_THE SACRED MOUNTAIN OF OMI._
Luncheon with a Chief Priest.--Tigers.--Mysterious
Lights.--The View of a Lifetime.--Pilgrims.--Glory of
Buddha.--Unburied Priests.
It was very hot in Chungking in 1892--too hot, we feared, for us to
bear, worn out as we were by the emotions and excessive heat of the
river journey, entered upon too late in the summer. So, while we yet
could, we secured four bearer sedan-chairs, with blue cotton awnings
six yards long, after the fashion of this windless province, and, with
bath-towels to bind round our heads, and sun-hats, and dark glasses,
and all that following necessary for a land journey of between twenty
and thirty men, were carried for a fortnight through a rich
agricultural district, a region of salt wells and petroleum springs,
on through the white-wax country to the foot of sacred Omi. A letter
written at the time to a cousin, with whom I had two years before
driven through our own lovely Lake country, and who I knew shared my
delight in strange surroundings and the unexpected, will best
reproduce the exhilaration consequent on emerging from the green
luxuriance of semi-tropical vegetation with its steamy hothouse air.
It was written from our first resting-place upon the romantic
mountain-side.
"WAN NIEN SZE, _July 26th, 1892_.
"With whom do you think we have been lunching to-day? I have had tea
with gold-miners in Alaska, and luncheon in a lumber camp in British
Columbia, and dinner with a party of Chinese merchants in Chungking;
but to-day, of all people in the world, it was with the chief priest
of a Buddhist monastery on the sacred mountain of Omi! And very good
the luncheon was! I really felt _fed_--always a matter of question
when one is living upon tinned things. He did not sit down with us;
but he entertained us by his conversation, and we had our own
tablecloth and forks and spoons, and our own servant to wait upon us.
The room was all set out with red cloths beautifully embroidered in
pale blue, hanging on the front of the side-table, over the backs of
the chairs, and down from the seats, on which were cool summer
cushions. There were twelve courses besides the rice; and quite a
number of monks and pilgrims assembled to see us eat. Our room opened
into the temple, where Puhsien (gigantic) sat upon the altar on a sort
of leopard. I believe some people say Puhsien was the son of Sakyamuni
or of Gautama, pronounce them how we will. But the high-priest says,
'Omito Fo!' (Blessed is Fu, or Buddha!) as a greeting, and interlards
all his talk with it: 'I am so glad you like your dinner, Omito!' 'We
are very poor; we want two hundred thousand tiles to roof the temples,
Omito!' etc., etc. We found _beignets_ of pumpkin flowers in dough
perfectly delicious. But our man-servant says, 'Yes, but you put in a
catty [1⅓ lb.] of flour, and you get only three ounces.'
"It was a regular charity lunch; for directly it was over the
high-priest entered into further details,--how the rooms we were
lodging in wanted repairing, and how everything did (which is quite
true), and how we could see every one who came to worship was very
poor, and the last Europeans who lodged there gave about £15, and he
thought it would be so nice if we gave £25. And he brought the
subscription list out, and the brush to write with; and positively
would _not_ let our Boy write down £2 10_s._--twice as large a sum as
I thought necessary. Then another priest begged too. They begged and
begged, till I said at last, determined to interrupt them, 'There is a
Tibetan image in the temple behind I do so want you to come and show
me.' Then every one burst out laughing at such a very palpable attempt
to change the conversation. However, our modest sum got written down,
and the chief priest nearly wept. He came to show us the Tibetan
image, and he seemed to find it absolutely uninteresting. It holds a
little white rabbit in one hand, and a rosary with very large beads in
the other, and looks as conceited as it is possible to look. But as he
said it was made on the mountain and not in Tibet, we did not
photograph it and him together.
"As far as we can make out, this mountain was sacred long before
Buddhism; and every day crowds of pilgrims come--numbers of Chinese
women, with their bandaged feet wrapped up in husks of Indian corn to
make it easier to walk up the steep flights of steps that lead up ten
thousand feet to the top of the mountain. How they manage it, I cannot
think. The saying is, 'If you are a bad man with sins unrepented, and
go up the mountain, you die.' Six men are said to have thus died this
year. There is a wonderful bronze Puhsien riding on a colossal bronze
elephant, beautifully made, each of its feet standing on a lotus
flower. This is in a temple just behind ours, with a dome, and made of
bricks, both very unusual in China, and said here never to have been
built, but to have come in a single night.
"But I cannot tell you how I wish to get away from all these temples.
They begin to oppress me so,--all the people prostrating themselves,
and then offering incense before each image in turn (and there are so
many!), and lighting a candle before each. They arrive with great
baskets full. And they come out of the temple with a rapt expression.
And then our white long-haired terrier springs out on them, and they
start so! We do not know what to do; because they call him a lion-dog
(he is the Chinese idea of a lion), and seem to regard him as a
semi-sacred thing. I do not want him to go into the temples at all.
And the thresholds are so high he cannot get over; but there is
always some one who will hand him over, and then the conceited dog
shakes his sides and frisks about among the worshippers. This worship
has been going on for thousands of years; and yet I do not believe any
one has an idea about Puhsien!
"Then there is Kwanyin over and over again, like a Byzantine Virgin
and Child, with a very sweet face on this mountain, and a child on her
knee. And women come and pray for children, and carry away little
dolls. The more I think of it, the less I know what I believe about it
all. Nara, where they had worshipped for so many years in Japan,
seemed to be haunted. But this mountain does not feel haunted, nor as
yet does it feel sacred. But so far we are only up three thousand
feet, with mosquitoes all alive about us, and scissor-grinders
shrilling their souls out in just, I should think, the highest note
possible for the human ear to hear, besides others more like other
scissor-grinders.
"Then, though this temple seemed clean on first arrival by comparison
with Chinese inns, its dirt now has a very materialising effect upon
one's susceptibilities. It is beautifully situated on a spur of the
mountain, with an amphitheatre of mountain-peaks girdling it in except
on one side, where it looks down on the lesser hills and rivers we
came up from. There are trees, and, we are assured, tigers, a man
having been eaten by one ten days ago. But as I am also told eight men
together were going up a peak not far from here, and of the eight five
were killed by tigers, I am not quite sure whether one can believe
everything one is told on Omi-shan. At all events, the tiger-mosquitoes
seem a more real danger at present. We had sixteen nights in Chinese
inns to get here from Chungking, travelling always westward; so I
cannot think many Europeans will come, till there are steamers running
to Chungking, and Cook has organised through-tickets. But the chief
priest thinks if he could only do these rooms up many foreigners would
come, and all give him many taels, and then the temples could all be
restored."
[Illustration: JACK (LONG-HAIRED SHANTUNG TERRIER).
_By Mrs. Archibald Little._]
[Illustration: SACRED TIGER.
_By Mr. Upcraft._]
There are many wonders upon this sacred mountain, one the so-called
Glory of Buddha, which we saw every afternoon during the fortnight in
August we spent on its summit. Another, more puzzling to me, we only
saw once. We were called out about nine o'clock on a keen, frosty
night to see the lamps of Kiating, the city ten thousand feet below
us, that had come up to be lighted. Some rich donor has given the
lamps of Kiating particularly high lamp-posts to facilitate this
miracle. Certainly, on each out-jutting spur of the mountain, as we
looked down from the edge of the great precipice, we saw a large
luminous light apparently quite stationary, and in effect recalling
the lamps of Piccadilly at night. Some people say this must be caused
by electricity. Certainly, on Mount Omi we always seemed to look down
upon the storms of thunder and lightning that evening after evening
cooled the hot country below us. But the most beautiful sight was to
turn away from the grand views as far as the eye could reach over the
rivers and hills and cities of China, and, standing on the verge of
the precipice, look just in the other direction, across the sea of
mountains with serrated edges or slanting-backs, two flat-topped
table-mountains conspicuous among them, till there at last up in the
sky, "as if stood upon a table for us to look at," as some Chinaman
said centuries ago, stood the long range of the snowy giants of Tibet,
with great glaciers clinging to their sides, and catching the first
rosy light of morning, whilst all the other intervening mountains were
still wrapped in their blankets of mist and night.
[Illustration: GREAT PRECIPICE OF MOUNT OMI.
_By Mrs. Archibald Little._]
Many beautiful descriptions have been written of Mount Omi, that
mountain that stands alone in its sacredness in the far west of China,
with an all-round view from its summit, where the beholder stands on
the verge of one of the most gigantic precipices in the world, said by
Mr. Baber to be a mile deep. But it would be hard to surpass that of
Fan Yü-tsz, of the Ming Dynasty, who tells how he saw the Wa-wu, and
the snowy mountains "running athwart like a long city wall," and
India, and the mountains of Karakorum, together with all the
barbarous kingdoms, the great Min River, and the rivers of Kiating,
the Tung, and the Ya; and winds up by saying: "The advocate and I
clapped our palms, and cried out, 'The grandest view of a lifetime!'"
The cloud effects from Fujiyama's top are different, but not finer;
and Fuji has no snowy mountains of Tibet to look out upon. The
all-round view from the ever popular and most beloved Rigi seems a
plaything sort of pretty pigmy view by comparison.
And day after day, year after year, all the year round, pilgrims come
and prostrate themselves on the different out-jutting bastions of the
cliff upon boards laid in the wet grass for their convenience while
they venerate Puhsien, who, they say, came up from India on his
elephant and settled here; just as their ancestors probably came,
before ever Buddha was, to venerate the sun-god, as we call him now,
we not apparently having even yet learnt enough to say simply God, as
if there were, or could be, God this and God that,--not one God, the
Father of All--to use the simple comprehensive Chinese phrase, "The
Above All!" The men and women of the province come in great numbers:
the men with their brows bound with the white Szechuan handkerchief
like Dante, and with mouths like the old Greek gods, with rich,
regular curves; the women with their skirts only to their knees, and
feet of the natural size or only slightly deformed, and in each case
bound with Indian corn-husks, the better to contend with the steep
stone steps that lead up and down the ten thousand feet of
mountain-side. Men from Yunnan come too, with extraordinarily heavy
and knotted young trees for walking-sticks, shod, not with iron
points, but small iron spades, that they may if need be re-make the
road as they go along. Military dandies even from far Ningpo are
carried up the mountain in sedan-chairs (this last a work of great
difficulty); whilst old men and very weak women manage to get up in a
sort of basket carried on a man's back, their feet holding on round
his waist after the fashion that children are carried pick-a-back. And
in the winter the Tibetans come, men and women all together, all in
furs, and saying, "Om Mani Padmi Hum!" instead of the familiar, "Omito
Fo," the habitual greeting on the mountain-side. Some of the wild
tribes also come, without pigtails, like decent people, but with their
hair strangely sticking out in front of their heads, as if they wore
their tails in front. And all prostrate themselves, and do
reverence--_unless_ it be the few Europeans who have strayed so far
west through China--as they look over the edge of the great precipice,
and there on the mist below see the circular halo of three primary
colours, very brilliant, and in its central brightness the shadow of
their own head and shoulders, or, if their heart be such, Puhsien
himself riding on his elephant, as he came from India more than two
thousand years ago. Where the pilgrims most do congregate some pious
donor has had strong iron chains fastened between iron supports; and
in another place there is a low stone wall: but so great is the
indifference to its depth that so lofty a precipice inspires,--we
ourselves once resided on a fifth story, and found many of our
visitors unable to look out, and ourselves suffered somewhat from
dizziness; but on moving to the eleventh floor of the same building
felt nothing of the kind,--so great is the indifference to its danger
that this great precipice inspires, that not a day passes but people
are getting outside the chains, or standing on the top of the low
wall, the better to see down below.
[Illustration: PRIEST AND PILGRIMS ON EDGE OF OMI PRECIPICE.
_By Mrs. Archibald Little._]
And there, as we look down upon the beautiful trees far beneath us,
and the flowers finding here and there a foothold, we become aware of
a cave, that looks quite inaccessible now, although it may not always
have been so; and below the cave, just a little way farther down the
precipice, something--we cannot quite make out what. We saw it from
the first, and then turned away to look at the city of Kiating,
picturesquely situated at the junction of its three rivers, or to
notice how swollen the rivers are with the recent heavy rains, or to
catch a distant glimpse of the one Taoist monastery on the mountain,
perched like an eyrie on its most picturesque out-jutting spur, or, as
so often, to watch the mist roll up. Oftenest it comes flying up from
the hot lowlands at our feet; but at times it crawls up like a great
white bear, lifting first one paw, then another, yet always securing
its foothold even on the sheerest edge of the precipice. At other
times it comes up like a sinuous serpent; and sometimes, enfolding all
the landscape, it flows over the precipice from the top like a Niagara
of mist. But always as the mist lifts, and we lean over the precipice,
scanning closely, we see that cave, which surely no man could ever
reach, and, below, something curious lying aslant on an edge of the
cliff; yet never is our curiosity sufficiently awakened to lift an
opera-glass, and see what it may be: it looks so small and
insignificant--just something out of place in the vast landscape, that
is all.
Then we see other caves, and hear wild talk of aborigines, who live,
or lived, in them. The coolies talk of nothing but aborigines and the
unconquered Lolos. One of them has been two years among the latter as
a soldier; and he tells how his general's wife was taken prisoner by
them, and put upon an ox to ride, since she could not walk, and
describes them as a sort of Highlanders, wearing a skirt and a wrap,
and not rude at all to those they carry off--only wanting to get
ransom-money. Then we meet a pilgrim, who is standing staring at some
caves far below with protruding eyes; and he says, "There are tigers
in there!" then stands speechless. But on our laughing we are told
again of six men already this year eaten by tigers. It is a comfort to
laugh even over tigers; for the high, rare air affects the nerves even
of our coolies, and every one is asking for quinine as a cure for
neuralgia. For foreign medicines are known in the West, and "They
never cost anything," as some women with a sick child said with great
energy, and confidence that we must be able to cure the child, and for
nothing, as missionaries or foreigners (here the two words are treated
as synonymous) always did. Then, as one coolie after another sickened,
and we ourselves could hardly breathe or bear the aching of our heads,
we were told a very dangerous air came up over the precipice, and how
a Taoist priest, who was going to live in a cave on the mountain,
dropped down dead of it. And none of our Chinese would hear of a cave
being possibly full of gas, or that the air on the top of the mountain
was so much lighter than that below that a little time is needed to
get accustomed to it.
And whilst explaining scraps of modern science, we forgot all about
the Taoist priest who died, till one day again we were hanging over
the cliff, watching for the Glory of Buddha below, when we noted a
Chinaman gazing down more intently than devoutly. "Do you see him?" he
asked. "I could not find him this morning; and I would not believe
what they all said, that a Taoist priest lay there. But what else can
it be? Do you look through your far-seeing glass, and say what you
see." So we looked at that something out of place, that had at once
caught short-sighted eyes intently scanning, yet without arresting our
attention sufficiently even to wonder what it might be. Yes! certainly
there lay, across a fallen tree, what looked like a man with a hood
on, like that the chief priest here wore, with an old basket at his
feet. "Yes, that's it--that's it. All the Taoists wear that! With his
feet in a basket! That is how they say he lies. He has lain there two
years, they say; and last year his clothes looked blue, and now they
look whitey-brown. Next year, I suppose, they will all fall to pieces.
I suppose it must be a man. I would not believe it at first." "No, no;
it is not a Taoist priest," said the young Buddhist, whose duty it was
to be agreeable to visitors. "It is just some clothes people have
thrown down." But, in the first place, no human hand could throw
clothes so far. They must long before have, fluttering, caught upon
some rugged edge. Next, nothing thrown could so exactly take the
semblance of a man,--the hood worn just as the chief priest wears his,
only the head fallen forward somewhat, and the lower part of the
person in dust-coloured clothes evidently fast approaching decay, but
even yet lingering on just where they would be if a man lay there
wearing them. The idea of clothes thrown down certainly would not hold
water. The idea of a sort of Guy Fawkes figure did at one time present
itself; but whilst it seemed possible that some enthusiast might
attempt to climb to that inaccessible cave, and so climbing fall and
perish, it did not seem possible that any one would be foolhardy
enough to climb there for the purpose merely of placing a lay figure
there, or could do so, carrying a lay figure. Yet, not wishing to be
too credulous, we approached the chief priest the next time his
picturesque figure in grey silk gown and black hood appeared beside
the parapet, and propounded the theory of clothes. His dark eyes grew
luminous with a sad smile; his is a face in which a painter would
delight, with its rich dark shades, well-marked features, and general
air of an Oriental saint of the early Christian era. "Those are no
clothes," he said, sadly smiling. "A Taoist priest lies there."
[Illustration: CLOUD EFFECTS ON MOUNT OMI.
_By Mrs. Archibald Little._]
And could there be a grander grave for a dead man,--the great white
mists of Omi his winding-sheet, the Glory of Buddha floating above him
his memorial cross, the bosom of Omi's inaccessible precipice his last
resting-place? Year by year, day by day, pilgrims kneel, and knock
their foreheads on the ground, then hold out hands of supplication
over his prostrate form; the bells are struck, the prayers are
chanted, the incense burns, above the unburied priest's last
resting-place. Never now will hand of man touch him more. He lies
secure. He sought to pass away from the contamination of the world,
and in pure ecstasy of devotion pass his days in an untrodden cave.
And it seems that God--our God, his God, the Lord and Father of us
all--accepted the offering without requiring the year-long daily
sacrifice. There are no signs of struggle in the orderly disposed
garments. It seems as if his spirit passed away as his foot stumbled,
and he fell across the fallen tree.
And to make it grander still, he has won no immortal name thereby. The
young priest in the temple on the summit says, "That is no unburied
saint lies there--only clothes!" He takes us to a neighbouring shrine
of his own faith to see a real unburied saint. As we ascended the
mountain, we were struck by an image upon an altar from its likeness
to a man in its little human imperfections, all covered with gilding
though it was, as well as decked out in somewhat tawdry bright
embroidered satins. We only noticed, and passed on, repelled by a
large and really rather offensively ugly representation of Puhsien
standing behind it. The front figure was seated on a large lotus
flower, with its legs tucked up underneath it, just as the chief
priest at our temple tucked up his legs when he sat to have his
photograph taken, putting on his best vestments for the purpose, and
looking no longer like an early Christian, without his hood, and with
his bald shining head. "There! that was a priest here in the time of
Kang Hsi," said the young priest. "It is his very body, not embalmed.
It would not decay, and so he was----" Now, did he say _canonised_?
"Few foreigners know of this----" Now, did he say God or saint? So
much turns upon a word sometimes, and so few foreigners know Chinese
well enough to be clear about these delicate distinctions.
A set of dandies in rich-coloured silks from Kiating, with yellow
incense-bags and double purses, invaded the temple, not for the
purpose of staring, as we were doing, but to worship. They prostrated
themselves, burnt their joss-sticks, and struck the gong before the
gilded old man upon the altar just in the same way that they did
before the other images. And they looked so picturesque doing this, it
seemed a pity to wait to set up the camera till they had gone, and
then only to photograph the gilded old man upon the altar and the
priest of seventy-one of to-day who ministers before it. The living
old man was quite excited by the proceeding, and completely unaware
that photography demanded the posture, generally most congenial to a
Chinaman, of repose.
Even through all his gilding, the face of the other old man upon the
altar gave an idea of holiness, and this in spite of his having as
typically slanting eyes as any Chinaman living. Some of his teeth were
gone, and his mouth had a little helpless sort of crookedness about it
that was very touching. It seemed impossible then and there to hear
anything of his history; but it seemed equally impossible, looking at
him, to doubt that he had been a good man, a Vicar of Wakefield simple
sort of good man, and probably deserved as well to have his body set
upon an altar and worshipped as any mere man might. But the place of
sepulture of the unburied Taoist priest strikes the imagination as far
finer, recalling the grand lines upon the burial of Moses. Angels bore
Moses to his sepulchre, we are told. No one has borne the Taoist
priest. Even the winds of heaven cannot touch him, as he lies
sheltered by the great precipice on which he perished.
"Stars silent rest o'er him,
Graves under him silent.
* * * * *
Here eyes do regard him
In eternity's stillness."
Thus, at but a little distance from each other, on the summit of the
sacred mountain of Omi, in this land where more importance is attached
to burial than in any other, two Chinamen await unburied the
consummation of all things,--the one a disciple of Buddha; the other,
of that even less known Laotze, Buddha's Chinese contemporary: the one
covered over with gilding, raised upon an altar, and certainly
apparently worshipped as a god; the other lying prone upon the
mountain-side, his poor perishable garments growing threadbare in the
snow and rain. But when the mists gather round the mountain-top, and
the sun shines slanting from the west, it is above the ardent disciple
of Laotze that the Glory of Buddha floats--the man who sought the
grimmest possible retreat from the snares of this world, and, thus
seeking, found, we trust, the joys of Paradise.