Let go and let Dog

Wutaishan (五台山) in Shanxi Province, about 500 miles west of Beijing, is one of the five sacred mountains of China. Its rock-strewn hills, studded with over a thousand Buddhist temples, were still brown and bare from the long, cold winter when we visited during the May 1st holidays a few years ago.

Although the main street of the town was snarled up with cacophonous traffic and a handful of the best-known temples were overrun with bus-loads of tourists, only a couple of kilometers’ walk into those dry hills led one into a world as remote from modern China as if one had traveled in time as well as space.

On one of those walks we came across Shou Ning Si (the Temple of Peace and Longevity), almost deserted apart from the monk in the photo and a couple of resident dogs. Dogs are not unusual in rural China; usually employed to guard the home, they’re tied up on a short rope or chain, permanently outside, usually unsheltered against winter and summer alike and fed scraps of the owners’ food when they remember. They’re no more cherished than most other animals, in a country which generally sees them as a source of labor or food.

So it was particularly striking to observe these sleek, well-fed temple dogs bounding up to their keeper and wagging their tails while he patted their heads and held their paws, all as naturally and unselfconsciously as if they were friends he played cards with every day. There was none of the deliberateness and condescension of the Western “animal lover” singling out this or that class of creatures to be a recipient of his beneficence, just a joyful and spontaneous acknowledgement of the kinship of all creatures.

A famous Zen koan asks whether a dog has Buddha-nature; the monk at Shou Ning Si had no doubt about the answer to this question – and this is precisely and exclusively what we and dogs have in common. Not culture, nor language, nor possessions, nor thought, nor mind – there isn’t one of the attributes with which we commonly identify and in which we lose ourselves that we share with dogs.

The modern version of that koan might ask whether people have Buddha-nature – and if they’ve mislaid it, where they can find it again.

In the wind-whipped emptiness of Shou Ning Si and in the monk’s playful companionship with the temple dogs one could touch something of that reverence and non-attachment which one associates with traditional Chinese culture , but which is very little in evidence in modern China’s headlong pursuit of power and wealth. Yet one of the world’s most unbalanced countries has the potential within itself, in its own half-forgotten corners, to restore and renew its own spirit. I suspect that the desire to do so will become stronger and stronger over the next few years.