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| [a] Sunrise on Mt. Tai RL |
From Spring to Summer
It is spring, the second lunar month. In the West, we call it “March.” I sleep fitfully in my mountaintop guesthouse, then rise at 3:00 to watch the first glints of light on the Shandong province horizon. For the next three hours I watch the unfolding of sunrise on Mt. Tai. With throngs of pilgrims, I see the day begin again, but in the month of the beginning and on the mountain of all beginnings. It is sunrise on Mt. Tai, and time has begun again, as if from scratch—as it does every single day in perpetuity on the mountain of beginnings.
Before the sun has climbed very high on the horizon, I
start down the winding paths on the city-sized acreage of Mt. Tai’s “peak.”
Just as I near the steep staircase under the “South Heaven Gate,” I pause to
watch a group of travelers—several families combined into an early morning
cosmological enterprise. On the granite marker with each of the “True Forms”
(meta-characters that function on a plane beyond the linguistic) for the five mountains
on its face, pilgrims rub the forms in correct cosmological sequence. Mt. Tai
in the east—rub, rub. Mt. Heng in the south—rub, rub. Mt. Song in the
center—rub, rub. Mt. Hua in the west—rub, rub. And finally Mt. Heng in the
north—rub, rub. They have, in their tactile journey, retraced en petite the journeys of the ancient
sage kings. They have reconfigured time and space. If they were emperors or
even mere kings, they would have reconstituted the realm. As individual
travelers, they have climbed all five sacred mountains of China. With their
fingers.
Really. The “true forms” are the mountains.
I admire the scene, repeated on each of the mountains countless times during any day. The granite markers become worn with the greasy acid of palms and fingers, and the hard rock must be recarved and reproduced every decade or so. They travel the miniature circuit with their fingers and reproduce the natural one…at the same time.
Then I descend the mountain, moving in a gravitational and
calendrical pull past stone poetic inscriptions, cable cars, throngs of
travelers, reborn vegetation, buses, shopkeepers, and stone. I pass through
the First Heaven Gate (一天門), where
Confucius was said to have noted that even his home state of Lu looked small
from this vantage point. I finish the hike, take a cab to my hotel, have a
quick dinner, pack, and take a cab to the airport. The cosmology seems to be in order.
Now consult your calendar and flash forward. It is summer, the fifth month (what we in the West call “June”). As soon as I walk out of the Changsha airport in Hunan province, the humidity hits me like a wet gym towel. It is summer, and the early Chinese cosmologists “knew” that summer (if you were a sage king) was to be spent climbing and sacrificing to the southern sacred mountain—the mountain of summer, of the color red, and of highest intensity.
Before I leave for the southern mountain, though, I take a bus to another pilgrimage site, and perhaps the most famous one today in all of China—Mao Zedong’s birthplace in Shaoshan. I see teeming political religiosity, with what I take to be a startling level of wailing devotion and bowing, all around the humble little childhood village of the Great Helmsman. Politics, religion—conflation.
Back on the mountain pilgrimage path, a rickety regional
bus barrels toward the mountains. I think of the English saying “keep a good
tongue in your head” and cannot help but recall Jules Verne’s passage in Around the World in Eighty Days, in
which Passsepartout is advised, while riding near the neck of an elephant
across India, not to let his tongue meet his teeth. A stray tongue could be a
severed one. The same can be said for bumpy roads in southern China.
Everywhere, I see lush fields, basketball pickup games, and little goslings. Narrow roads separate the rice fields, and workers seem set to their knees in mud. Oxen abound. As I near the village of South Peak (Nanyue; 南嶽), the bus slows to a crawl. The signs are everywhere, and, even if you miss one or two, you cannot miss them all. Every few meters, it seems, there is another stall, operated by a local proprieter, selling something that everyone seems to want in this area. There is supply and, to be sure, there is demand. To say that there is competition is an understatement. Everywhere, this single character dominates:
The bus stops. Travelers-turned-pilgrims flock to buy incense sticks, hell money, and other necessities. The bus coughs, spits, and restarts, bouncing down the highway to the location everyone demands—the South Peak Temple (南嶽廟), the place where respects are paid at the base of the great mountain. “Everyone” enters the temple at the rear. Temples are painstakingly ordered to flow from south to north, but the commercial movements bring almost everyone to the “back” of the temple. The cosmology of it all is rent asunder, but everyone has the same location in mind, in any case—the furnaces at the “center.”
I walk around the vast temple complex and, in
a bit of showmanship for no one in particular, enter it from the “correct”
direction. I pass by the “release life pool,” the pavilions for drums and
bells, and a construct in the center of the path on which pilgrims rub the wood
and the stone “round and square” money
figures all around it. I ask people what they are doing and receive a wide
variety of answers from “it’s a little bit superstitious” to “I rub the beams and stone
to bring myself fortune.”
Finally, I reach the center of the temple. The furnaces. Pilgrims fight the “flow” of energy from back to front, but eventually reach the same place. Today (as with most days) just one of the paired furnaces is blazing. A tour group in matching caps, led by a megaphone-bearing leader, dumps bag after bag of incense and hell money into the stoves, which belch forth smoke in acquiescence. A small family begins in democracy (mother, father, and little son each clutches incense sticks). The terrific blaze from the furnace scares the youth, who gives his sticks to his father. The mother, noticing her son, gives her sticks, as well, to her husband. An egalitarian scene turns starkly patriarchal in an instant, and the father—seemingly emboldened by the deference shown him—stands squarely against the pulsating heat, bows, and slowly drops the incense sticks into the furnaces before rejoining his family with increased domestic capital.
Visitors from Taiwan arrive. Their incense sticks shine an understated light of ash, flame, and stick, just as they were taught to do almost since birth. Their sticks are a thing of beauty. Near them, a group of young men try to remain calm and focused as their own sticks burn like torches in a Paleolithic cave. They laugh and tamp and look around them to see if anyone else finds it funny. The visitors from Taiwan are appalled in a way that a Westerner might understand only if someone in a Catholic church belched and rubbed his stomach in satisfaction after receiving the body and blood in wafer form.
Finally, a young woman, alone, approaches the furnaces. She has incense sticks and seems to carry the burdens of a family or clan with her. These are not, it seems to me, the worries of a single young woman in the Hunan summer. She approaches the furnace. The heat forces her back. Again, she approaches the furnace, getting closer. She pauses. She looks left, and then right. In the corner of her eye, she spots an attendant. Throw, throw! he shouts. She winds up, and then pauses. Throw them! he says. He makes an exaggerated tossing gesture to convey his meaning. She moves closer, winds, and throws. He smiles. She walks away, visibly concerned.
The afternoon has ebbed into evening. I return to my hotel. The base (of the mountain) devotions have been made, and it is finally time to start up the path, past temples and historical markers that we read about only in textbooks. Soon, we will be on the road—Unterwegs.
It is spring, the second lunar month. In the West, we call it “March.” I sleep fitfully in my mountaintop guesthouse, then rise at 3:00 to watch the first glints of light on the Shandong province horizon. For the next three hours I watch the unfolding of sunrise on Mt. Tai. With throngs of pilgrims, I see the day begin again, but in the month of the beginning and on the mountain of all beginnings. It is sunrise on Mt. Tai, and time has begun again, as if from scratch—as it does every single day in perpetuity on the mountain of beginnings.
 |
| [c] True Forms RL |
Really. The “true forms” are the mountains.
I admire the scene, repeated on each of the mountains countless times during any day. The granite markers become worn with the greasy acid of palms and fingers, and the hard rock must be recarved and reproduced every decade or so. They travel the miniature circuit with their fingers and reproduce the natural one…at the same time.
 |
| [c] Spring RL |
✓Spring…✓east...✓green...✓beginnings
Now consult your calendar and flash forward. It is summer, the fifth month (what we in the West call “June”). As soon as I walk out of the Changsha airport in Hunan province, the humidity hits me like a wet gym towel. It is summer, and the early Chinese cosmologists “knew” that summer (if you were a sage king) was to be spent climbing and sacrificing to the southern sacred mountain—the mountain of summer, of the color red, and of highest intensity.
Before I leave for the southern mountain, though, I take a bus to another pilgrimage site, and perhaps the most famous one today in all of China—Mao Zedong’s birthplace in Shaoshan. I see teeming political religiosity, with what I take to be a startling level of wailing devotion and bowing, all around the humble little childhood village of the Great Helmsman. Politics, religion—conflation.
 |
| [c] Fields RF |
Everywhere, I see lush fields, basketball pickup games, and little goslings. Narrow roads separate the rice fields, and workers seem set to their knees in mud. Oxen abound. As I near the village of South Peak (Nanyue; 南嶽), the bus slows to a crawl. The signs are everywhere, and, even if you miss one or two, you cannot miss them all. Every few meters, it seems, there is another stall, operated by a local proprieter, selling something that everyone seems to want in this area. There is supply and, to be sure, there is demand. To say that there is competition is an understatement. Everywhere, this single character dominates:
香
Fragrance...incense.The bus stops. Travelers-turned-pilgrims flock to buy incense sticks, hell money, and other necessities. The bus coughs, spits, and restarts, bouncing down the highway to the location everyone demands—the South Peak Temple (南嶽廟), the place where respects are paid at the base of the great mountain. “Everyone” enters the temple at the rear. Temples are painstakingly ordered to flow from south to north, but the commercial movements bring almost everyone to the “back” of the temple. The cosmology of it all is rent asunder, but everyone has the same location in mind, in any case—the furnaces at the “center.”
 |
| [d] Square RL |
Finally, I reach the center of the temple. The furnaces. Pilgrims fight the “flow” of energy from back to front, but eventually reach the same place. Today (as with most days) just one of the paired furnaces is blazing. A tour group in matching caps, led by a megaphone-bearing leader, dumps bag after bag of incense and hell money into the stoves, which belch forth smoke in acquiescence. A small family begins in democracy (mother, father, and little son each clutches incense sticks). The terrific blaze from the furnace scares the youth, who gives his sticks to his father. The mother, noticing her son, gives her sticks, as well, to her husband. An egalitarian scene turns starkly patriarchal in an instant, and the father—seemingly emboldened by the deference shown him—stands squarely against the pulsating heat, bows, and slowly drops the incense sticks into the furnaces before rejoining his family with increased domestic capital.
 |
| [e] Sticks RL |
Visitors from Taiwan arrive. Their incense sticks shine an understated light of ash, flame, and stick, just as they were taught to do almost since birth. Their sticks are a thing of beauty. Near them, a group of young men try to remain calm and focused as their own sticks burn like torches in a Paleolithic cave. They laugh and tamp and look around them to see if anyone else finds it funny. The visitors from Taiwan are appalled in a way that a Westerner might understand only if someone in a Catholic church belched and rubbed his stomach in satisfaction after receiving the body and blood in wafer form.
Finally, a young woman, alone, approaches the furnaces. She has incense sticks and seems to carry the burdens of a family or clan with her. These are not, it seems to me, the worries of a single young woman in the Hunan summer. She approaches the furnace. The heat forces her back. Again, she approaches the furnace, getting closer. She pauses. She looks left, and then right. In the corner of her eye, she spots an attendant. Throw, throw! he shouts. She winds up, and then pauses. Throw them! he says. He makes an exaggerated tossing gesture to convey his meaning. She moves closer, winds, and throws. He smiles. She walks away, visibly concerned.
The afternoon has ebbed into evening. I return to my hotel. The base (of the mountain) devotions have been made, and it is finally time to start up the path, past temples and historical markers that we read about only in textbooks. Soon, we will be on the road—Unterwegs.
Unterwegs im Namen der Göttlischen Berechnung.
On the Road in the Name of Divinatory Calculation.
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| [f] Overview RL |
With apologies to Immanuel Kant...and Adam Smith.
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