Zen Baggage: A Pilgrimage to China

"Porter is best known as a translator of poetry, which is mostly published by Copper Canyon Press . But he has also written several travel books about his experiences in China, and has become a kind of cult figure here, because Chinese are very interested in how foreigners view China. Another book of his, Road to Heaven , is about encounters with Chinese hermits around 1989, when he visits them in the Shaanxi area, south of Xi’an, and the Zhongnan mountains. My recommendation, though, is Zen Baggage , because it is a bit more systematic and current. He goes to all the main Zen temples in China, right from the first patriarch of Zen. It’s like an ethnographic book but it’s not written with the theoretical baggage of sociology. Along the way he meets people and observes them closely, interspersing it with a practitioner’s knowledge of Zen. He is also a funny storyteller. At the end of the evening, no matter where he was, he would try to find an hotel with a bathtub so he could have a good hot bath, sit there with a beer and think about what happened. The best parts of the book are in the bath, or about his bowel movements, how you have to start the morning with a cup of Nescafe to make sure your bowels are moving before you get going. Absolutely. Zen is the Japanese pronunciation of the character 禅, which in Mandarin Chinese is pronounced chan . It’s something that the Japanese through clever marketing have been able to steal from China and sell to gullible westerners as some sort of aestheticized Asian religion that any amateur can practise. But it was founded in China and in many ways is a sinification of Buddhism , which originally came from India. Zen has the idea that through meditation you are able to achieve instant enlightenment. A lot of religions around the world have a heavy ritualistic component – you have to worship and worship for years, and eventually you might be able to go to heaven. But Zen in a way is similar to Protestantism: you find your own way to God, or you find Zen through meditation or through koans — which is the Japanese pronunciation for the characters 公案 or gong’an in Mandarin – enigmatic sayings supposed to shock you into enlightenment. I can recommend another book about how Daoism gets translated in the West, Dream Trippers , by David Palmer co-authored with Elijah Ziegler. He follows two people: one is a new age practitioner and teacher named Michael Winn ; the other is Louis Komjathy , a professor at UC San Diego who is also a spiritual practitioner. Palmer’s take is that we should not look down on people’s spiritual practices in general. Of course that’s the politically correct thing to say, but he also means that these aren’t simplified or somehow inauthentic versions of a ‘real’ religion. Many religious reform movements have started with people trying to strip religions of their culturally specific practices. One of the problems with Daoism is it’s so embedded in Chinese culture that it’s hard to say how Daoism is practised without all of that. But I think all religious have a huge spectrum of belief and practice. Take Catholicism: if you only knew about Catholicism through St. Augustine and then went to, say, a Sicilian church 100 years ago, it would be full of illiterate people from the countryside who are all “hail Mary full of grace” with rosary beads, but don’t know many profound teachings from the Bible. From today’s vantage point, there would be exorcisms and all sorts of superstitious mumbo jumbo. But religion is a spectrum, and in the modern world perhaps the only accepted religious practice is the more intellectualised version or something that’s somehow considered “pure” and “spiritual,” something involving searching for the meaning of life, like the guru in cartoons . So I think that these westernised forms of Chinese religion, if they’re meant in good faith, are okay. Yet if it’s simply from a colonialist mentality – I fancy an African mask here and a Chinese statue there, I don’t know anything about the culture but it matches the colour of my sofa – or out of vague spiritual notions, then there is something exploitive to it. I think it depends on intentions."