suspected the Berlin Ethnographic Museum would be the graveyard for these precious objects. After surviving for more than 1,500 years in the desert, most of the murals were reduced to ashes in the bombing of Berlin in 1945. Only photographs remain.

I was in and out of the caves in twenty minutes. I was not the only unhappy visitor. A woman in high-heeled shoes and a long black velvet dress was blaming her partner loudly: ‘I’m baking hot. It’s all your fault. I told you we should have gone to the bazaar …’ When I got back to the car, I was complaining to Fat Ma about the destruction by the barbarians.

‘It wasn’t just the Germans,’ he said, ‘a friend of mine did his bit too.’

‘What? Your friends helped the Germans?’

‘No, it is a different story.’

There were still a few murals in some of the caves a decade ago. His friend and five other amateur archaeologists were told to clean them with soap and water. After the grime and mud were washed away, his friend saw a lovely face of the Buddha. He worked very hard for several days to clean the rest of the murals, Fat Ma explained, his voice falling almost to a whisper, as if he were afraid he would be overheard. But in a few days the cleaned murals began to crack and disintegrate; in no time they were gone. The cleaning had washed away the glue that held the pigments together. What had stood for so long and survived various depredations was finally destroyed by the ignorance of good intentions.

It was a sad story, and it matched my disappointment with the caves. Fat Ma tried to cheer me up. ‘Come on, lighten up. You’re going to see something really interesting. Promise.’

Barely two hundred yards from the caves, by the side of the narrow road, stood a grinning monkey, bright yellow and made of clay, and a pantheon of other characters from the novel – the gluttonous piggy, the novice, a red demon, a crab, a fox and of course the venerable Xuanzang on his white horse. They were crudely made and painted in day-glo colours. I had not noticed them before because I was looking for the water I could hear but not see. There was a terracotta dome in the background and on top of it the Islamic symbol of the crescent moon, presumably to appeal to the local Muslim population as well as tourists. The backdrop of the whole site was the red rock of the Flaming Mountain. ‘This theme park is for visitors so they can relive the myths of The Monkey King,’ said Fat Ma enviously, no doubt regretting that he had not come up with this enterprising idea. Two young men seemed to be enjoying themselves: for 30 pence each, they put their faces through cardboard versions of the Monkey King and Xuanzang, and then had their photos taken. For a pound, they could be the monkey, putting on a mask and a bright yellow martial-arts costume, with a walking stick for his cudgel. If the pilgrim himself took their fancy, they could put on a monk’s robe and get up on a real white horse.

I stood surveying the scene, a little shocked that the government had given permission for a theme park to be built so close to a grade-one listed ancient site. Turfan is not exactly crowded – it is as big as Ireland – and most of it is desert. They could have built this garish entertainment anywhere. But Fat Ma said, ‘I would have chosen this spot too. It’s near the famous site, many people come this way. And after the disappointing caves, why not have some fun?’

‘They have the Flaming Mountain,’ I said.

‘That’s where we are going next,’ he replied.

In The Monkey King, the Flaming Mountain bars Xuanzang’s way: for hundreds of miles around it everything is on fire and nothing can grow. To cross it, he has to borrow the magic fan from the princess of the Iron Fan. Waved once, the fan puts out fire; twice, it raises a wind; and the third time, it brings on rain and makes everything flourish. The local people have to sacrifice a child every year to appease the evil princess and borrow her fan for planting and watering their crops. Naturally the princess will not lend it to the monk. So the monkey uses his magic and turns himself into a tiny insect, gets into her stomach and makes trouble there. She is forced to give him a fan, but it is a fake one which shoots up flames almost engulfing the sky. He then pretends to be her husband and takes the fan from their marital bed, but without the right spell. A whirlwind blows him ten thousand miles away like a fallen leaf. He is lucky the third time, with the help of a host of celestial spirits. He puts out the fire and returns the fan to the princess, who now promises to use it for everyone’s good. The monkey gathers their packs, saddles the white horse for Xuanzang, and they cross the Flaming Mountain without flames.

The real Xuanzang could not have avoided the Flaming Mountain when he was in Gaochang. It was the most striking feature of this oasis kingdom and it was right on the Silk Road. Just as Fat Ma and I were discussing it, I saw spiky rocks on the horizon. They grew taller, rising inexorably. They almost seemed to throb with their curious red as we drove nearer. I had read about the Flaming Mountain so many times and seen many pictures of it, but still I was amazed at its grandeur. The steep sides are criss-crossed with deep gullies of dark red stone; the mountain-tops make hectic zigzags against the blue sky. Under the blazing sun, it really does seem ready to burst into flames. It made me realize why it was the perfect backdrop for one of the most dramatic episodes in The Monkey King, firing the author’s imagination, mine and that of everyone who has read the novel throughout the centuries.

I decided to have my photo taken with the Flaming Mountain in the background. I could not return empty-handed from the land of my childhood dream that had been burning in my head for the past thirty years. But Fat Ma said no. I thought he did not want to get out of the jeep in the scorching sun, so we drove on. After another fifteen minutes, we left the main road, cruising on the gravel towards the foot of the mountain. Suddenly we screeched to a stop. ‘Photo time now!’ he declared proudly. ‘I have searched the whole mountain from end to end: this is the ideal spot.’ I thought it was very considerate of him to do it just for me but it turned out to be a more serious business matter. In Turfan as in the rest of China in the reform era, everything is about money. Fat Ma said they were having a Flaming Mountain fever right now – half a million people had visited Turfan the year before. ‘We should put a billboard on the road, saying “Ideal Photo Spot for the Flaming Mountain”,’ he said excitedly. ‘We will have a guard and charge fifty pence per photo. We will make a fortune.’ He seemed to be intoxicated by his dream of riches – or maybe it was just the heat.

Before I read Xuanzang’s biography the only thing I knew of him in Turfan was the Flaming Mountain story – and this is still true for most Chinese. I had no idea that it was here in Turfan that the real Xuanzang, by his courage and determination, gave his pilgrimage a solid chance of success. He arrived here penniless, with a warrant over his head, far from certain that he could survive the journey. Now he could carry on with every hope of fulfilling his dream. The king of Gaochang provided him with everything he would need: clothes to suit all weathers, one hundred ounces of gold and three piles of silver pieces, and five hundred rolls of satin and taffeta as donations to major monasteries. He was also given thirty horses, twenty-four servants and five monks to look after him as far as India and back. But most important of all, the king wrote state letters to be presented to the twenty-four different kingdoms along the way. In particular, he asked the Great Khan of the Western Turks, who controlled the whole of Central Asia at the time, to protect the Chinese monk. Xuanzang wrote these words that expressed all the elegance of his mind and his depth of feeling:

For all these favours, I feel ashamed of myself and do not know how to express my gratitude. Even the overflow of the Jiaohe River does not compare with your kindness, and your favour is weightier than the Pamir Mountains. Now I have no more worries for my journey … If I succeed in my purpose, to what shall I owe my achievements? To nothing but the king’s favour.

The contrast between fiction and reality could not be greater.

The Monkey King has hidden the real Xuanzang, but the fiction has an important role to play. Life for most people in China had always been oppressive. They were subjugated by hardship and tyranny and The Monkey King was cathartic, not just as a rich and colourful fantasy world, but as the story of a maverick spirit who symbolized what we could only dream of: rebellion. It was sheer magic. The thrill of reading it for the first time is still with me.

But it had another significance: it carried any number of Buddhist messages. I remember Grandmother trying to explain some of them to me. She said although the monkey could fly up to Heaven and dive into hell, slay dragons and subdue demons, he could also be arrogant, jealous, angry, greedy, selfish and harmful. That was why Guanyin gave him another name, Wukong, meaning ‘Understanding Emptiness’. Guanyin hoped the monkey would come to appreciate the limits of his power and the vanity of life. We even had a saying: ‘Mighty the monkey may be, but even with his 180,000-league jump, he can never escape from the palm of the Buddha.’ The monk, on the other hand, was kind, loving, selfless and compassionate. He had the Way – that was the secret of his power over the mighty monkey whom he kept under control simply by reciting the Heart Sutra. It did not make sense to me at the time. Now I can see what Grandmother meant. In fact, the last sentences of The Monkey King

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