'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Notes from Shanghai (and China, generally), part 2

We've been having an incredibly busy, informative, and fun time here in China. Just before I introduce the things I've been writing here so far, I want to apologize to any readers who found a rather perplexing post that was up here for a few hours, that should have gone onto a private family blog...

Anyway, here are the main things I've been intending to put up here.

Between Thursday April 29 and Saturday May 1 or so, I managed to write the following notes about experiences I'd had during the previous ten days or so:

Hangzhou, including tea gardens and a Buddhist temple
Some dinner conversations
Tibetan Buddhism in Beijing

Hangzhou, including tea gardens and a Buddhist temple

I'm writing this Thursday afternoon, China time. We're in Beijing now: we came here from Shanghai on Tuesday. I haven't written anything for the blog for so long! I have a lot of catching up to do. I want to start by writing a little about what we did while we still in Hangzhou, on Sunday and Monday.

In addition to being a large provincial capital and evidently the center of a lot of industry, Hangzhou is also very famous in China for its gardens. We were staying in a very well known area called West Lake, which stretches westward from the city. I think the main lake, which is maybe two kilometers by one kilometer, was all man-made (Managua?) It has a few little islands in it, and a causeway that stretches the length of it, from north to south, near the western edge. And then all around it are little subsidiary bodies of water, all surrounded by lovely landscaping. Walkways thread along through all the gardens, and when they have to cross water they do so by means of exquisite little bridges.

Lots of Chinese people like to visit Hangzhou in the spring! The main menace is the tour buses all over the place. On Sunday evening, after yet another great dinner, Brantly, Ann, Bill, and I decided to walk back to our hotel by means of the long causeway. At each end of it there were lots of people, but in the middle it was not too crowded. The menace there was the cyclists, who were clearly defying all the 'No Cycling' notices as they bore down on us at some speed... But each side of the causeway was lined with lawns and willows. Everybody was having a good time. So we did, too.

Before that, we had driven out to some of the tea gardens that stretch westward from very near the edge of the lake. At that point, the ground rises into a series of small but steep hills, most of which are far too steep to cultivate. But the tea growers have pushed their terraces of tea bushes as far up the hillsides as they can. The tea from this region is, it seems, quite renowned: it is the Long Jin (Dragon Well) tea, and the best picking season is in spring. Actually, we were there a little later than the peak of the picking, which I think has to occur in March. But each bush is subjected to multiple pickings during the growing season, with each picking producing just the green tip and one infant leaf.

The road we took out through the tea gardens is lined with tea-tasting and tea-selling places. We stopped in one, sampled the tea, looked at the huge, electrically-heated, wok-type metal tubs in which the fresh-picked leaves are lightly roasted, and then Lipeng, our guide and friend from ECNU insisted on buying us some of the product there as a gift.

Then we drove on, via a short stop at a garden called "Nine Gullies in the Misty Mountain", to a massive pagoda built beside the river. The pagoda is called something like the Pagoda of the Six Harmonies. It has twelve stories. We climbed as high as we were allowed--maybe to the eighth or ninth level. The view from the top was fantastic: out over Hangzhou, to the east, with a couple of large bridges spanning the river between us. A tiny toy train chugged across the lower level of one of the bridges. There was a lot of construction going on on the Hangzhou side of the river: we counted more than 15 high cranes in just one small section of the river-bank..

On MOnday morning, we four visitors got up early and walked across to one of the nearby islands at around 6:30 a.m. As we walked around it, we found a gate leading to a park, and it turned out out as we climbed the steep, wooded hillside inside the gate that the park took up most of the island. We climbed and climbed to the top, and once there we found a series of platforms on which, at that time of day, people were out doing their various, and very graceful, exercizes. We wandered on along the hilltop. "There must really be a market for someone to have a little tea-house up here," I said. And lo and behold as we turned the next corner there was just what we were looking for.

The way the Chinese people serve the very best green tea is in large, clear glasses that have a heavy, solid glass base. They toss in a small handful of tea leaves, pour on a little hot (but certainly not boiling) water, and then a short while later fill the glass to an inch or so beneath the rim. At that point, the leaves do different things. The best Dragon Well tea will have some of the picked leaf-plus-tip pieces rising to the top, then drifting slowly back down, and the rest of it just standing upright at the bottom of the glass. When nearly all the pieces from the top have drifted down to the bottom, you can drink it. Then, you can re-fill and re-fill the same glass fromn the vacuum flask of hot water that is never far away.

When we had our early-morning tea up there at the tea-house the weather was quite damp. As we drank our tea, a group of older Chinese people was sitting playing Chinese chess or mahjongg nearby. We looked down over various platforms scattered throughout the trees where people were doing their exerecizes. One women was doing something that looked like some fairly suggestive dancing, all down there on her own. On another platform, a couple of older guys were doing some impressive shadow-boxing.

Later in the day--after yet another great meal, this time at a restaurant called 'The Mountain Beyond the Mountain'-- we went out to a Buddhist temple to the southwest. There, too, there were thousands upon thousands of visitors. Lukcily, it's a big temple complex there, so the crowds were manageable. This place is called 'The Mountain that Flew from Afar', and there's a complicated story about how that all happened. (I don't have our guidebook to hand. If I did I could sound more knowledgeable about all these things!)

So first of all, we went to the extensive series of grottoes that is at one side of the temple complex. There was a story about how a certain very holy Buddhist monk had lived there... All these details were told to our friend Lipeng by a Mandarin-language guide, which was all he could find, and he then rendered a version of it all in English for us. Our little group of six people was strung out in these very complicated series of caves, huddling under umbrellas and being buffeted around by much larger tour groups... Many of those larger groups--nearly all of which were 100% Chinese-- had guides equipped with small bullhorns. So between the bullhorns, the echoes off the cave walls, and the reverberating sounds of all those people moving aound, it's a wonder any of us heard anything of what Lipeng told us. Even more of a wonder that we managed to stick together being borne through those totally unlit caves by the crowds of our fellow-visitors.

The main thing about the caves is that they had hundreds upon hundreds of very intricate and lovely Buddhas carved in deep relief to their walls. On many, many of these Buddhas, the faces had been hacked off. I think that happened during the Cultural Revolution.

After the grottoes, we moved on to the main temple complex. It has a number of large walled courtyards with various large structures built on massive red-lacquered pillars and with a style of decoration much more intricate and colorful than in the Buddhist temples in Japan that I've visited. The centerpiece is a vast, soaring hall housing a 40-foot-high gilded Buddha. We circled slowly around it. Ann and I performed little namaste-type greetings in front of it. ("Three times!" Lipeng coached us quietly from the side, when we showed signs of stopping after one.) Most of the toursist swirled on past this renowned "historical and cultural relic", as it was descibed on some of the signs. But a fair number of them walked forward to the yellow-covered kneelers and did a full, forehead-to-the ground kowtow in front of it, instead. Several other visitors, who did not do the full kowtow, placed incesnse sticks in the stands and did a namaste-type thing like us.

As we walked through the grottoes, we saw one shaven-headed Buddhist nun walking through, too. And then, as we exited the whole temple complex, we saw a group of some two dozen people waiting to go in, two of whom were women wearing Tibetan-style striped aprons-- and all of the group looked fairly "Tibetan".

So of course, I'm trying to figure out the extent to which all of these thousands of visitors here see the visit to the temple as having any possible religious, as opposed to purely "historical and cultural" relevance. Hard to say, really. Tomorrow, here in Beijing, we're planning to visit the big Tibetan Lamas' Temple that is a big place to visit here. Bill has a colleague at the University of Virginia who says there is a large new interest in Buddhism in China these days, and that Tibetan Buddhists in Beijing have been a part of that.

Anyway, at the temple in Hangzhou, one of the really interesting things was that it was Chou Enlai who gave the temple protection from the very earliest days of Communist rule. Indeed, the Communists didn't just protect what was there, but in 1953 they allowed (encouraged? helped?) the Buddhists to build that whole big Buddha that we saw there, its predecessor having been destroyed in one of China's many earlier wars.... And then, though so many of the Buddha images in the grottoes had been defaced during the Cultural Revolution, inside the main, walled part of the temple complex there didn't seem to have been any still-visible destruction at all. It certainly looked as though someone had been still protecting it at that point.

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Some dinner conversations

I'm writing this Friday evening. We're still in Beijing-- now, staying in a really lovely courtyard hotel not far from the northen end of the Beihai Gardens, called the Bamboo Garden Hotel. But before we leave for Xian tomorrow, I want to reflect a little on a couple of very interesting dinner conversations we've had since we came to Beijing earlier this week.

At both these dinners, our little four-person traveling group was being hosted to really excellent restaurant food by Chinese colleagues of our friend Brantly Womack, the inspiring force of our group. (Brantly is a China expert and the only Mandarin speaker among us.) For these dinners, our hosts took private rooms in very large, good restaurants. I cannot even begin to describe some of the great meals we have had on the trip so far!

At the first of these dinners, our main host was a researcher working for an important government agency. He had brought along two of his friends, both of whom were charming thirty-something executives in the private sector. One of them, it turned out was a close business associate of the researcher's wife; but none of the three men had brought their spouses along. All spoke excellent English.

The two business executives talked easily and informatively about their work. But when the conversation turned to politics, they deferred first of all to our main host. After he had spoken, however, on several occasions they chimed in as well.

I have to confess that this dinner came hard on the heels of the frustrating trip we'd had to the capital. We flew here from Shanghai. Our flight was cancelled due to unspecified mechanical trouble, and East China Airlines then put us all onto another flight a couple of hours later... Well, it was no big deal, and the airline handled everything (including having our bags arrive on the same flight) just fine. But still, it meant I was tired by the time we went for dinner and didn't commit everything that was said to memory.

The three young(-ish) men talked quite a bit about the current economic situation, and the fears in the international financial markets that the country's economy is becoming "overheated". They discussed some possible remedies for that. The researcher also talked interestingly about how the Communist Party leadership had decided a number of months ago to start redirecting attention and resources to the rural sector, since that was now seen as lagging seriously behind the urban sector. "They've already started doing that," he said. The three men also talked about the effects of the dismantlement of some portions of the country's earlier cradle-to-grave social security net. People in the cities were having to start getting used to paying for medical care, and to saving for their own retirement, they said, and one of them even noted that the American Life insurance company had recently started selling policies here.

Mainly, though, I was very interested to see the easy, very friendly relationship among our three hosts. When we were still in Shanghai, we had had another interesting meal-time conversation with a high-ranking faculty member at East China Normal University who had told us his view of the role the Communist Party still played in the life of the university community. People generally respect the Party members, he said, since they have a reputation for being serious and diligent, and for helping out with extra tasks when asked. He estimated the proportion of students who were Party members at around 50 percent. While he admitted that maybe a few of them might have joined for mainly "opportunistic", career-related reasons, most had not. "The Party still has an important role in the life of the country," he said...

Anyway, the second interesting dinner conversation we've had since arriving in Beijing was one hosted by a high-ranking member of the administration of one of the institutions of higher education here. This man took us for a great dinner, accompanied by a senior female colleague from his university. Both were urbane, self-confident, friendly-- and both spoke really excellent English.

At this dinner, too, there was some similar discussion of economic issues. At one point, though, our host got into a noteworthy little side-discussion on the best term to use in English to describe China's growing presence on the world scene. "For a while, the Party leaders used to use the term, 'China's peaceful rise'," he said. "But once, some of them asked me about this term and I said I thought it was not the best way to say this. What do you think? Peaceful 'rise', or perhaps peaceful 'emergence' or peaceful 'development'? I think peaceful 'rise' might sound a little threatening?"

He noted that more recently, the country's leaders had stopped using "peaceful rise", and had started using "peaceful development" more instead.

Later, he talked a little about the shift he saw the country's leadership as having recently made, towards trying to increase the safeguards for the personal rights of its citizens. He cited two examples of this. In one case, a student had been beaten to death while visiting a friend in another city. Remember, to be a "student" in China is already a mark of some distinction, given the tough competition for spots in colleges and universities. It is possible, too, that this particular student might have been politically well-connected,or might have come from a well connected family... Anyway, whatever the reason, the fate of this student had become something of a national cause célèbre, and during the most recent Communist Party Congress the country's leaders pledged to put in much more effective procedures for monitoring and preventing abuses of power by the police.

In the other case he mentioned, a woman from the countryside had spoken up during a public meeting that Premier Wen Jiabao held in her province, and had told him that after she'd worked a year for her former boss he had simply refused to pay her. "So then, Premier Wen and the rest of the leaders passed new legislation requiring employers to pay their workers monthly or even more frequently, rather than yearly, and providing some means for workers to seek redress against tardy bosses. "This was even more of a problem in the urgban areas," he said. "Here in the cities, many contractors in the construction sector lag behind in paying their workers, or pay them only annually. Now, they're going to change all that, and give the workers more protections."

For the record this articulate, cultivated person expressed scathing criticisms of President Bush's policies regarding both Iraq and Israel/Palestine. In fact, just about every Chinese person with whom we've had any kind of a serious conversation at all has dome the same. I saw in today's China Daily that Premier Wen Jiabao recently defined these two problem areas as topping the list of China's priorities in the foreign policy field. (People here are also very concerned about the ongoing political developments in Taiwan. But those, they do not consider to be matters of foreign policy. They're also concerned about North Korea, and about what some of them have described as the unpredictability of Kim Jong-Il.) Significantly, though I've heard many harsh criticisms of what the Bush administration has done in Iraq and Israel/Palestine, I have heard almost no expressions of schadenfraude (?sp) over these issues. Instead, there's a sense that these are explosive issues that China has to be very concerned with. In both cases, the main thrust of China's policy seems to be to maximize the role and effectiveness of the United Nations.

Whew, I'm tired! We had a wonderful but very full day today, including a lot of walking, visits to two extensive Tibetan-Buddhism complexes, a short tour of Mme. Sun Yat-sen's home, and dinner at a great Peking duck restaurant. Tomorrow's May Day, and Bill and I are flying to Xian. I don't know how crowded the airports and flight will be, but however it is I guess it'll be an adventure. But I have so much more I want to write about here! Later, later...

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Tibetan Buddhism in Beijing

Yesterday (Friday) was a beautiful day in Beijing, after a heavy rain the previous day and night had almost totally cleared the city's persistent smog out of the air. Luckily we didn't have anything firm planned: we'd had it in mind to spend most of the day wandering around some of the city's gardens, starting out from the fabulous little courtyard hotel we were staying in not far from the north end of the Beihai (North Sea) Gardens. Brantly had a good map, and we had learned from our guidebooks that there plenty of little hutongs (alleys) in that part of the city, through which we could make our way to where we wanted to go. (Hutong tours are a big deal in this year's tourism "experience" in Beijing-- catch those hutong scenes before the alleys all get ploughed under in the city's relentless push to modernize!)

Our first destination as we walked out of the hotel was the compound where Mme. Sun Yat-sen lived most of the second half of her life. The hutong scene was interesting, but maybe I'll write more about it later. Mme. Sun's compound was maybe a mile or so away from our hotel, picking our way along the rain-washed backstreets and dodging the pedicabs, pedicarts, cyclists, cars, and buses that all vied for space in them. Her compound was similar to the one our hotel was in: an extensively landscaped garden compound sheltered from the bustling streets around by a high wall. Actually, both compounds had been the homes of high officials in pre-revolutionary China. Mme. Sun's place was the birthplace of Pu Yi, China's "last emperor", though I'm not sure how all that happened...

Anyway, she was one of the three famous Soong sisters: Soong Chingling. She and her two sisters grew up in China and were then sent to Wesleyan College in Macon,Georgia (USA) for their B.A. studies. After their return to China, in around 1915 or so, she went to work for KMT leader Sun Yat-sen as his seretary and shortly after that she married her boss. They had, as the fairly extensive exhibit in an annex to her house told us, "ten years of happiness" before he died. After that, she continued to be active in Chinese nationalist politics. Her sister Mingling was too: she had married Chiang Kai-shek. I guess Mme. Sun's most important contribution to Chinese history came during the years of Japan's occupation of most of China: she worked with her extensive network of friends and supporters in the west to rally support and aid for the Chinese nationalist resistance to the occupation, and was fairly successful in doing so. (In the discussion Bill and I had earlier in the week with a very smart bunch of students from Beijing University, about the Middle East, the issue of Bin-Ladenist terrorism came up. Our host there, Prof. Wang Suolao, told us that China's leaders seemed really to understand the difference between the kind of violence employed by indigenous resisters to foreign occupation in Iraq or Palestine, and that employed in a very different context by Usama Bin Laden. Of course, China also faces some challenges from Muslim militants in its own western areas; but those, I don't think it regards at all as being legitimate resistance to 'foreign' occupation.)

Well, anyway, Mme. Sun's place turned out to be much more interesting than I had expected. After the revolution, she came here to live, and continued to play a sort of qiet "elder stateswoman" role for the country. On her death-bed in 1981, she was accorded the high honor of membership in the Communist Party...

But, moving right along here, we continued our walk, turning south toward the Beihai. I learned to fend off the importunings of the pedicab drivers with one of my few words of Chinese, "sam-BO" (walk!)

What a beautiful day! Now, we were walking along the bank of another small lake, not the Beihai. Everyone who could get out to enjoy the freshness of the morning seemed to have done so. People had come out with their caged birds: they hang them in the trees to let the birds talk to each other. A small group were standing around playing shuttlecock hacky-sack. Some people were doing their tai chi or other exercises. A few folks were fishing. Some granddads had brought their little grandbabies out to play by the park benches. The willow fronds wafted gently in the breeze.

We walked along one little area of lakefront lined with high-end restaurants, ending with a Starbucks. Then we traversed a pedestrian underpass under a busy road and found ourselves at the north end of the Beihai, which proudly describes itself as China's oldest park.

Most of it is in fact taken up by the body of water from which it takes its name, but around the lake itself there is beautiful landscaping and even, as we discovered, a very extensive traditional compound housing a Tibetan Buddhism study center. In the middle of the lake is a small island dominated by a steep hill, atop which sits a truly massive Buddhist stupa, which was built in the mid-17th century to celebrate the arrival in Beijing of the then-Dalai Lama.

The plan formulated by our friend Brantly had us taking the boat from the north end of the lake down to the island, from where we would walk across a bridge to the southern shore and then exit the park to find a place for lunch. However, we didn't quite know where along the northern shore the boat would leave from, so we started walking the wrong way along the shore by mistake. But what a serendipitous mistake to make! As we wended our way back through the moderate crowds I saw an older man working with what looked like a broom on a stretch of the walkway. (All the walkways in the parks and beside the streets are kept impressively clean in Beijing, as in Shanghai and Hangzhou.) But this guy wasn't sweeping! He was writing a poem on the concrete slabs with an ingenious long device that delivered a constant slow supply of water to two-inch-wide, specially-shaped sponge on the end of his stick. So he was writing his poem-- which Brantly told us said something about the "north wind" and something about "jade trees" in beautiful strokes in water-- right there on the walkway. By the time he had finished the thirty or so characters that made up the poem, the earlier characters were already starting to dry. The transitory nature of beauty! What a fabulous thing to do!

We stopped a little to watch. A few other people did so, too; but by no means everyone else did. Bill took a couple of photos, which I'll try to get up here when I can. Then we walked on.

The next serendipitous find was the Tibetan-Buddhist study center, also at the north end of the lake. It seemed not to be being used very actively. It was housed in what had evidently been a gorgeous compound for a very high-ranking Chinese official and was built, like the Forbidden City or any of the other imperial palaces I've seen, on the model of a number of walled courtyards linked by halls of ever-increasing dimensions. These halls housed various Buddhas and statues of the founder of Tibetan-style ("yellow hat") Buddhism. I don't think I saw any monks there, however.

Brantly started talking a little about the nature of the long cultural interaction between China's political elite and practitioners of Tibetan-style Buddhism, which is much richer and more complex than I had previously understood. From the 17th through the early 20th century, China was ruled by the Qing Dynasty, whose people had come down from the Manchurian areas to the north. As Brantly explained it, Tibetan-style Buddhism had been very widespread there as in many other peripheral areas of China (including Mongolia and of course Tibet itself). So the Qings were very hospitable to yellow-hat Buddhism and actively encouraged the establishment and support of yellow-hat intstutions in Beijing itself. "So it was not totally an assimilationist version of the interaction between the Han Chinese and the Tibetan Buddhists then?" I asked. "Oh now, not the total 'melting pot' version at all," he said.

I bought a little brass Buddha near the gate of the study center. I'd been looking for one for a while, but nearly all the Buddhas I'd seen before this one were either hideously laughing Buddhas, or extremely ornate and over-decorated painted porcelain Buddhas (or sometimes, both). I was looking for something serene, for my friend Marian Morgan, a Buddhism teacher back home in Virginia, and this was the most serne one I could find.

Then we embarked on the boat, along with 30 or so very happy Chinese tourists, and soon enough it departed for the island. At the island, we bypassed the waterside restaurant which is renowned for once having served 120-course dinners to Cixi, the Empress Dowager and Dragon Lady of late-19th and early-20th century infamy. And we climbed and climbed up behind it to the platform on top on which the vast, inverted-vase-shaped stupa was built. From the north side from which we were approaching it, it just looked massive (maybe 20 metres high from its stone base?), plain, and fairly ugly. But the view from there, out over the rest of Beijing, was spectacular.

To the immediate south is the 'Middle and South Sea' lake-side park which is a closed compound, the nerve center for the Communist Party leadership. To the south-east from us spread the acres and acres of yellow roofs of the Forbidden City. And beyond all those sites, ringing the horizon, were the crane-studded views of modern, high-rise Beijing.The mid-day sun glinted off the broad curved expanses of glass covering the new National Theater down near Tienanmen Square, and off the various architectural fancies topping the cluster of new high-rises at the Wangfujiang shopping area.

Coming down the steep south side of the stupa hill, we ended up in another, but much smaller, Tibetan-Buddhism emple complex, built along the same lines as the one we'd seen earlier. (And now, looking back at the stupa, from the side people are supposed to view it from, we saw the big Tibetan design on this side of it, and the whole wooded temple complex leading up to it: it looked much prettier from this side!

We exited the path nearby there. We were now at the northwest corner of the Forbidden City, which we had visited in a gathering rainstorm the day before. We went to an excellent restaurant Brantly knew of near there, had a ood lunch, then took a taxi to the main, much bigger Tibetan-Buddhism center in Beijing, which is in yet another former palace three miles or so to the northeast.

This temple does operate as a functioning center of religious life. We saw a number of people in monks' clothes (or novices' clothes?) performing various functions around the complex. Here again, there were the familiar courtyards linked by cavernously large halls. Here again the esthetic was dark red pillars, intricate "imperial" gold tiling on all the roofs, and bright, symmetrical painted designs on all the multiple lintels and cross-beams.

Here, however, there were also clouds and clouds of incense, billowing up from large bronze coffers into which many of the visitors were plunging great handfuls of long incense sticks. Fur or five of the halls along the main 'spine' of the complex all had either three vast statues of different aspects of Buddha, or three large statues representing the founder of yellow-hat Buddhism and flanking him the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama. All very trinitarian! The same trinitarian group of statues was found in many of the side-halls, too. These halls included the Hall of Mathematics, the Hall of Medicine, the Hall of Esoteric Knowledge, and the Hall of Exoteric Knowledge... (Actually, the organization of all this reminded me strongly of Thomas Jefferson's design for the original "Ackademical Village" at the University of Virginia.)

In a few of the halls, there were large, red-painted wooden cases in which the bulky, yellow-silk-wrapped shapes of Tibetan-style books had been stacked, but I didn't see anyone studying them. Then, in the final hall there was a truly impressive, standing Buddha statue, gilded like all the rest of the statues and standing maybe 50 feet high. We could only peer up toward its distant face! In one of the halls near there, there were rows of slightly elevated seating platforms laid out around another large Buddha statue, with space for maybe 30 or 40 monks to sit during a study session-- but again, no-one sitting there at that time, studying.

I was struck, however, by the high proportion of the Chinese people who were visiting this temple who seemed to be doing so as part of an intense-looking religious experience. These included many younger people as well as some older people, and many who didn't to my unpractised eye seem to "look" specifically Tibetan, as well as some who did. These worshippers would hold a handful of smoking incense sticks to their foreheads and pray intently for a couple of minutes before stepping forward to plant the incense sticks in the large coffers. They would stand before the front of the Buddha or other statues praying intently-- some of them almost shaking, or should I say "quaking", as they did so-- and then they'd kneel on the little kneeling platform to perform three full kowtows before the figure. From one of the side-courtyards came the repetitive wail of a recording of someone crying out the simple Buddhist prayer of "Om mani padma ommmm". Occasionally a brown-robed monk would hurry through a courtyard on some task. Mainly, though, their job seemed to be to sit in the shadows at the corner of each hall admonishing people who failed to obey the "No photographing" signs.

Talking of the signs there... On the front of each hall were two brass plaques, giving a general explanation of the nature of the hall and what it was used for. On one plaque, this explanation was provided in Chinese and English; on the other, in Tibetan and Manchu. Manchu script is, like Mongolian, basically a form of Arabic script-- but written on its side, from top to bottom.

I found the whole set of experiences throughout the day interesting in ways I hadn't expected. When Bill and I have visited Japan, I have always loved the more somber esthetic of the Buddhist temples there. And about ten years ago, I became fairly fascinated with Tibetan Buddhism-- though even then, perplexed and slightly off-put by the intricacy of Tibetan cosmology and the fairly violent-seeming nature of some of the culture and practices associated with it. But anyway, I was really looking forward to seeing these Tibetan temples in Beijing. I came away from the experience, however, disquieted in ways I hadn't been expecting. I think that probably, over the past ten year, I have absorbed a lot of the traditionally simple esthetic, values, and worldview of the Quakers. I found the temple we visited to be fascinating-- but ways over-decorated, and thought that all this creation of and worshiping at huge, expensive gilded images seemed wasteful, slightly authoritarian, and definitely perplexing... I longed for the simplicity of our plain, undecorated meeting-room in Charlottesville with nothing but the faces of my dear friends and the natural scenes that present themselves through our windows there to distract me from (or lead me to) where my spirit needs to be going.

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