Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron Page A

revolution had come, and the monks were being disbanded everywhere. At first I went on studying. Then in 1964the government ordered me to marry. They wanted monks to be like other people.’
    ‘You have a beautiful family.’
    He smiles softly. ‘Thank you.’
    Buddhism had always struggled to justify itself here, I knew. Confucianism and Communism worked themselves out in society–whether in filial piety or social advance–but Buddhism conjured private salvation. Its destiny was the shedding of illusion. And society was a mirage.
    ‘But personal things are important to us too.’ The Living Buddha glances at the door where his daughters were. ‘This life, after all, is the only one in which the present relationships will ever exist. So we must do well by them. In the next life I will be born to different parents, and my children will not be born to me, or perhaps even know me, and my wife will be someone else’s. After death, your family cannot follow you.’
    These Buddhist values had not saved him, of course. ‘During the Cultural Revolution I was struggled badly. The Red Guards hated the idea of a Living Buddha. Four thousand of them came to get me. I was beaten so badly I had to lie flat for three months, my body broken.’ He touches his arms and knees. ‘All the time they were beating me they were saying “You’re wrong! You’re wrong! Wrong!” and I said “Yes, yes, I’m wrong, I’m wrong!” ’ He bursts suddenly into laughter: not the tense Chinese stammer but a timeless greeting of worldly folly. ‘And all the time I knew in my heart that I was on my way somewhere else, my own path. But I said nothing. While I lay on my back I composed a Tibetan grammar in my head, and years later I wrote it. That way I survived.’
    These struggle sessions could be uniquely terrible. In essence they were mass gang-beatings–a Calvary of mockery and torture–sometimes inflicted by a mob of neighbours and erstwhile friends. As the bullying and the terror intensified, everything the victim said would be cursed and denied, until all shred of self-worth was gone. Forced confessions set in train the liquidation of the self. The shame drove many to suicide. If the victim repudiated his family, another prop of selfhood fell away. In time, if heunderwent deeper thought-reform, his pretence of shame might itself slowly destroy the conviction of his innocence, like a mask eating into the face. In this scenario the victim longed to be culpable, otherwise the world itself was deranged. A strange, free-floating guilt enshrouded him. He became his own accuser, his own crime. And the work was complete.
    But the struggle session was usually too swift and sudden for more than makeshift pretence. The screamed confessions were like acts of theatre, and the persecutors too were playing a preordained role–the state had written the script. Yet a million people died. Now, almost forty years later, the rhetoric seems as thin as ditties. And often, as with the Living Buddha, something in the victim’s core remained inviolate.
    He says: ‘After that I was sent out into the countryside to work among the peasants in the region where I had been Buddha. I was there twelve years.’ He speaks without bitterness or self-pity. ‘Then at last I was assigned here. And now I teach religion to Tibetan students. I even have a house beside the temple in Tianshui, and often I go there for ceremonies. It’s a beautiful place.’
    The environment is for ever, he says–now he might be addressing a class–so we must be tender to it. We come and go, but it stays. So he is happy now?
    ‘After the Cultural Revolution, anything is happy.’
    His younger daughter has eased the door open a crack, but is betrayed by a tiny dog which barges through, flies round the room and out again. The Buddha grins indulgently. ‘And yes, I can forgive those young people, because all China went mad at that time.’ He bursts into incredulous laughter again. ‘From