Читать книгу Petals from the Sky - Mingmei Yip - Страница 14

After the lunch break, I went back to the Meditation Hall for the lecture and meditation sessions. Inside, men, women, and children sat on brown meditation cushions, waiting silently or squirming to find a comfortable position. Participants continued to stream in; their cloth slippers scraping softly on the clean tiles sounded like leaves rustling in an empty courtyard.

A few minutes later, the nun with the twitching eye stepped forward onto the platform before the altar and tapped lightly on the microphone. Waiting until the vibration subsided, she cleared her throat and announced the venerable nun Yi Kong from the Golden Lotus Temple as the special guest speaker of the retreat.

The audience stirred.

My heart thumped to hear the familiar yet distant name Yi Kong, Depending on Emptiness. She was one of the reasons I came all the way to this temple to join the retreat—after I’d learned that she would be here to lecture on Buddhist Dharma. My head turned with the congregation’s to see Yi Kong stride in measured steps to the platform in front of the altar. Her chin was raised, her bald head glistened, her robe trailed behind. She looked like a hairless Guan Yin walking on earth.

Yi Kong was the bald scalp and pretty face I’d glimpsed from the bottom of the well when I was thirteen. At that time she had been a wandering nun who, on her way to visit the Golden Lotus Temple, learned of a girl trapped in a well and went there to throw down Guan Yin’s blessing. Yet our friendship didn’t develop until two years later, after she had taken residency in the nunnery.

Now Yi Kong still looked handsome as she marched toward the altar. Mother would certainly have been disappointed to see her on TV now, for she had put on some weight, and she didn’t look as detached with the extra pounds.

Yi Kong lit incense and led the audience in three deep bows to the three large gilded Buddhas on the altar. Then she seated herself on a cushion and arranged her legs into the full lotus position. With her long, elegant fingers, she drew the gold brocade shawl into a pleasing curve across her tangerine-colored robe and began: “Honorable guests of faith…”

I stared at her intense face and concentrated on the rich inflection of her voice. Yi Kong’s eyes glowed in the mellow light of the room. I couldn’t see whether the corners of her eyes had grown wrinkled, but her speech was as smooth as before.

“I’m so glad all of you are here today. Simply by being here, you’ve already extended your first step onto the Buddhist path.”

Wherever Yi Kong’s gaze fell, there seemed to be a face momentarily enlightened, shining with the truth.

“Don’t belittle this first step. The journey of a thousand miles begins on the ground under your feet. But neither should you think you’ll be enlightened just by attending a seven-day retreat.”

Suddenly Yi Kong seemed to notice me, and our eyes met before she glanced away. My heartbeat accelerated to allegro. Had she really seen me? Did she recognize me among the crowd after all these years? Would she, as before, want me to enter her temple as a nun? Now she asked the audience to meditate for five minutes before her Dharma talk. While everyone’s head was lowered and their eyes half closed, I carefully studied my nun mentor’s face, feeling my mind start to wander….

During my adolescence and into my twenties, years when I disdained and ignored men, Yi Kong really became my only friend. In the famous novel Dream of the Red Chamber, men are compared to mud, but women to water, as they are supple, tender, and nurturing.

When I dreamily turned the pages of the novel, sometimes I’d wonder: Would a man like the hero Jia Baoyu—refined, talented, pure, true, and nice to all the women around him—exist in real life? What about the beautiful nun Miao Yu, Wonderful Jade, who wrote poetry, secretly longed for a man, and gathered snow from plum blossom petals to brew tea for Jia Baoyu instead of fulfilling her passion for him? Oh, how I wished I were like those beautiful, brilliant women in this Dream of the Red Chamber!

I had always preferred the company of females. Like the best kind of yunwu—cloud and mist—tea leaves picked before the rainy season, women are shapely, delicate, pleasing to look at, intoxicating to smell, enjoyable to savor. And of course, for me, the only female who embodied all this was Yi Kong.

Although Mother knew nothing about my close friendship with the nun, she sensed the infatuation in me. Once I overheard her asking Father, “Our daughter looks dreamy. Do you think she’s in love or something?”

I almost chuckled. How could I tell my parents that I was infatuated with a nun?

Yet the relationship between Yi Kong and myself was not without tension, tension that had nothing to do with us, but with the villagers’ convictions. Those who worshipped Yi Kong would say, “Look at Yi Kong; she’s so beautiful, wise, compassionate, and a nun—how can she not be the reincarnation of Guan Yin?” But another group would argue, “Meng Ning came out alive from the haunted well! Who else could survive this except the reincarnation of Guan Yin?” Once two women broke into a loud quarrel right in front of the statue of Guan Yin inside the nunnery. Another time, two elderly men competed to donate offerings to us until Yi Kong insisted we return all the gifts and money.

Mother, of course, took my side. She pinched her eyes into slits, her voice sharp and intense. “It’s easy to shave one’s head and put on a robe, but how many, like you, could survive that fall with no injury? I’m sure if she were the one who fell, her bald scalp would have cracked open like an egg hit over a wok and her brain would have splashed like vomit all over her robe!”

I felt terribly sad. How unmerciful to fight so mercilessly over the Goddess of Mercy! Didn’t the villagers know it was Yi Kong who’d thrown the Guan Yin pendant down to me? But when I told them this, as before, they just thought I was being nice and adored me more. Sometimes I became confused. If I were really the reincarnation of Guan Yin, why couldn’t I stop Father from gambling and fighting with Mother? If Yi Kong and I were both the reincarnations of Guan Yin, why didn’t that stop the villagers’ childish disputes?

I finally left the villagers’ squabble behind when I turned nineteen and received a scholarship to go to college. The same year, Father won seventy thousand dollars at the racetrack, enabling our family to move back to the city of Tsim Sha Tsui. Six months later, he lost all that money, so we had to move again—to a slum in Kowloon city. Then the trip to the temple became long and expensive, forcing me to reduce my visits.

A year later, Yi Kong began to take over the supervision of the Golden Lotus Temple after its chief nun, Wisdom Forest, had become ill and passed away. Whenever I visited her, Yi Kong would express her wish for me to be a nun in her temple. One time she asked, “Meng Ning, do you know you have a perfectly shaped head? I’m sure if it’s shaved, it will be an object of admiration for many monks and nuns.”

Another time she said, “Meng Ning, you have the rare quiet nature of a high nun. My Shifu, Wisdom Forest, said that if a person has the karma to possess this quality, she should not waste it in the dusty world.”

Later, when Yi Kong knew that although my interest in being a nun was serious but I had not quite made up my mind to shave my head, she’d change to a joking tone and ask, “Meng Ning, when are you coming to play with us? There’s lots of fun going on here.” Of course I understood that by “coming to play with us,” she meant when would I become a nun in her temple, and “fun” meant helping with her many ambitious projects.

Being the only child in the family, it was hard for me to tear myself away from my parents and throw myself inside the temple gate. Chinese deem it extremely unfilial for an only child to become a monk or a nun—unless his or her parents have passed away. Otherwise, who would take care of the parents during their old age? Who would carry on the family name? Who would inherit the family’s possessions?