Hubei: Autumn in Wuzu Temple of Huangmei County

After finishing my Beijing Xian tour, today is the first day of the “Nanyue Journey” for Audi Q5. The first day’s journey is over 600 kilometers. Leaving from Wuhan City at 8 o’clock in the morning, and after 200 kilometers ride, we arrived at the first stop: Wuzu Temple in Huangmei County.

Built by the fifth founder of Zen Buddhism in theTanghui 5th year of Tang Dynasty (654), Wuzu Temple is the sacred place where the sixth founder Huineng became immortal and. Located in the East Mountain in Huangmei county, the temple is hailed as “the World Ancestral Home”. As the shape of the mountain is like a phoenix which is ready to fly, therefore it is also called Phoenix Mountain.

I have heard about Wuzu Temple long time ago. In my childhood, I had known little about Zen Buddhism by reading Cai Zhizhong’s cartoon Wisdom of the Zen Masters. In fact, I know little about Buddhism, but the famous poetry wrote by Huineng is widely known by most of Chinese people. It is said that the senior monk of Hong-jen's monastery wrote a poem on a wall that went like this:

Our body is like the bodhi tree,And our mind a mirror bright.Carefully we wipe them often,And let no dust alight.

Huineng, not yet a monk then, saw this verse and composed another one —

There is no bodhi tree really exists;Nor the frame of a mirror bright.While nothingness (i.e. wholeness) is the essence of nature,Where can the dust alight?

The second poem seems to say that bodhi tree, mirror, dust and alight are all concepts if one falls into a conceptual perspective. If one could go beyond the conceptual perspective, i.e. the observation of the enlightened one, none of these really stands for existence.

Perhaps only those who really have a affinity to Buddha can understand the profound meaning of the poem. Although I am not interested in Buddhism, but the feeling about temple is the same. Just like when I attended the Xi’an package tour, I visited Da Ci’en Temple where Monk Xuanzang lived in, I felt a kind of inner calm in my heart.