Yellow River Odyssey. Bill Porter
buses arrived. With his home out of the way, I proceeded to his grave. It was two kilometers north of town, which was a bit beyond my energy level. So I climbed aboard one of the pedicabs that plied the main road of Chufu. A few minutes later, I was in China’s largest manmade forest park. The park covered 200 hectares of former farmland that over the centuries had been planted with 40,000 trees from all parts of China. There were more than 200 species in the park. In addition to Confucius’ tomb, the park contained countless graves of his descendants. But even 200 hectares were not enough. Graves were constantly being dug up to make room for the newly dead. All of Confucius’ relatives had the right to be buried in the park, and there were 130,000 people in Chufu who could trace their ancestry back to the Sage. The solution was to allow his descendants to be buried there temporarily and for their remains to be moved elsewhere when new grave sites were needed.
From the park entrance, it was a short walk to his grave. In keeping with Confucius’ wishes, his tomb was a simple affair: a grass-covered mound with a stone tombstone hewn from the cliffs of Taishan. On it were inscribed the words Hsuan Sheng, Exalted Sage. After paying my respects, I visited the adjacent graves of his son, K’ung Li, and his grandson, K’ung Chi. After Confucius died, his disciple Tseng-tzu carried on the master’s teaching, which Tseng-tzu conveyed in the book known as the Great Learning. After the Analects, that was considered the second of the Confucian classics. Tsengtzu also taught Confucius’ grandson, and the grandson also became a prominent teacher in his own right. His interpretations of his grandfather’s doctrines make up the third Confucian classic, the book called the Doctrine of the Mean. I was a big fan of K’ung Chi’s book. It was so straightforward: “The Tao is what you can never leave. If you could leave it, it wouldn’t be the Tao.”
In front of K’ung Chi’s grave, I paused to admire the twin statues of a general and a minister standing guard. They represented the twin virtues of the Confucian ideal: service to the state in times of peace and service to the state in times of war. After paying my respects, I decided to forego the pedicab and walk back to town. On the way, I visited a temple dedicated to Confucius’ favorite disciple, Yen Hui, whose early death Confucius often lamented. And after another few blocks, I also visited a temple dedicated to the Duke of Chou. The Duke was the father of the first ruler of the state of Lu, of which Chufu was the capital. He was Confucius’ hero.
After returning for lunch back at the Confucius Family Mansion, I hired another pedicab and this time proceeded several kilometers east of town to yet another grave. This one belonged to Shao Hao. Shao Hao was the son of the Yellow Emperor and ruled North China more than 4,500 years ago. His grave was a simple grass-covered mound, but in front of it was a large stone pyramid. The stones were as smooth as glass and defied my best efforts to climb to the top, where several children were congratulating themselves on their success. I gave up and returned to the Confucius Family Mansion.
After a repeat of the previous night’s dinner of smoked tofu and assorted vegetables of the season, I walked out to the small store at the Mansion’s entryway and bought a bottle of Confucius Family Liquor. I thought certainly the Sage’s family must have concocted a noble brew. But I was wrong. Confucius’ family may have been expert in their great ancestor’s Tao of behavior, but the Tao of liquor remained beyond them. After two shots, I gave up, put the cork back in the bottle and left it in a drawer for the next unlucky guest to find.
Confucius’ grave
During his own lifetime, Confucius wasn’t all that well known. His ascension to sagehood was due largely to the efforts of two men who lived south of Chufu. Their names were Hsun-tzu and Meng-tzu. Hsun-tzu’s stomping grounds and grave were a hundred kilometers to the south and a bit too far for me, but Meng-tzu’s old home was only twenty kilometers away in the town of Tsouhsien. And that was where I headed the following morning, this time in a local bus that operated between the two towns every half hour.
In the West, Meng-tzu was known as Mencius, which was how Jesuits in China first romanized his name. As we drove through the barren countryside still waiting for warmer weather, we passed a forested hillside. That was where Mencius’ mother and many of his descendants were buried. His own grave was more remote, about ten kilometers to the east.
The reason Mencius’ mother inevitably came up in stories about him was that she was so concerned with his education, both academic and moral, she moved her home three times before she found a suitable environment for him. The place she finally chose was Tsouhsien. The old house site was still there, along with a large temple complex built in her son’s honor. There weren’t any English guides or guidebooks, but it was built along the same lines as the Confucius Temple in Chufu with the usual archways and courtyards and shrine halls, but on a smaller scale. And there weren’t any tour buses lined up outside. I was practically alone.
Just west of the shrine halls was another complex of buildings known as the Mencius Family Mansion. Like the Confucius Family Mansion, it was built as the residence of the oldest direct male descendant and his family. But while Confucius’ heir had fled to Taiwan, Mencius’ seventy-fourth male heir was still there. His name was Meng Fan-chi. He was in his eighties, and he lived in a courtyard in back in an area cordoned off from visitors.
Mencius, or Meng-tzu, flourished in the 4th century B.C. a hundred years after Confucius. His writings were also compiled into a book that bears his name. It was the fourth and final member of the group of books known as the Confucian Classics. As opposed to the somewhat terse sayings that make up the other three classics, students of classical Chinese read the Mengtzu with much more pleasure. That was because Mencius usually couched his teachings in stories, like this one about human nature:
“Ox Mountain was once wooded, but because it was close to town, its trees were all cut down by wood collectors and builders. And as time went by, it was visited by herds of cattle and sheep that grazed on its grass until there was nothing left but barren rock. When people see the mountain today, they imagine that nothing ever grew there. But surely this wasn’t the true nature of the mountain. The same might be said of human beings. We all possess feelings of kindness and justice. But day after day they are hacked away and destroyed by the way we conduct our lives. When this happens to us, we can’t imagine that once our nature was different. But surely this is not our true nature. Confucius said, ‘Hold fast to it, and you preserve it. Let it go and you destroy it.’ Confucius was speaking of nothing other than this heart of ours, which must be nurtured in order to protect it from woodcutters and shepherds. And in nurturing the heart, there is no better method than cutting down on our desires.”
Give me Mencius any day.
There were many more sites around Tsouhsien and Chufu associated with Confucius and his disciples, and Chufu was the sort of town where travelers often stayed longer than they planned. Historical associations aside, it was a good place to recuperate or relax. But I wasn’t there to recuperate or relax. After returning from Tsouhsien and pausing just long enough for lunch, I decided I needed an excursion to the countryside, and I had the perfect place in mind: Shihmenshan, or Stone Gate Mountain. It was twenty-five kilometers north of Chufu and just within bicycle range, and the Confucius Family Mansion had bicycles for rent. It took me nearly two hours to get there, but I finally made it. As its name in Chinese suggested, the mountain looked like a stone gate, whose two peaks faced each other across a narrow valley. The eastern peak was where the famous writer and recluse K’ung Shang-jen lived 300 years ago, and the remains of his hut were still visible. Visible, too, on the west peak was the spot where Li Pai and Tu Fu spent the night a thousand years earlier, and that was why I had made the effort to come there.
Li Pai and Tu Fu were China’s two greatest poets, not only of their time, but of any time, and they came there one summer day in the year 745 AD. After chaining my bicycle to the railing at the entryway, I followed the stone steps that led up the mountain. The steps continued on to a Buddhist temple near the top, but just before the temple, I turned off on another trail that led to a rocky outcrop and a pavilion built at the spot where the two poets met. The view was grand, with the valley below and the entire ridge of Shimenshan’s east peak spread out like a painting. I could imagine the two poets