Go Forth Without Fear

Of course there was something unusual about the place. It didn't have the constant flow of tourists I'd grown to expect. Instead, I found myself standing alone in the main courtyard of BaoGuang Temple (near Chengdu, SiChuan) as the rain drew to an end and the sky turned into the color of the stone paths- grays, flickering white. I wandered around reading informational plaques, explaining in Chinese, English, Korean, and Japanese; wondering where all the foreigners were.

I don’t know much about the architecture, but most temples (Buddhist and Taoist ones, to me at least) are pretty similar: statues as ubiquitous as the large ash bowls carrying dreams and hopes, entwined in sticks of burning incense. Prayer halls, red pillars, stone blocks filled with chants in ancient scripts, no longer understood beyond a façade- a relic of history and perhaps beauty. Monks walked around with mobile phones and got into Cadillacs, a touch of modernity quite in place with the meager stream of tourists in heels, wielding cameras and umbrellas, emerging from their rain shelters.

Outside one of the prayer halls was a clump of elderly women, chanting along to a prayer broadcast. The broadcast came from monks within the hall. They were clad in goldenrod robes, seated behind lacquered tables, and seamlessly pushing sounds from their mouths into the microphone.

The place was filled with a transcendence, of wisdom bleeding through the ages and onto its walls, quiet literally.

Just outside the entrance of the temple, was a lonely wall with a large ? carved in the center of it, painted in red. The simplest translation of the word means auspicious, blessing in life, good luck. What one does is ??, in the literal sense, “touch the blessing; the good luck”. You walk a good 30 yards away from the wall and line yourself up, center to the character. Then you close your eyes and walk, hoping you’ll touch the word when you run into the wall. And if you do, you'll be blessed.

What’s remarkable was almost everyone hesitated about ¾ of the way there. They slowed down. And everyone who slowed down ended up missing the word. Maybe the margin they miss by is proportional to whatever drove them to slow. In any case, there was one little girl, about 8 or 9, who strut forward at the pace in which she began, all the way to the end. No slowing, no hesitation, no fear. Just trust that the gods will deliver. She alone touched the blessing. That says a lot, doesn't it?