Joy and Good Fortune!
恭喜發財
by Michael Tkaczevski
In the morning, Baohua Si Temple was empty except for a few workers and two girls taking photos, and my host mom’s nephew and I. Fat, ¥160 pillars of incense stood taller than me next to black metal stalls covered in red candle wax.
Tonight, the stalls and incense would be burning wildly, and Baohua Si would be host to what would seem like a third of Gejiu’s populace.
Gejiu is my host mom and dad’s home town, although to call Gejiu a town is to realize just how massive China’s population and industrialization is. It’s a small yet crowded city, a jungle of concrete trees reaching up almost as high as the steep mountains that hem it in.
Baohua Si is halfway up Lao Yin Shan, a steep, green mountain that sits across Lao Yang Shan, between which is a lake that remained after a flood in the 1950s. The view from the temple is extraordinarily panoramic, lending itself to watching fireworks burst over the grey and pastel squareness that sprawls out from Lao Yin Shan’s base.
An hour before midnight on Chinese New Year’s Eve, my host mom took me and her nephew to check out a smaller temple and then to see Baohua Si again. Near the smaller temple was a two-story, granite monument that was once part of the city walls and now simply marks where the old city seamlessly becomes the new city.
The smaller temple — which my host mom could only identify as a Caishen Miao, a generic temple to a non-specific fortune deity— was practically empty, but in an hour it would be so packed that you wouldn’t even be able to rush in to light your incense first, she said.
“People think that whoever lights it first will be the luckiest one that year,” host mom said.
I would see tonight that almost every tradition and practice that Chinese people did for Chinese New Year was in pursuit of good luck or material wealth.
We then ascended the crooked steps to Baohua Si, bobbing and weaving between clothes lines, precarious gaps between roofs and staircases, and people carrying firecrackers or incense sticks.
Earlier that day, the sky had been a clean hue of blue, a specialty of Yunnan Province’s pristine air.
Tonight, stark reds and oranges danced against the black sky with flashes of greens and purples bursting between the jagged skyline, while a raucous chorus of firecrackers never ceased the drumbeat of prayer and merriment.
Statues of fat Buddhas and armored Buddhas and Buddhas with all sorts of expressions lined the staircase of the complex’s entrance, through which one passed from 21st-century Gejiu and into the timeless space of China’s syncretic religion.
The temple breathed out a mixture of incense and smoke, an offering to the gods and the ancestors and the Buddha.
“It’s like Beijing,” my host mom’s nephew joked. From what my friends tell me about Beijing, it smelled better in Gejiu.
We reached the main platform, where there were several candle stalls brimming with fire and incense pillars already halfway consumed that lit the smoky, swaying throngs of people offering sacrifices of fragrance, tossing coins into a golden fortune urn, and crossing into the main sanctum over the shin-high threshold and between doors adorned with reliefs depicting the Journey to the West.
We stepped inside, careful not to leave our feet on the red-painted wood, lest we make it seem we were unsure about entering. A statue of Shakyamuni Buddha — painted gold, three or four times bigger than a human, and holding its hands in abhaya mudra — gazed with compassionate dispassion upon the people who made prostrations to it on the circular pillows laid out around a small, black table with plastic candles glowing a faint, electric red.
Two smaller statues of men holding walking sticks and wearing prayer beads and long robes flanked the statue of the Shakyamuni Buddha. I then noticed the temple walls from the middle up to the roof were covered in a heavenly scene of numerous robed people resting on clouds in various positions. One was lounging like a Roman, pouring himself a saucer of rice wine, while the one next to him was standing up in much more formal stance, eternally chastising the other heavenly being for his drunkenness.
It reminded me a little bit of the icons of saints or significant Biblical scenes that would encircle even the smallest church, though I had to admit that these three-dimensional reliefs were more theatrical, for better or for worse. There would also be fewer bald men lounging and drinking in a church, too.
There must been hundreds of the reliefs, each one reflecting the unique life of a particular Bodhisattva. The rows of clouds went around the walls and behind the Shakyamuni Buddha’s facade, where more large Buddha statues stood and accepted the prayers of people who sat on their knees and bowed several times. I saw all sorts of people, old man, a fashionable young woman, a child, each give their most heartfelt prostrations before the Buddha, and then give the same to the next few statues.
I asked my host mom and her nephew of what they thought of Buddhism when they were young.
“I didn’t really think of it as special. It was part of the culture,” my host mom said. “I just saw everyone doing it, so I would do it, too.” My host mom’s nephew said something similar, that he didn’t see any distinction between praying at the temples and Chinese society.
My host mom, her nephew, and I left the sanctum and dodged the flood of pilgrims as midnight approached, five minutes away. We took an alternate path down another staircase that had a deep pitfall I would’ve stepped into had I not turned on my phone’s flashlight, and then walked onto a veranda.
Away from the smoke and the crowds, my host mom’s nephew told me, “Five or ten years ago, the temple was not like this. There were not so many people praying like this.”
We discussed it further, and it seems the recent fortune that China’s Reform and Opening Up Era brought to the whole country, even as far as Gejiu, has changed Chinese people’s relationship with their religions, which were previously regarded as an ideological threat to the all-consuming Communist nationalism of Maoist China.
“Now, because everyone is richer, they think that something changed within themselves,” my host mom’s nephew continued.
From how my host mom and her nephew spoke about these traditions, I got the feeling that, in their eyes, the recent boom in religiosity among Chinese people is somewhat hypocritical, or at least merely self-interested. Spirituality only manifests as rituals for an ambiguous concept of good luck. The lines between native Chinese religions, including Taoism, and the foreign and complex theology of Mahayana Buddhism are blurred specifically because, according to my host mom, Chinese people don’t mind spreading their faith around to whatever might work.
“Their thinking is, ‘If you make me rich, I will believe in you,’” my host mom’s nephew said.
I’m sure some might disagree with their relative cynicism, instead viewing China as a beautiful example of religions coexisting and intermingling seemingly harmoniously. Indeed, Yunnan Province is the epicenter of Chinese cultural exchange given that it contains members of half of China’s ethnic minorities and borders Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar. Say what you will about praying to gods for material wealth, but from the way some of the practitioners held their hands together and bowed in prayer to the Buddhas, I could sense unadulterated sincerity.
My host mom and her nephew’s feelings towards the organization of the religion still was something more than mere parade rain, however, as it was impossible to escape the predominance of worshipers’ interest in material fortune at the temple.
But Gejiu’s prosperity has always found itself pooling in the hands of a few. According to my host mom’s nephew, the majority of Gejiu’s people are poor, but in a Chinese version of poverty.
“They can grow their own food to eat, but they have no money. They can’t buy expensive electronic products, and they can’t go anywhere,” he had said earlier that day, when we were walking down from the temple.
We got off the veranda and stumbled upon a larger temple that had practically no pilgrims inside, despite it being midnight. My host mom said it looked new and must have been recently completed.
Inside the wide, empty sanctum was a dark grey statue of a man who held his hands in a manner similar to the Buddha statues. While not necessarily identical in terms of motifs to the Buddha statues, the design of the temple and the offerings to the statue of the man were strikingly similar. There were even pillows for prostrations like in the Buddhist sanctum.
This man, Mei Jiatong, was a poor miner who discovered a huge deposit of tin and became incredibly successful. Gejiu had been and remains a huge source of tin for China. According to the panels on the side of the sanctum, he never forgot to honor the gods, who had sent him a vision of a monkey leading him to his rich tin mine. From the attire of the people in the panels, I would guess Mei Jiatong made his fortune in the 19th century.
It seemed odd to me that a person who achieved great wealth would be prayed to in a similar fashion as those who attained enlightenment by unshackling themselves from worldly possessions and attachments. There was no irony in the hearts of the people paying their respects, nor did it seem to conflict with Communist ideology that I would think, even after Deng Xiaoping declared it glorious to get rich, would still balk at encouraging spiritual veneration of one man’s financial success.
We left Mei Jiatong’s lonely temple and followed a circuitous route back down to street level. Once we reached the road, a flurry of firecrackers erupted in the middle of the street. It sounded quite like gunfire, except with no sonic boom. After a few barrages, I gave in and started to cover my ears with my fingers. I didn’t feel like losing my hearing that night. And to my credit, I waited until I saw locals doing the same.
The firecrackers were constant, and we had to stop and go with each blast in the middle of our path. If it weren’t for the yelps of excitement from children and adults alike, I would’ve considered the scene to be one of annoyance, as I caught that emotion in the gnarled expressions of passersby.
As we walked down the street, incense and firecracker smoke wafted toward us. The incense didn’t do much to counteract the obnoxious, latex-like smell of the firecrackers, unlike how it had mixed with the candle and cigarette smoke into a sweet and sour aroma at the temple.
On the main street near where we would turn left to get to our apartment, there were fireworks over the street in between the tall buildings. My amazement at the beauty of the radiant colors clashed with my nervousness over the low altitude at which the fireworks would fizzle out. Amidst dangerously close pyrotechnics and maintaining a steady pace when jaywalking between bikes and buses, I’m learning to adopt Yunnan’s devil-may-care attitude towards urban hazards.
The cacophony of shrill whistling and satisfying snapping from the firecrackers and radiant fireworks would keep anyone awake all night, and any demons and evil spirits at bay. My host mom explained the importance of staying up all night to celebrate. I might not have grasped it, but basically, by staying awake and celebrating from yesterday to today, one would get another year of prosperity out the New Year celebration.
“That’s why everyone stays out. Except my mother. She went back home.”
I asked why.
“Oh, ha! She doesn’t care about it,” my host mom said. “She doesn’t really believe in anything, not even atheism.”
