E-Paper
Chinese grandchild visits India
Sun Shuyun recollects her experiences while travelling to India. The journey ends, where it began, in Xuanzang.
Ten Thousand Miles Without A Cloud
Sun Shuyun
Harper Perennial
2004
Memoir
£ 7.99
A child of the Cultural Revolution that banned religion in China, Sun Shuyun grew up watching people stone and spit on monks during the day. Then she went to bed with her Buddhist grandmother, who would get up in the dark of night to chant her prayers in secret. It confused her as a child, but it was this dichotomy that made her take up her long journey to India and back.
When the revolution failed everyone, even her communist father who, to prove his loyalty to Mao, disowned her land-owning grandfather, Sun saw her father's comrades turn vegetarian and embrace Buddhism. Curious about the faith that had survived the destruction of two lakh monasteries and forced thousands of Chinese monks into poverty, despair and suicide, the Oxford-based Sun decided to find out more about the faith that lived.
She discovers China's own Marco Polo through a chance reference to the Buddhist scholar and intrepid traveler Xuanzang, who traveled to India in the 7th century to understand the true tenets of Buddhism and translate them into Chinese. The journey takes him 18 years, during which being attacked and nearly killed were all in a day's work.
Sun's novel tracks her journey in the footsteps of Xuanzang, whose Record of the Western Regions is essential reading for historians studying Buddhism in India. Detailed records of his journeys helped the British identify and excavate the key Buddhist sites, including Sarnath and Bodh Gaya. Though her travels were a lot easier than Xuanzang's, she faces roadblocks in the form of war in Afghanistan, visa problems in Uzbekistan and violent elections in Bihar, which force her to cancel her booking at the Buddha's birthplace, Lumbini.
Sun gives fascinating glimpses of life during the Cultural Revolution. A monk in Xian tells her how former monks were coached to interact with foreign delegations to deceive them into thinking there was religious freedom in China! Ramshackle monasteries were cleaned up and made to look functional for the duration of the visit, after which things were allowed to fall apart.
Where Sun falls flat is when she tries to simulate what Xuanzang thought, did and saw: her commentary is too sketchy to hold interest. A little less empathy and a little more description would have made the travelogue more engrossing. But heaping criticism on her writing style, you must remember that like Xuanzang, Sun is essentially a recorder of facts of a pilgrimage that she ends where she began: at her grandmother's grave.
