Baofeng Temple, located just north of Nanchang is a large, operating Zen temple. It looks like there has been a lot of recent refurbishing, We didn’t see a lot of monks, but the few we did see looked us in the eye and greeted us warmly.

In the eighth century Baofeng was the dharma seat of Ma-tsu (Baso Do’itsu in Japanese), who lived from 709-788. Rinzai Zen in Japan traces its origins to Ma-tsu, seventh in the line of patriarchs after Bodhidharma.

Ma-tsu excelled at training monks, producing nearly a hundred successors.

Quoting from THE RECORD OF MA-TSU in the book Roaring Stream,

“The Ancestor said to the assembly, ‘… If one wants to know the Way directly: Ordinary Mind is the Way! What is meant by Ordinary Mind? No activity, no right or wrong, no grasping or rejecting, neither terminable nor permanent, without worldly or holy.’ ”

This is the instruction I needed during our overnight train trip to Nanchang.

Cynthia and I were assigned the upper and lower berth in a Soft Sleeper compartment and were looking forward to a restful night aboard a gently rocking train.

Then a young man, in his mid-thirties showed up to claim his upper berth opposite ours in the same compartment. He seemed like a nice enough fellow, and we had no problem with him taking a phone call before we turned out the lights.

Then he got another call, around 11:00 and that lasted for nearly an hour. Then another call around 1:30 am; it sounded like he was talking with his girlfriend, for at least another hour. Then another call at about 3:00 am. What’s with these people with their cell phones!!

At that point I felt that I was really being tested– I didn’t feel like I had slept at all. So I got up and put in some ear plugs, but they were only partially successful.

I tried to maintain an attitude that his end of the conversation was just random sounds, basically no different from the random sounds of the train wheels on the tracks. But I had a hard time convincing myself of this.

The guy was still talking with his girlfriend at 4:00 am! In desperation, I got up and sat zazen on the lower berth beneath the man with the cell phone. That helped a bit. Then I tried one last time to get some sleep before the train arrived in Nanchang at 5:35 am.

I managed to catch a few minutes of sleep, but Cynthia was still awake. She found it challenging to fall asleep, especially when she realized that she was only about four feet away from a person having telephone sex.

So when the train arrived, we were both rather bleary eyed. Fortunately our driver was there to meet us at the train station and take us up to Baofeng Temple.

I remembered a line from the book, “The Art of Pilgrimage” by Phil Cousineau:

“The bittersweet truth about travel is embedded in the word, which derives from the older word travail, itself rooted in the Latin tripalium, a medieval torture rack.”

That night on the train really did feel like torture.

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