Travels With Dongbo

We have lost our best friend. Dongbo left us one month ago,  he had been fighting with the pancreatic cancer in his last months. He passed away, in Honolulu August 25 of 2009, happened peacefully. Dongbo was our friend and a man with wisdom, courage and happiness,  and is ALWAYS.

As a close friend and technical partner, I believe we will continue his ideals with Mountain Songs. The website and the dream are still alive!

If you have any ideas for the future of our website, please send me an email.
To: Robin Zhang < robin (at) atomixtech (dot) com >

Dongbo enjoyed his Chinese poetry world, he often said he met his old poet friend Su Shi in the mountains and drunk with him together. At this moment, I am reading a biography book of Su Shi, I did find a way to continue our talking between friends.

A small poem I wrote, it’s a letter I want to send to the heaven.

又是季节交替时，
时常想起老傅的身影。

以往他在上海，
便会约他喝咖啡聊天。
享受秋天的凉爽，
和小小的忧郁。

这几天，
常把一本东坡传记放在包里。
在秋色中阅读，
感觉我们的对话还在继续，
还有那些小小的忧郁。

老傅常说，
他又在山里偶遇苏轼，
与东坡对饮聊天。

也许现在，
他又在天堂中偶遇故交，
与朋友对饮聊天，
谈论以往的快乐云云。

If you fly between San Francisco and Portland, and want to view the USA’s most spectacular snow blanketed volcanic peaks, book a window seat on the right side of the jet going north and the left side flying south. There is no guarantee that the weather will cooperate, but if it does, as it did for me yesterday on my flight to Portland, you will bne awarded by birdseye views of mounts Shasta, Jefferson, the Three Sisters, Hood, and as you swing into the Portland airport mounts Adams and  St Helens. Makes the flight worthwhile!

What’s in Portland of interest to MountainSongs? Check out the Chinese Garden in downtown Portland, a lovely bit of Suzhou in Oregon. You will find many couplets around the garden. These couplets were selected by our TransPoet Charles Wu, and at the garden you can purchase a book of these couplets translated into English by Charles. 

Borders Books, 7pm at the same second floor table over looking Union Square. This evening the moon hides behind a layer of cold fog. The square is full of Tibetan flags, monks, workers and students demonstrating against China. It is the 50th anniversary of Mao’s clampdown on Tibet and the Dalai Lama’s flight to India. And there is no sign that China is loosening its grip on this mountain country. If anything, since the demonstrations last year at the time of the Olympics, the Chinese army has imposed harsh martial law in Tibet.

The most recent symbol of Chinese brutality is the report from Sichuan. A Tibetan Monk doused himself with gasoline and ignited himself. A Chinese soldier walked up and shot the burning monk in the head! Reminds me of the South Vietnamese officer, in the mid 1960’s. He had captured a suspected Vietcong and had his arms bound behind him. They were standing next to each other on the street in Saigon in broad daylight. The officer calmly pulled out his pistol, reached over and shot the prisoner in the head. In this case the atrocity was captured on film. What kind of a human being would murder another human being to keep him from committing suicide?!?

The demonstrators are now circumnambulating Union Square in the gathering darkness…

San Francisco 03-09-2009

Flew into Frisco this morning on my way to a couple of meeting, an ECAI (Electronic Cultural Atlas Innitiative) meeting in historic Williamsburg, Virginia and the Association of Asian Studies Annual Meeting in Chicago. Checked into the small Fitzgerald Hotel on Post. Now at 8pm I’m sitting in the second floor coffee shop of Borders Books looking out over Union Square from a corner window. A full moon just climbed over the the buildings on the east side of the square.

This is almost the exact spot where I worked for a few months in the spring of 1955 as a telephone sales agent for United airlines. At that time this was United’s headquarters in San Francisco.

Guangzhou Baiyunshan 02-25-2009

Spent the afternoon tramping around Baiyunshan, a small mountain park in Guangzhou. Surprise! Last week I was on Yen Tu Mountain, the Buddhist mountain in northeast Vietnam which I learned was named after a mystical  Chinese Daoist hermit named Ai Qisheng. It is thought in Vetnam that he became an immortal there and left his earthly remains there. But on Yen Tu Mountain I gained very little knowledge about him.

At the foot of Baiyunshan, as I started my climb, I found a display of photographs and historical discriptions of Baiyunshan’s famous sites. The very first one was a photo of an ink painting of An Qisheng 安期升 riding off on a crane over Baiyunshan! The text below the photo reads as follows:

Zheng Anqi, also named An Qisheng, was from Langya, Shandong in the Warring States Period. When young he sold medicine at the shore of Donghai (I suppose on the Daoist mountain Laoshan in Qingdao.) It is said he lived for over 1,000 years and was called Millennium Codger 千歲翁. Emperor Shihuang 秦始皇帝 ordered him to provide him with the ingredients to attain immortality. An Qisheng searched for them in Cattail Gorge 蒲洞 on Baiyunshan but only found enough for one person. Without thinking he imbibed it, then fearing Qin Shihuang’s fury, pitched himself over the cliff.

But he didn’t plummet down, just floated in the mist, and along came a white stork and carried him away. That was on the 24th of July and henceforth this day is known in these parts as Zheng Immortal’s Birthday . Later in the Tang, Li Bai wrote in a poem, ‘Better to leave in a cloud of mist, than to be squashed by Emperor Qin!’ ‘秦帝如戎來, 蒼蒼向 煙雲’.

It is interesting to see how local people in different areas, regardless of their ethnic background, appropriated legends for themselves.

I’m sitting in a coffee shop with wifi on a street that 40 years ago was lined with seedy restaurants and raunchy bars with iron gratings across the windows so that VietCon on motor bikes could not swing by and roll handgranades into the shops. In those days it was dangerous just to eat and drink, and I hated this place!  Now it is peace and quiet and upscale!

Recently there has been discussion on the MCLC List, Modern Chinese Language and Culture List, about variants of Li Bai’s most famous poem, 靜夜思, due to the ‘discovery’ of an alternate version in Japan. The most well known version of the poem is:

床前明月光

疑是地上霜

舉頭望明月

低頭思故鄉

The question revolves around which is the ‘correct’ version of the first line, 床前明月光 ming yue guang or 床前看月光 kan yue guang?  Here are a couple of the comments:

“Personally I prefer the sound of “ming yue guang” to “kan yue guang”, which also has the function of turning guang into a verb.  The phrase “bright moon shines” seems more poetic somehow than “I am watching moonlight”.  But that’s just me… 

Nevertheless, it’s fun to tell people that the version they learned as children might not be the “authentic” version and watch their jaws drop and their eyes pop out in wonder and disbelief.

In any case, I’ll probably stick to the “ming” version when teaching it to my own kids ; )”

“I happen to have a Japanese edition of Li’s poetry published in the Meiji reign year 34. Indeed it has “kan yueguang” and “wang shan yue” respectively in accordance with a Song edition. But to say an earlier extant version is the “original” and therefore “correct” version seems simplistic. No one, for instance, has made similar claims about the Mawangdui version of the Daodejing. It’s not surprising that a popular poem or song should undergo variations as it gets passed on by word of mouth as well as by hand-copying or print. Apparently the received version of “ming yue” is the one that has outlived other variants by popular choice. What we still don’t know is whether or not there were versions that used “ming yue” but predated the alleged Song edition. Let’s pray for the next Big Dig.”

Had another pleasant visit with Prof. Dr. Le Manh That, Vice Rector of the Buddhist University of Vietnam this afternoon. First met him at the ECAI Conference in Hanoi last December and called on him in Saigon after the meeting. It was Profesor Le who gave me his books on the King-Monk Tran Nhan Tong which made me return to Vietnam this time to visit Yen Tu.

Professor Le has a most interesting biography, perhaps a bit dated!

“Born Le Manh That on April 15, 1944 in Quang Tri province, Reverend Thich Tri Sieu went into the monkhood at the age of 12. 

 He studied in Vietnam and abroad, receiving a Ph.D. in Buddhist studies and philosophy in May 1974 from the University of Wisconsin. In Vietnam, he was a professor at the Van Hanh University and coeditor of the Encyclopedia of Vietnamese Buddhism (with Rev. Thich Tue Si). 

 On April 2, 1984, he was arrested with other Buddhist monks and followers at Gia Lam Temple in Saigon. He was detained for four years without trial in Chi Hoa prison. On September 30, 1988, Rev. Thich Tri Sieu, a member of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (UBCV), was brought to trial for “plotting to overthrow the People’s Government” and given a death sentence. 

 On November 15, 1988, following international protest, the Supreme People’s Court of Vietnam commuted the sentence of Rev. Thich Tri Sieu to 20 years imprisonment. He was imprisoned at Prison Camp Z230A, Dong Nai province, along with many other political prisoners. 

 On August 31, 1998, Rev. Thich Tri Sieu was released from prison. He told a human rights organization (the International Buddhist Information Bureau) : “In the New Economic Zone near my prison, on a stretch of desolate waste-land, the local people set up a make-shift Pagoda commonly known as the ‘Tin-roof Pagoda’ so they could study and practice Buddhism. This is a simple act, but it shows how deeply Buddhism has impregnated the common people in Viet Nam…Before I was arrested, I was writing a book on the history of Vietnamese Buddhism from its origins until today. I had written up to the rule of King Ly Nam De (IV Century AD). Then I was arrested, so I had to stop. But I am ready to finish it now.” 

Source: Vietnamese Federation For Fatherland’s Integrity  Voices of Conscience 

PS Arrived in Saigon last night and at a small cafe in Pham Ngu Lao, shared pho and Tiger beers with a French farmer (goat cheese) from somewhere north of Provence, who is visiting Vietnam with his 14 year old son, who is one half Vietnamese, a lovely bright lad. The Farmer doesn’t speak more than a few words of English, and I speak no French except for the singing of one French love song, Plaiser D’amour. But we had a delightful evening and made friends.

He is Italian by background and his Italian father was in the French Foreign Legion, fought in Vietnam in the mid 50’s, was wounded seriously, recovered and fought in Algiers and somewhere else, then retired as a French citizen and bought the farm. It was a night that brought back a lot of memories; watching Movietone news at the local movie house in Portland, Oregon the 1950’s…in those days in the cenema, there was always a cartoon and a clip of news before each feature. I watched the farmer’s father and his comrades slogging through the Vietnamese mud. It was my first connection to Vietnam.

There were lots of silences since our vocabularies were small and during these I thought about the unpleasant nights and days I spent visiting Saigon in the late 1960’s when the Vietnamese War was at it’s height. I travled with my guitar and picked and sang mostly folk songs and many of then anti war songs.

It was close to midnight when I drifted back to my $15 a night room at the small Hong Hoa Hotel.

The winter months are festival time here and last November was the 700th anniversary of the death of Tran Nhan Tong so there is a hugh crowd of pilgrims on the mountain, and they are pilgrims not tourists! Unlike China where half or more of the temple visitors are just casual tourists. 

Tough climb, particularly when souped up with antibiotics fighting off a cold! Yesterday climbed up from the car park to Chua Hoa Yen where I found a gaggle of restaurant inns where I could camp for the night. I left Hanoi at 8am by taxi and arrived at the Chua Lam at the base of the mountain three hours later at 11am. By the time I reached Chua Hoa Yen it was 3:30pm.

From near Chua Hoa Yen I took the second cable car up to near the summit. But from top of the cable car it is a strenuous difficult climb over jumbled rock, with little semblance of a trail, before one reaches the summit and Chua Dong, the copper pagoda. (Interesting resemblance to the small golden temple on Wutaishan, the new one built on Emeishan, the one on the peak of  Wudangshan, the latter being a Daoist, not Buddhist, structure. It was getting late in the day but flocks of pilgrims, young and old, were scrabbing their way over the rocks to pray by Chun Dong and rub their hands and spirit money on its polished surfaces