A Time of Ghosts. Hok-Pang Tang
and possessions. In the monastery he learned to do without. Now he was poor. But material things held no attraction for him, and he led a very simple life. His food, like that of monks, was vegetarian. It seemed that none of the pride and aggressiveness of former generations lived on in him. If someone stepped on his foot, it was he who apologized. His behavior was like that of the third son in the old proverb:
A father asked each of his three sons what he would do if someone were to spit in his face. The first son replied, “I would say, ‘Please don’t do it. If you do it again I will fight.’” The second son answered, “I would take out a cloth and wipe the spit from my face.” But the third son replied, “I would just forget about it and let the spit dry on my face.”
The father did not approve the first answer because it revealed that the son took offense and was aggressive. He did not entirely approve the second answer because wiping away the spit showed that it was regarded as offensive. He approved the third son’s reply because it showed that no offense was felt and even the spit was not seen as repulsive. And that is how the Herb Doctor lived his life and conducted himself in human affairs.
Though he paid little attention to the condition of his clothing and did not bathe as often as some might have thought proper, he kept the Buddhist shrine in his room immaculately clean. There were always a few fresh flowers before the images of Shakyamuni and Kuan Yin. Shakyamuni is the historical Buddha who appeared in India. Kuan Yin is the Bodhisattva of Compassion, whose name means “The One Who Hears the Cries of the World.” Sometimes the flowers were gifts from grateful patients (he charged nothing for treatment, but accepted whatever was freely given); sometimes they were simple wild flowers he happened upon in his wanderings.
He spent much time in continuous repetition of the name of the Buddha Amitabha, noting each repetition by slipping another of the one hundred and eight beads on the string through his fingers. Often he sat lost for hours in meditation, his feet resting on his thighs in the lotus posture. It must have been restful and invigorating, because in our home he was always the latest to sleep and the earliest to rise.
Strange to say, he did have a wife. She was a girl who had been bought for him when he was young. She was given the chance to marry another when he went to study in the temple, but chose not to, and when he returned to the world they were married – a marriage never physically consummated.
Before the Herb Doctor could take up residence with us, there was still the matter of the house. Life could never be peaceful in a place so infested with tormented and malicious spirits. So he made ready to cleanse it and expel the ghosts.
First he went to the front of our dwelling. There he placed two sharp swords, which hung threateningly across the entrance. Then he moved to the center of the mansion, where on the house-post he suspended an old bag with a drawstring about its opening. Next he wrote many copies of a Taoist talismanic symbol. These he hung on all the walls. After that he cut up a great deal of paper into life-sized images of soldiers. Then he brushed a poem onto paper in black, fluid characters:
Unfair things have a reason;
If there is debt, a loaner exists.
Far, far away is Heaven;
So deep, deep, is Hell.
Your spirit may go wherever it will,
But trouble not the innocent.
And then he wrote another:
Good to good,
Bad to bad;
High is high,
Low is low;
Each returns to its origin.
He had everyone leave the house, being sure to close all the bedroom doors tightly. We watched as he seated himself in an open space in the garden, mumbling and mumbling incantation-like words. As he muttered on and on, it seemed to my astonished eyes that the paper soldiers rose and stood vigilantly beside him.
All this took place on a calm and beautiful night. We were silent as he burned the papers on which he had written the poems. As they caught flame and flared up, I was jolted and frightened by a sudden crash of thunder. The quiet night turned almost instantly into a storm, and as rain began to pelt down there was a continuous, growling roll of thunder.
The Herb Doctor took a long, horsetail-like whisk, and with it he passed around the house, flicking the long hairs to and fro as he chanted. The spiritual force he created was so compelling that the evil spirits were driven to the entrance like leaves blown before the wind. There they met the swords. The gentler ghosts were pulled helplessly into the open bag on the central house-post. The Herb Doctor took the bag and pulled the drawstring tight. As he did so the thunder and rain ceased, and the night was tranquil again.
A servant later told us that he saw blood on the swords across the house entrance. The doctor took the bag away, and we did not ask what became of it.
His final act on that strange night was to tell my grandparents that on the following day, they were to call Buddhist monks and nuns to the house. His instructions were followed, and for three days the air in the old mansion was filled with the chanting of sutras and dharanis to aid the tormented spirits in the other world. Nine paper bridges were constructed and burned during the intoning of the texts to provide passage out of the nine levels of Hell. Paper money, clothes, and palanquins were burned as the monks and nuns prayed for the release of the suffering ghosts.
Now what is one to make of all this? I can only say that it did happen. I witnessed it, as did the others in the family. We can be modern and scientific and say that the ritual was performed for its psychological effect on us all. One may believe what one likes. But the fact is that from the night of the uncanny storm, all the strange sounds and apparitions within the house ceased, and one could feel that its unhealthy atmosphere had passed away. The living were now the only residents in the old mansion.
There is much more that one could say of the remarkable Ch’ing Yu Chou. I have called him the Herb Doctor for simplicity’s sake, though that was but one of his many skills. He was adept at calligraphy, music, poetry, and was in particular a great scholar of the I Ching, the Book of Changes, in which all that can happen in this world is set forth in the symbolic forms of trigrams and hexagrams. One who learns their transformations and mutations can accurately predict the future, though to do this is far more difficult than Western books on the subject would lead one to believe.
All the Herb Doctor’s learning was pervaded by a deeply Buddhist piety. This had a strong influence on my father, who was very impressed by his new-found friend’s freedom from bondage to self-importance and material possessions. The Herb Doctor treated life and its sorrows and joys as a temporary, passing show to which one should no more become attached than any sensible person would cling to the illusory images moving across a movie screen. One could see from his life that he had realized the significance of the old Chinese tale of the man who got what he wanted. This is the story in brief:
A poor man had just put his rice over the fire to cook when a sage appeared at his door. The two sat down and talked.
“What would you like your life to be?” the sage asked.
The poor man pondered, then replied that he could think of nothing more glorious than to be wealthy and powerful, surrounded by beautiful women. As he talked on, he suddenly found himself in completely different circumstances. The walls of his ramshackle hut faded and vanished, and he forgot all his years of poverty and discovered that he had become rich. As time passed his wealth and power grew ever greater, and he experienced all the delights that money, authority, and possessions can bring.
But as the years fell away, though it seemed that he had everything a man could want, still something seemed to be missing. He felt himself growing old. His body began to weaken, his senses lost their sharpness. Former delights could no longer please, and for newer pleasures he seemed pressed to find the strength.
Finally, as death drew inescapably near,