- Chinese hermits
I have been revisiting a number of wonderful videos on You Tube about Chinese hermits. These are my four favorites, but there are a number of others that are also very special in their own way:
The Mountain Path https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7RqVBG4tVQ
Amongst White Clouds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pH2ozq65yHQ
The two above are mostly from the same visit to Zhongnan by Edward Burger with some same footage and some different footage.
“Everything Is Spiritual Practice”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVWHgPUNRsY
Chinese hermits with Red Pine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_YV3E9Rwac
First a bit of background history: So Red Pine (Bill Porter) came to China in 1989 after things opened up with the demise of the Cultural Revolution. He came to see if there were any hermits left in the Zhongnan Mountains, the ancient traditional home of Chinese hermits for at least the last 4000 years. Again and again he was told by various people and officials that there were none. To his surprise he found some 200 living on Zhongnan, wrote a book about it, Road to Heaven, sold about 2000 copies here, got translated into Chinese and sold over 2 million copies over there. The Chinese people have a deep love and respect for the hermit tradition in China; it is part of their ancestral, cultural and religious heritage, but many modern Chinese had thought that the Cultural Revolution had obliterated all that just as it had with all monasteries and temples. So this was a surprise to them also. When he returned in 2014 he found the number had increased to about 600, and today (2026) some say the number may be more like 2000. The people coming now (both men and women, both Daoists and Buddhists) tend to be younger and more educated…like university or professional drop-outs. All you have to do is register with town officials as a “hermit” and find a spot for yourself. There are no religious orders or organization; you are on your own or a disciple of some master living there; and there is no requirement for staying or going.
Among the videos I selected as my favorites, “Chinese Hermits with Red Pine” is a video record of his revisit to Zhongnan in 2014. The other three are by Edward Burger who came after Red Pine and was on his own spiritual quest. The video, “Everything is Spiritual Practice,” is a short excerpt from Burger’s footage, featuring a hermit named Guan Kuan, one of the deepest spiritual figures you will ever see or hear. I love his face; for me he has the look of one of our great Desert Fathers, like Poemen or John the Dwarf or Macarius or…. There is a very deep hiddenness about him and his words and demeanor, but also at the same time there is a luminous transparency. This paradoxical combination is a sign of a very special person.
Most of the figures in these videos (not all of them) are marked by a great simplicity, practicality, down-to-earth demeanor, etc. They lack that “spiritual pizzazz” that many Tibetan lamas or Indian gurus exhibit; their language does not resonate with “mystical” exuberance or aspirations. And yet one senses something deep behind their words and in the foundations of their lives. In this they truly make one think this was how the great Desert Fathers were, and not surprisingly many people find those desert monks “too dry” to pay attention to. But if you do want to get an appreciation and understanding of what the desert monks were all about, these folks, so seemingly radically different, are a good place to start.
And this brings us to another observation: The use of the word “practice” is ubiquitous through these videos. For most modern westerners this seems to mean mostly meditation of some kind or other….and the cultural accoutrements that go with that. However, in authentic Buddhism, the word “practice” refers to the active, experiential application of the Buddha’s teachings to transform one’s own mind and behavior, to see things as they really are. The teachings must be lived, tested, and realized through personal effort. At its core, Buddhist practice, no matter which tradition, is basically structured around a threefold training, which encompasses the entirety of the Noble Eightfold Path:
Sila (morality): Ethical conduct in daily life. This involves following the Five Precepts—abstaining from harming living beings, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, and intoxication. Some modern practitioners and teachers seem to claim that they have transcended all this “rule stuff”….that enlightenment means you are beyond all this…. Yes and no. With full realization you are no longer following external rules, but the realization makes you aware that sila is part of who you are, what is real. Buddha nature is empty of ego-driven afflictions (like greed, lust, anger, etc.) A fully enlightened being manifests “spontaneous Buddha-activity” that is naturally pure. He/she does not follow sila out of obligation; sila is simply their natural state of being.
So Buddhist practitioners and teachers who act against sila are deluded.
Samadhi (stability of mind, pure awareness): This is primarily achieved through meditation of one kind or another. Much to be said here, but not now.
Pranja (wisdom): Developing direct, experiential insight into the true nature of reality—specifically understanding the ground of all reality as sunyata (emptiness) and karuna (compassion).
For the Desert Fathers also, their “practice” was a total life journey involving the total self. We will get into this in more detail soon.
- No gate.
At the entrance gate of one of the great Zen monasteries in Kyoto there is the following inscription: “No door leads to the Great Path.” This is a take-off from an ancient Chan poem by Master Wumen Huikai:
“The Great Way has no gate,
A thousand roads enter it.
When one passes through this gateless gate,
He freely walks between heaven and earth.”
“This poem illustrates a core paradox of spiritual awakening: there is no actual barrier or gate keeping you from enlightenment except for the conceptual boundaries you construct in your own mind. Your true nature is already present, the “gate” you are trying to open was never closed to begin with.
If you visit a major Zen monastery in Japan, you enter through a massive, grand wooden gateway called the Sanmon. It is a common teaching practice for masters to instruct students standing right beneath this gigantic physical structure by telling them, “The Great Way has no gate.” The physical gate is there to remind you that the spiritual gate is an illusion.
Christian monks and contemplatives have much to learn from this. There is a Christian counterpart to all this, but it seems to be downplayed or even totally neglected: St. Paul’s profound teaching that there is nothing that can come between us and the Love that God has for us….in other words God. Christianity, or rather some diluted and polluted forms of it, seems very adept at finding or even creating “gates” that we need to open before we are “with God.” We will get back to all this in a more extensive way in the next posting.
- “And now for something completely different.”
With that line from Monty Python, let us look at this recent news event: Christa Pike, who had committed a brutal killing when she was in her teens, was condemned to be executed by the State of Tennessee. She had been raised by an alcoholic mother, among drug addicts, abused, at least twice raped as a child, but they deemed lifetime in prison was not enough, she has to be killed. So the State administers TWO doses of a lethal injection, but they do not cause death but make her seem like brain dead. She is rushed to a hospital, and in their own words “life-saving treatment was given her.” Christa recovers and they still plan to kill her next year after they figure out what went wrong. I would say that what is wrong would be the State of Tennessee. This reminds one of the madness of the Vietnam era: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it” Here we “save her so we can destroy her later.” The whole situation is madness. As the Pope said in regard to another execution spectacle: this is a cult of death.