TEN THOUSAND MILES WITHOUT A CLOUD
By Sun Shuyun
HarperCollins, £17.99; 356pp
ISBN 0 0071 2964 5
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SUN Shuyun grew up during the Cultural Revolution in 1960s and 1970s China as a devoted believer in Mao. The daughter of a Communist soldier, she would run “shouting and laughing” alongside humiliating public parades of bad elements such as landlords, loose women and monks. An entry from her primary school diary reads: “Must read more of Chairman Mao’s works, listen to him more attentively, and be his good child.”
But Sun’s orthodox Communist family had a politically incorrect skeleton in its cupboard: a devoutly Buddhist grandmother. During the Cultural Revolution, when the cult of Mao reigned supreme, all other forms of religious belief were condemned as “feudal practices”. Sun and her sisters made fun of their grandmother’s faith, while their father blamed his mother-in-law for hindering his promotion through the army ranks: “To hell with all your superstitious crap.
What is so good about your gods up there?” The mindless violence of the Cultural Revolution, however, shook the Sun family’s faith in Communism. In 1997, her father died a disillusioned man, while Sun experienced the political thaw of the early 1980s as an undergraduate at Beijing University, then won a scholarship to study in England.
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Returning to China in the late 1990s for her father’s funeral, she was struck by the spiritual vacuum within a country that outwardly espoused Communism whilst practising capitalism. More and more Chinese, she discovered, were seeking to fill this void with religion: Christianity, popular deities and Buddhism. “You live in England and you don’t go to church?” a lapsed Communist asked her in amazement. Suddenly feeling the need for a “confirming faith” and guiltily remembering her mockery of her grandmother’s beliefs, Sun decided to embark on one of the greatest Buddhist pilgrimages in history: to follow in the footsteps of Xuanzang, a Chinese monk who, in 629 AD, set off across Central Asia to seek enlightenment in India, the home of Buddhism. Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud is the story of her travels, interwoven with tales of Xuanzang, and the religious and political histories of the countries she passes through.
Along his 18-year journey, Xuanzang faced death many times over: from hunger, thirst and robbers. Although travelling through the region has become easier in the intervening 13 and a half centuries, Sun’s trip is still no picnic. Walking out of the airport in Peshawar, she picks her driver out from ranks of heavily armed Pashtun men. She asks if a visit to Taleban-ruled Afghanistan would be possible. “Do you really want to end your journey there?” her Peshawar guide replies. Bihar, once the Buddha’s holy land, is now an impoverished, crime-ridden state where 50,000 people were murdered in the six years before Sun’s visit.
Disappointment is another hazard of the trip. Over the last couple of centuries, Western imperialists and gaudy tourism have succeeded in sucking much of the magical serenity out of religious sites in the region. In Turfan, only chisel marks are left of the spectacular cave murals removed in the 19th century by the German explorer Albert von Le Coq and his European contemporaries. Seeing Sun’s disappointment, her jolly guide Fat Ma tries to cheer her up. “Come on, lighten up. You’re going to see something really interesting only a hundred yards away”: a garishly bright Xuanzang theme park.
Sun’s final test is to enrol for Buddhist study at the Thunderbolt Monastery in northwest China. On the first morning, her mentor shakes her out of bed before daylight: “Do you know what they say if you are lazy. . .? You will be born as a snake in your next life.” “Who cares?” Sun responds, quickly realising she isn’t cut out to be a Buddhist. After a few days of pit latrines and overcooked noodles, she heads towards home for a banquet complete with turtle soup. But despite her failure to attain nirvana en route, her travels through the holy places and history of Buddhism spell two things out for her: the utter bankruptcy of the Maoist religion, and the importance of respecting and tolerating other beliefs — both useful messages for contemporary China.