BUDDHIST MONK, CHANTING
TIGER SHRINE
It was interesting to find on Mount Omi the two great Chinese symbols of power, the dragon and the tiger. As Laurence Binyon puts it: “In the superstitions of literal minds the Dragon was the genius of the element of water, producing clouds and mists; the Tiger the genius of the Mountains, whose roaring is heard in the wind that shakes the forest. But in the imagination of poets and of artists these symbols became charged with spiritual meanings, meanings which we should regard as fluid rather than fixed, and of imports varying with the dominant conceptions of particular epochs. In the Dragon is made visible the power of the spirit, the power of the infinite, the power of change; in the Tiger the power of material forces.”
It is worthy of note that the Buddhists selected mountains already sacred, where they might establish themselves and form Buddhist sanctuaries. They tolerated the gods in possession, so that they still continue to be worshipped simultaneously with the Buddha. The mixing up of religions is seen everywhere in China, but nowhere did we notice it so grotesquely carried out as here. We counted no fewer than twelve tiger shrines on the way up the mountain, many of them with vivacious beasts half out of their shrines, as if they were tired of their rôle and were meditating a raid on their worshippers. In the evening the Abbot had prepared a feast for us, but we declined it, so he sent in a tray of nuts and sweets instead.
The following morning we set off betimes on foot, and very soon the coolies left the carrying-poles behind, and were obliged to carry our chairs on their backs. Soon the steps became almost continuous and increasingly slippery. The longest flight was over 1200 steps, and as the steps sloped downwards and were covered with ice the ascent was most fatiguing and toilsome. The day was grey and cloudy, but the shifting mists revealed crags and abysses, and all along our path there was a wealth of lovely shrubs—camellias, rhododendrons, bamboos, and ferns. The frost had coated everything, and the leaves were reproduced in ice, looking exactly like clear glass; sprays of dead blossom, tall grasses, delicate ferns, everything was duplicated in ice, and the slight thaw early in the day detached this ice from the vegetation. We were sorry not to see in full beauty the flowers and ferns for which Mount Omi is justly celebrated, but it would have been impossible to conceive anything lovelier than what we did see.
Our midday halt at a monastery was provokingly long, as the men’s food had to be cooked, so that we did not start for a couple of hours. The sight of fowls here was a pleasant surprise to us, as the Buddhists obviously could have no use for them and our larder needed replenishing. We secured some eggs, and asked for a fowl also. When we came to pay for it, however, the monks said that they did not sell anything. If we liked to put our names down on their subscription list (which a monk forthwith produced) for the restoration of the monastery, we should be welcome to a fowl as a gift, not otherwise. We set out again, and found our way grow more and more precipitous and slippery. We met Tibetan pilgrims, a wild and fierce-looking company, toiling painfully upwards like ourselves, or slithering down. All these are welcomed and entertained in the monasteries. Our soldier escort was evidently very much afraid of them, and had a great deal to say of their evil doings, warning us to keep close together and close to himself. As I approached a group of pilgrims in one of the monasteries, in order to watch a man blowing up his fire with a goatskin bellows, one of them scowled at me and waved me away, as if he feared our sharing his thieving propensities. This is the season for Tibetan pilgrims, and many of them had travelled far, bringing their beasts of burden with them. The Chinese pilgrims come in the spring, and there was a big pilgrimage ten years ago—so a monk told us. The air grew intensely cold and dense, and, as twilight fell, our men urged us to halt about two miles short of the summit, where there was a good monastery. To this we willingly agreed, the more so as my breathing had grown extremely difficult, and I was beginning to feel at the end of my strength. Our lofty room was clean and well built, and the ten beds around it all stood empty. Soon a large glowing brazier was brought in, and we were thankful not only to get warm, but also to dry our clothes, which were heavy with mist.
Mount Omi is 11,000 feet high, and Kiating is only 1200, so we had come into a wholly different temperature, and when we woke in the morning it was to find everything frozen hard—sponges like boards, oranges as hard as bullets, and the water in my sketching-bottle a lump of ice. But the sun was shining brilliantly, and the mountain-top was a dazzling vision of loveliness emerging from a vast ocean of clouds. It took us about an hour to arrive at the summit, and the priest told us that as the sun shone we were evidently good people. This was highly satisfactory, as so many people thought us fools for attempting the ascent at this time of year, telling us of all the people who had toiled to the top and seen nothing. We anxiously inquired at what time of day we could see “Buddha’s Glory,” a sort of Brocken spectre which is rarely seen by travellers, and which we were told could not be seen at all at this time of year. Standing on the edge of the summit, you look down a precipice of more than a mile, and we could only feast our eyes on the ever-changing scene, the clouds looking as if they were boiling up from some hidden caldron, now concealing, now revealing the peaks of distant mountains. On a clear day the far-distant snowy peaks of Tibet are visible, and the glorious fertile plain out of which the limestone peak of Mount Omi rises.
