The Hindu Business Line : Warmth of a Chinese Sun

Bodh Gaya with its Bodhi Tree is the beginning and end of a search and the poetry of the place works on Sun, who is not a Buddhist not being convinced of karma and rebirth.

FOR over a month now one has been living with `Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud' of Sun Shuyun.

The unwanted daughter of a Chinese family, Sun Shuyun treads the path of the Chinese monk Xuanzang (known in India as Hiuen Tsang or Hsuan-tsang) from China to India "to learn the teaching of Buddha at its source."

Entwined in the tale are fragments of her persona with the reader being able to easily relate to her compassionate and devout Grandmother as many lives have been fashioned by grandmothers. The book starts and ends with her Grandmother and could not have gone to the press without the blessings and prayers of the old woman.

Sometimes Sun is lyrically lost to quote a Buddhist scripture: "Self-nature, complete and clear,/Like the moon in the water./The mind in meditation, like the sky,/ Ten thousand miles without a cloud."; at other times she narrates without trying to impress.

One prefers her Grandmother to Xuanzang, who after 18 years, came back to China to spread Buddhism by translating many sutras into Chinese. Born into a scholarly Confucian family in Henan province, Xuanzang chronicled everything he saw in The Record of the Western Regions and which got Sun to follow him.

Unlike Xuanzang, Sun had to skip some parts of the long trek into Afghanistan.

On February 26, 2001, a year after Sun tried in vain to enter Afghanistan, Mulla Mohammed Omar issued a decree cruelly doing away with the Buddhas of Bamiyan. The Chinese traveller is appreciative of India though in Bihar (derived from Vihara) he came up against thugs. The Record brought Buddha alive in India.

As late as 1942, the Encyclopaedia Britannica defines the Buddha as "one of the two appearances of Vishnu."

Comments Sun: "This ignorance beggars belief, given that Buddhism is older than Christianity and Islam, that it reigned supreme for more than a thousand years in India, that the whole of Asia embraced it, that Genghis Khan, one of the most powerful rulers in history, adopted it throughout his empire, that Marco Polo and Francisan emissaries to Japan, China and Tibet all encountered it, and reported their findings to a curious West.

So here were two utterly extraordinary stories: one, the virtually complete disappearance of the knowledge of the Buddha from the land of its birth - as if the identity of Christ had been forgotten in Palestine, or the Chinese did not know who Confucius was; the other, the equally remarkable recovery of this past by the British and the Indians, with the help of records kept by two Chinese monks in the first millennium."

The Britisher was Alexander Cunningham, the first Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and the two Chinese monks were Xuanzang and his disciple Hui Li (The Life of Xuanzang).

For the Buddhist pilgrim, Bodh Gaya with its Bodhi Tree is the beginning and end of a search and the poetry of the place works on Sun, who is not a Buddhist not being convinced of karma and rebirth, two thought pieces picked up by Buddhism from Hinduism.

Under the Bodhi Tree, Buddha sat for seven days to realise Nibbana (in Pali) or Nirvana in Sanskrit. "But when he (Xuanzang) came to worship at the Bodhi Tree, he broke down," writes Sun and that was some 1,300 years ago.

Sun meets Andrew meditating under the Bodhi Tree. Andrew is a systems engineer from Wisconsin and works 10 months every year to spend two months in Bodh Gaya.

Sun had the first taste of Buddhism from her Grandmother cluttered by Gods and Goddesses which the Cultural Revolution tried hard to destroy.

Sun Shuyun is impressed with Andrew and the Buddhism he practices "as it makes a lot of sense to me." For Andrew it means, "once we have let go our attachments to ourselves, we can learn kindness and compassion, as the Buddha taught, and not to harm others."

The Grandmother meets Andrew's requirements. Sun's father robs Grandmother of her Guanyin statue, her amulet, but she takes the hurt. "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."

The 446-pages story ends with Sun standing by the grave of her Grandmother; "Softly, I said Amitabha for her" leaving the reader a touch teary. Thanks for the book, Sun.

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