Yellow River Odyssey. Bill Porter
and it was just as good as the first bowl. For those who weren’t able or who didn’t want to walk up the trail, this was where the road from town ended and where a cable car took over. But the cable car was expensive, and most people finished the second half on foot.
After catching my breath and restoring my well-being with the hot tofu pudding, I rejoined the other pilgrims on the trail. From Middle Heaven, the path continued along a long, fairly level stretch of trail that eventually led across Cloud Walk Bridge and then up a flight of steps to Five Pine Pavilion. In 219 BC, China’s first emperor sought shelter there beneath a pair of pine trees during a rainstorm. In gratitude, he made the pine trees ministers in his administration. Originally, there were only two pines. But both were washed away in another rainstorm. And they were replaced by five pines, only three of which remained. Obviously, Taishan was not a good place to be during a rainstorm. But the pavilion built to mark the spot was still called Five Pine Pavilion.
Further on, I paused to catch my breath again and sat down next to a stall where a man was hammering out name
chops on brass rings. He charged 5RMB, or seventy-five cents, and said it would only take five minutes, so I asked him to make one for my son. While I was waiting, an eighty-year-old man I had met earlier waved as he passed by. Gasping between words, he said it was just-a-matter-of-perseverance, one-step-at-a-time. As soon as my son’s name chop was done, I followed him, one step at a time.
Five hours after passing through the archway announcing Confucius’ ascent, I, too, reached the final archway, which was also where the cable car debouched its passengers. On the other side was a gauntlet of trinket sellers and food stalls. It had snowed the day before, and someone had made a snow buddha. I sat down nearby and ordered a bowl of hot cornmeal gruel and some fry bread. I was so famished, once more I had seconds. I was really enjoying being a pilgrim, instead of a lone hiker.
The summit was 1,500 meters high, and in addition to the stalls that supplied pilgrims with sustenance and trinkets, there were a number of shrine halls scattered across the ridge. Chief among them was one dedicated to the mountain spirit’s wife: the Primordial Princess of Rainbow Clouds. As I entered the courtyard, a Taoist priest hurried by on his way to conduct a ceremony inside. I stood outside the hall and watched as a half dozen priests chanted the daily liturgy to the accompaniment of drums and bells and chimes.
From above her shrine, the Yellow River was said to be visible on a clear day, and people often spent the night at one of the hostels near the summit to see the sunrise the next morning. But the lodgings were so flimsy, they reminded me of the big cardboard box that I kept in the garage when I was a boy and that I dragged into the backyard on nights when there was a meteor shower. I took a picture of the snow-covered roofs of the princess’ temple and followed Confucius back down to the civilization he helped establish.
CONFUCIUS
By the time I returned to the foot of Taishan, the sun was also on its way down. I picked up my bag from where I had left it at the train station’s luggage depository and caught the next bus headed for Chufu. It left as soon as it was full, and ninety minutes later, just as the last rays of the sun were disappearing, I checked into the Confucius Family Mansion. That was where Confucius’ lineal descendants lived, until they were evicted during the Cultural Revolution. Despite losing their home, the Sage’s relatives still controlled the town. Of Chufu’s 500,000 residents, 130,000 traced their ancestry to Confucius.
The current, direct male descendant, however, was not there. His name was K’ung Te-ch’eng, and he was in Taiwan. The Nationalists brought him to Taiwan in 1949 to support their claim to represent traditional Chinese culture. I first heard about him from my fellow graduate students in the philosophy department at the College of Chinese Culture outside Taipei. Every Sunday afternoon, they attended his private class on the Confucian classics. I once asked if I could join, but Master K’ung said he doubted if a foreigner could grasp the subtleties of his ancestor’s pronouncements, such as, “Man who sling mud at neighbor lose ground.”
But there I was living in K’ung Te-ch’eng’s house, which was now a hotel. It was a rambling one-story affair with numerous courtyards and corridors. At one time, it vied with the imperial residence in Beijing. But that was before the Cultural Revolution. Still, my room was so big, my bed looked lonesome. The Mansion was also the home of the Confucius Family Banquet, and I was just in time for dinner. The full banquet had to be ordered in advance and included nearly a hundred dishes representing every province of China. But it was for tour groups and party officials on an expense account, and I was alone. Still, I hardly felt slighted by the smoked tofu, for which Chufu was rightly famous, bamboo shoots with black mushrooms, stir-fried pea tendrils and rice pudding. As the Sage himself once said, “When it comes to food, it can never be too fine.”
Confucius was born just outside Chufu in 551 BC, a hundred years before the Buddha or Plato. The name Confu-cius was an early Latinized version of K’ung Fu-tzu. K’ung was his family name, and Fu-tzu was an honorific similar to the German “Herr Doktor” and meant “master.” Chufu was also where Master K’ung died. And he spent most of the intervening seventy-two years there as well.
During his lifetime, Confucius was not well known outside of Chufu, though he did visit a few of the surrounding kingdoms to promote his notion of good government. In 478 BC, two years after Confucius’ death, the ruler of the state of Lu, of which Chufu was the capital, built a small shrine to the Sage on the site of his old house, and over the centuries it was enlarged at imperial expense into the second biggest shrine hall in China, second only to the imperial shrine hall in Beijing’s Forbidden City. The tourist pamphlet said it was visited by three million people every year. Early the next morning, I made it a point to arrive just as the front gate swung open and, gratefully, before the tour buses.
The complex was so vast, visitors needed a guidebook or a guide, both of which were available at the entrance. From the front gate to the rear wall, the courtyards and shrine halls stretched for an entire kilometer, or about the same distance as they did in the Forbidden City in Beijing, with different views emerging through the archways that divided one shrine hall from the next. That was a concept the Chinese also used in their gardens, but in Chufu it was applied on a much grander scale.
From the front gate, the central processional led through park-like grounds shaded by towering pines and cedars, some of them 2,000 years old, and dozens of ancient steles recording the temple’s renovation by various emperors. The first major structure was the three-story Kuei-wen-ke, or Palace of Scholars, inside whose walls were more than a hundred pictures of the Sage’s life carved onto stone 1,500 years ago. Behind the Kueiwenke was a vast courtyard with even grander steles, most of them with their own enclosures. And beyond the courtyard of steles and off to one side was the Hsingtan, or Apricot Pavilion. That was where Confucius taught when the weather permitted. Next to it, a descendant of the original apricot tree was enjoying another spring. When the weather didn’t permit outside instruction, Confucius taught inside his house, which had since become the second biggest shrine hall in all of China and whose eaves required the support of ten dragon-encircled pillars carved from single blocks of stone.
I tried to imagine the scene of instruction: “ To put into practice what one has learned, is that not happiness? To greet friends from afar, is that not joy? To be unconcerned about being unknown, is that not the mark of a true man?” That was the passage that began the Analects, the collection of sayings that Confucius’ disciples put together after he died. While Mao’s sayings in his Little Red Book had come and gone, those of Confucius were still quoted. They first circulated among his disciples and their disciples until the second century AD, when Cheng Hsuan edited them into their present form: twenty chapters without any discernible order full of all sorts of oddities: “Girls and servants,” the Master said, “are the hardest to deal with. If you’re too familiar, they lose their humility. If you’re too distant, they get upset.” It wasn’t hard to see where all the Confucius Say jokes came from.
Mt. Taishan
My visit to Confucius’