 |
Remembering Master Xu Yun
What made this Monastery playground even more exciting to visit was that no one seemed to be in charge of it. About a hundred monks and a few dozen nuns lived there, but mostly they busied themselves with bickering. Nuns argued with nuns. Monks argued with monks. Nuns argued with monks. And the buildings of this great religious center were merely the places in which all these arguments took place. It didn't seem to matter that the wood was rotting and the stonework was crumbling and the ironwork of the old red and white pagoda was rusting. The decay had merely kept pace with the decline in monastic discipline. Devout Buddhists, like my parents, would visit and put money in the donation boxes; and if the unruly boys they brought with them, like my older brother and me, climbed on ancient structures, or played hide and seek behind the sacred statuary, or ran through hallowed hallways, well, nobody objected. To have restrained us from enjoying ourselves might have restrained the donations. I suppose the monks figured that they already had to suffer with dilapidated buildings, so why should they risk worsening their problems with financial shortages.
So we always had a good time whenever we went to Nan Hua. We'd run across the Caoxi (Ts'ao Xi) River bridge and climb one of the nearby mountains in which there was a natural stone niche. The Sixth Patriarch was said to have meditated in this niche. We'd sit in it and laugh, imitating his pious posture.
No wonder that the Sixth Patriarch appeared to Xu Yun in a vision and begged him to go to Nan Hua Monastery to straighten out the mess it had become!
I didn't meet Xu Yun until 1934 when I was seventeen years old and he was in his sixties. He looked then just like the photograph I have reproduced at the beginning of the text. I'll tell you about this meeting. But in order to appreciate it, you'll need to know a little more of my background.
My family name is Feng. Originally my family came from FuJian Province, but my father moved to Shao Guan and that is where my older brother and I were born and raised. By local standards my family was considered rich. My father owned two businesses: a building materials and supply business and a commercial shop in which he sold dried foods such as mushrooms, scallions, and other varieties of vegetables.
|
