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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Cynthia and I are at the train station in Hangzhou, waiting for the overnight train to Nanchang, scheduled to leave at 7:41pm. We are in the Soft Sleeper Waiting Room. We haven’t had dinner yet and the options here in the waiting room include candy, biscuits and fruit juice. So I was curious as to whether we would be able to order dinner on the train.

So I went up to the woman who took punched our tickets, showed mine and asked,

“Qing wen, zhege huo che, yao buyao, wan fan?”

(Lit. Please may I ask, this train, is there or not, dinner?)

[Probably not grammatically correct, but it contains the main ideas)

And she replied, “Yao de” (It is)

Not sure what the “de” means, but the “Yao” was good enough for me. We’ll expect to have dinner on the train.

So I just wanted to say, thank you, Ms. Pamela Lin, our Chinese instructor and Josette Hendrix who hooked us up with her.

Lin Laoshi, you just saved us from a dinner of candy and biscuits!

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I (Cynthia) sit in a hotel at the top of the Yellow Mountains. Those famous mountains that appear out of the fog with beautifully shaped trees growing at perfect angles out of the rock. No landscape designer could plan such perfection. Whole ridges appear and disappear in a few blinks of the eye and each scene seems like it must have been the most beautiful. It does, indeed, have a spiritual quality. I feel a deep gratitude to be in this place.

This constantly changing view leaves me pondering what may be before me that I don’t see due to my own fog or mist.

Anticipating what is next…

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To all our perspiring Seattle friends: wish you were here in nice cool Hangzhou.

Here are links to some of our photos of the past two weeks:

Eclipse
http://www.flickr.com/photos/11790404@N02/sets/721576217440843411/show/

Huangshan
http://www.flickr.com/photos/11790404@N02/sets/72157621856871074/show/

Hangzhou
http://www.flickr.com/photos/11790404@N02/sets/7215762176426156/show/

Jingci Temple
http://www.flickr.com/photos/11790404@N02/sets/72157621868433172/show/

Lingyin Pagoda
http://www.flickr.com/photos/11790404@N02/sets/72157621868407490/show/

Chungkang Village
http://www.flickr.com/photos/11790404@N02/sets/72157621868269900/show/

Keep cool!

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For a slideshow of some of our photos of Huangshan, try this link:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/11790404@N02/sets/72157621856871074/show/

Good luck!

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These two well-named sights are called “Flower Blooming on a Brush Tip” and “Beginning to Believe Peak”.

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We spent the night at the city of Huangshan, which is about two hours short of the summit of Huangshan mountain. “Huang” means yellow and “shan” means mountain. We will be staying in one of about 5 hotels that are located near the top of the mountain. To get here we took a van for an hour and a half, a shuttle bus up the mountain road and a cable car similar to what you see in large ski resorts. The elevation here is about 5,000 feet.

It was raining when we left this morning and the rain has continued pretty much the whole day. There are shops that sell plastic raincoats, including rain pants for 10 Yuan – about $1.50. That was one of our best investments. We passed up the booties they sell, so our shoes need to be dried out tonight, but it hasn’t been cold, just wet.

The heavy cloudiness has obscured some of the views so far, but this place is obviously incredibly scenic — steep granite peaks with pine trees clinging to the crags, misty clouds drifting among the foliage.

We will be up here two nights, so we may get some more photography opportunities tomorrow.

Our Lonely Planet guide book says that Huangshan “is not one of China’s sacred mountains, so little religious activity is evident,” but I wonder whether there may be more to the story than that. The scenery is so stunning, it looks like the place calls out for sacred.

Any Buddhist or Daoist scholars out there who can shed more light on the subject? What religious significance do the Huangshan mountains have?

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In the dharma lineage recognized by Sogenji monastery in Okayama, Japan, the 27th ancestor after Bodhidharma is Nampo Jomyo Zenji, who lived from 1235 – 1309.

According to Andy Ferguson, author of the book, Zen’s Chinese Heritage, Jingci Temple in Hangzhou is where Nampo Jomyo learned much about Zen and tea culture before taking his knowledge back to Daitokuji Temple in Kyoto. This is where the famous Japanese tea master Sen Rikkyu established a tea dojo.

Today, Jingci Temple is visited my many Chinese people who pay tribute to the ancestors by lighting incense sticks, bowing to the north, south, east and west, then placing their incense in a very larger burner in front of the temple.

What I liked best here was the billboard erected recently by a Buddhist organization which says, “A harmonious world begins in the mind”.

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We knew that finding our accommodations at Moganshan Loft required that we take a bus to De Qing and then catch a taxi to Moganshan. What we didn’t realize is that our taxi driver didn’t know how to get to Moganshan Loft (and neither did we) nor that his three-wheeler taxi didn’t have the power to climb the mountain.

So we were puzzled as to what to do when he dropped us off midway up the mountain. We were reluctant to pay him, as we had not reached our destination but were not sure how to proceed. Fortunately we were rescued by some Israeli travelers, one of whom spoke Chinese. They invited us to join them in their larger van and the one who spoke Chinese explained that their driver would pay our driver once we got to our destination. We accepted that and went on with them.

The Israelis were staying at a hotel inside Moganshan National Park. We soon found ourselves at the entrance to the park and had to pay the entrance fee. It was only later that we discovered that our hotel was not within the park at all, but farther down the mountain. So after the Israelis were dropped off and after several phone calls, we were delivered finally to our accommodations at Moganshan Loft.

But there was no front desk and no receptionist to be seen. Only an elderly man with a bandaged arm, dressed in boxer shorts. The man spoke rapidly and insisted that we pay him some money. I understood practically nothing of what he was saying and I was not at all sure why we should pay him; we had just arrived and I had already paid a 33% deposit for our room.

When we called the owner, with whom we had made our reservations, he informed us that he lived in Hangzhou and was presently on a business trip. He explained that the man in the boxer shorts was the manager of the property. Soon the manager gave us a key and showed us our room.

We hadn’t eaten all day, so we were getting hungry. He motioned with the universal fingers-together-and-hand-to-the-mouth gesture, indicating that we could get something to eat next door.

Next door we saw several laborers eating at a table next to a makeshift outdoor kitchen. We waited until the men finished eating and left the table.

With the universal eating gesture, the two women cooking asked if we wanted something to eat and we nodded enthusiastically. Then we were led into the food storage area where there were all kinds of vegetables and meats and spices. They seemed to be expecting us to point to the foods we wanted. We had no idea whether they were inviting us to purchase the food and cook it ourselves, or whether they would cook it for us and serve us a meal.

We pointed to some eggs and some tomatoes and some tofu.

They motioned for us to sit down. Soon they were placing in front of us a mouth watering tofu dish, an egg-tomato dish and a plate of rice.

We ate it all with gusto.

So it all worked out just fine; we had a place to stay and our bellies were full. The day just didn’t resemble the expectations we had about finding a hotel, checking in, and ordering a meal. And without being able to understand what people were saying, we had precious little information to use for making sense of the situation.

And you remember those Chinese lessons we took before the trip, to learn some Mandarin fundamentals? Well, it turns out, in this part of China, the dialect is very different from Mandarin; it sounds like a completely different language.

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Anyone who witnesses a total solar eclipse knows what awe is. Our normal perception of diurnal cycles is so deeply ingrained that when daylight suddenly turns to darkness and an unfamiliar ring of light hangs over our heads, our attention becomes acute and our sense of mystery is heightened. Tears start streaming down Cynthia’s face. My eyes widen. THIS is unique! As clouds part for a few seconds in this longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century, we are granted brief witness to this amazing astronomical spectacle.

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