China and the West

Snyder, Gary. Passage through India [ID D29195].
Hong Kong: we first off headed for the Japanese Consul and presented our papers, applying for a new visa to Japan. Then walked around on the hillside back of town—Joanne went shopping for a raincoat, and Neale and I went into an old-style wineshop and talked to the old men in broken Chinese, sampling from various crocks and getting a little drunk— wandered up and down through the crowded alleys, people hanging all their laundry out the apartment balcony windows, old stained concrete and plaster. New buildings don’t seem to last long. Hong Kong so crowded—and barbed wire machine-gun emplacements set up all around. Lively, shopping is a major activity, stores are filled with every conceiv¬able thing, especially luxury. Joanne got a French raincoat—we met back at the ship. The next day Joanne, Neale, and I took a bus out to the border—about a thirty-mile ride. This is on the mainland side. We got up on a hill and gazed out through pine trees at the Chinese Peoples' Republic— spread out before us, a watery plain with houses here and there—a barbed-wire fence along a river at the foot of the hill showing where the actual line is. We could see men far off in China loading a little boat on the river, and hear the geese and chickens and water buffaloes from far away. It was warmish, gray cloudy, soft. Went back on the train to Kowloon (nine dragons) where our ship was—the seamen out handling rigging, sheaves, and cables. Joanne is wearing her fine yellow raincoat. The villages in mainland Hong Kong have a very different feeling from those in Japan. The rows in the gardens aren't so straight, the buildings not so neat—and the building material is brick instead of wood (though roofs are thatch); the people all wear the wide trousers and jackets, men and women alike, and the coolie hats in the field. But Hong Kong has food in a way no Japanese town could. The Japanese simply don't have the Chinese sense for cooking and eating (and a Japanese meal out, dinner party, say, is always a drag until people are finally drunk enough on sake to loosen up; whereas the Chinese have glorious multicourse banquets as a matter of course). In Hong Kong it Hong Kong: we first off headed for the Japanese Consul and presented our papers, applying for a new visa to Japan. Then walked around on the hillside back of town—Joanne went shopping for a raincoat, and Neale and 1 went into an old-style wineshop and talked to the old men in broken Chinese, sampling from various crocks and getting a little drunk— wandered up and down through the crowded alleys, people hanging all their laundry out the apartment balcony windows, old stained concrete and plaster. New buildings don't seem to last long. Hong Kong so crowded—and barbed wire machine-gun emplacements set up all around. Lively, shopping is a major activity, stores are filled with every conceivable thing, especially luxury. Joanne got a French raincoat—we met back at the ship. The next day Joanne, Neale, and I took a bus out to the bor¬der—about a thirty-mile ride. This is on the mainland side. We got up on a hill and gazed out through pine trees at the Chinese Peoples' Republic— spread out before us, a watery plain with houses here and there—a barbed-wire fence along a river at the foot of the hill showing where the actual line is. We could see men far off in China loading a little boat on the river, and hear the geese and chickens and water buffaloes from far away. It was warmish, gray cloudy, soft. Went back on the train to Kowloon (nine dragons) where our ship was—the seamen out handling rigging, sheaves, and cables. Joanne is wearing her fine yellow raincoat. The villages in mainland Hong Kong have a very different feeling from those in Japan. The rows in the gardens aren't so straight, the buildings not so neat—and the building material is brick instead of wood (though roofs are thatch); the people all wear the wide trousers and jackets, men and women alike, and the coolie hats in the field. But Hong Kong has food in a way no Japanese town could. The Japanese simply don't have the Chinese sense for cooking and eating (and a Japanese meal out, dinner party, say, is always a drag until people are finally drunk enough on sake to loosen up; whereas the Chinese have glorious multicourse banquets as a matter of course). In Hong Kong it's like walking along the market sections of Grant Avenue, Chinatown, only better, the wineshops and herb shops in between, That evening to an Australian-run bar for a while, then back to the end of the pier, looking across to the Victoria (Island) side, the celebrated lights going up the steep hill, drinking beer in the dark—a freighter comes in, blotting out the neon, the bridge decks alight, and a junk in full sail, batwing taut membrane over bones—goes out darkly and silent, a single yellow kerosene lamp dim in the stern.
The houses on the New Territory are all thatched, dry brown colors as the parched winter brown of the long plain stretching north-fallow paddies, with water buffalo, cows, pigs, and flocks of geese here and there browsing.
The dried out winter ricefields
men far off loading junks in the river
bales of rice on their shoulders
a little boat poles out
roosters and geese –
looking at China
Bought $ 347 worth of rupees in Hong Kong at 7 RS to $1 US, where official rate in India is 4.75 to $ 1. Ship sailed at midnight and we were bound for Saigon.
Out of Hong Kong they moved Joanne and me from our cabin-class cabins and put us together in one tiny two-man cabin in the tourist-class section. Food was still to be taken deck-class, but our living quarters had been altered. I never understood why except they did get a large number of additional cabin-class passengers, Indians and Chinese, and perhaps were overcrowded. So now in the messhall, besides our previous friends, there were women in saris and pigtailed old Chinese women in silk trousers – and the waters were warm, we were sunbathing on deck. At night took up the star map and a flashlight, and identified the southern stars, Canopus and Achernanr, and the Southern Cross, until one of the seamen came down from the bridge and said our little flashing of the flash-light was hard on the bridge lookout, so we stopped. Always in motion…

Dalai Lama
The Dalai Lama's ashram has fences around it, and a few armed Indian army guards. Between the tops of the deodars are strung long ribbons of prayer flags. After getting cleared through the guardhouse (and washing up at a pump, right in front of the guards) we were led to a group of low wooden buildings and given a waiting room to wait in. I guess the Indians are afraid the Chinese might come and kidnap the Dalai if they're not careful. A few minutes later the Dalai Lama's interpreter came in, a neatly Western-dressed man in his thirties with a Tibetan cast, who spoke perfect English. His name is Sonam Topgay. He immediately started to ask me about Zen Buddhism. It seems he had found a book on Zen (if I understood him right) in a public toilet in Calcutta, and was immediately struck by its resemblance to the school of Tibetan Buddhism he followed. After that we didn't talk about Zen much, but he told me about the Zok-chen branch of Rnin ma-pa (Red Hat), which is a Tantric meditation school. He said it was by far the highest and greatest of all schools of Buddhism, including the Yellow Hat (which happens to be the sect his employer, the Dalai Lama, is head of). (Don't tell the Dalai Lama I said this.) He is originally from Sikkim, went to college in Delhi majoring in psychology. Got fits of depression and figured out a method of 'introspection' to see what was the mind that felt depressed. Then he went to Lhasa and met a saintly old woman age 122 who told him to go see Dudjon Rimpoche of the Rnin ma-pa, which he did, becoming that man's disciple. He also married a girl in Lhasa. He said that one of the good things about his school of Buddhism was that you could marry, and you and your wife could meditate together while making love. Then they came out, when the Chinese moved in, with their baby girl. (A book by Evans-Wentz called The Tibetan Book of Liberation, I believe, is of this sect. Book of the Dead, also.) They also say, perfect total enlightenment can come: 1) at the moment of dying, 2) by eating proper sacramental food, 3) through dance and drama, and 4) at the moment of orgasm.
Then he told us the Dalai Lama was busy talking to the Maharajah of Sikkim, who had just dropped in, and that's why it had been such a long wait. So we went into the Dalai Lama's chamber. It has colorful 'tankas' hanging all around and some big couches in a semicircle. We shake hands with him except that I do a proper Buddhist deep bow. The Dalai Lama is big and rather handsome. He looks like he needs more exercise. Although he understands a lot of English, always keeps an interpreter by when talking to guests. Allen and Peter asked him at some length about drugs and drug experiences, and their relationship to the spiritual states of meditation. The Dalai Lama gave the same answer everyone else did: drug states are real psychic states, but they aren't ultimately useful to you because you didn't get them on your own will and effort. For a few glimpses into the unconscious mind and other realms, they may be of use in loosening you up. After that, you can too easily come to rely on them, rather than under-taking such a discipline as will actually alter the structure of the personality in line with these insights. It isn't much help to just glimpse them with no ultimate basic alteration in the ego that is the source of lots of the psychic-spiritual ignorance that troubles one. But he said he'd be interested in trying psilocybin, the mushroom derivative, just to see what Westerners are so excited about. Allen promised to try and put Harvard onto it, and have this professor Dr. Tim Leary send him some.
Then the Dalai Lama and I talked about Zen sect meditation, him asking 'how do you sit? how do you put your hands? how do you put your tongue? where do you look? '—as I told or showed him. Then he said, yes, that's just how we do it. Joanne asked him if there couldn't be another posture of meditation for Westerners, rather than crosslegged. He said, 'It's not a matter of national custom', which I think is about as good an answer as you could get.
The Dalai doesn't spend all his time in his ashram; in fact he had just returned from a tour of south India, Mysore, where a few Tibetan refugee resettlements are. And last thing I've heard (since I got back to Japan) is at he's going to set out and do some real Buddhist preaching over India, maybe Europe and America eventually, spinning the wheel of the Dharma. He is at the least a very keen-minded well-read man, and probably lots more than that. Also, he himself is still in training—there are 'Senior Gurus of the Dalai Lama', the most learned of Tibetans, who keep him on a hard study schedule and are constantly testing and debat¬es with him.
Walked back down the hill, two miles in the dark, illuminated by occasional lightning flash, to our bungalow. To sleep late, some Englishman shouting under our windows.