Wed, Dec 17, 2014 page6

• FEATURE: China’s mountain hermits seek ‘road to heaven’

  • AFP, ZHONGNAN MOUNTAINS, China
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  His unheated hut is halfway up a mountain with no electricity, and his diet consists mostly of cabbage.

  However, Master Hou says he has found a recipe for joy.

  “There is no happier way for a person to live on this earth,” he said, balancing on a hard wooden stool outside his primitive mud-brick dwelling.

  

  Master Hou walks outside his cottage in the Zhongnan mountains, in China’s Shaanxi province, on Oct. 31.

  Photo: AFP

  Hundreds of millions of people have moved to China’s urban areas during a decades-long economic boom, but some are turning their backs on the bright lights and big cities to live as isolated hermits.

  Their choice puts them in touch with an ancient tradition undergoing a surprising contemporary revival.

  Hundreds of small huts dot the jagged peaks of the remote Zhongnan Mountains in central China, where followers of Buddhism and local Taoist traditions have for centuries sought to live far from the madding crowds.

  “The Zhongnan Mountains have a special aura,” said Hou, who moved to the hills almost a decade ago.

  The hermit wrapped himself in a long black robe and smiled as the wind rustled the surrounding woods.

  Hou grew up in the bustling coastal city of Zhuhai, next to Macau, but now his days consist almost entirely of meditation, with pauses to chop firewood and vegetables.

  “Cities are places of restless life. Here is where you can find inner joy,” he said. “Now I am happy to be alone.”

  Winter temperatures can drop below minus-20oC and deadly snakes lurk under rocks, but the mountaintops are growing increasingly crowded amid rising dissatisfaction with materialism.

  Hou — who looks to be in his 40s, but says Taoists do not reveal their age — was recently joined by two apprentices.

  Wang Gaofeng, 26, has a wispier beard than his master and said he had quit a management-level job in China’s vast railway system a year ago.

  “Watching TV and playing video games are just temporary excitement, like opium. That kind of pleasure is quickly gone,” he said, chomping on some freshly boiled cabbage.

  It is a radically individualistic contrast to the collectivist mantras of past decades.

  However, today’s hermits are following a well-beaten historical path and experts say quiet types have preferred to live alone in the mountains of China for more than 3,000 years.

  Taoism — loosely based on the writings of Lao Tzu (老子), said to have lived about 2,500 years ago — calls for an adherence to “the Way,” which practitioners have long interpreted as a return to the natural world.

  Unlike their Western equivalents — religiously inspired outsiders who often shunned society completely — China’s mountain dwellers have historically been sought out by politicians.

  “Hermits played a political role; they pushed society forward and maintained ancient ideas,” said Zhang Jianfeng (張劍峰), part-time mountain-dweller and founder of Taoism magazine Wen Dao (www.wendaozazhi.com.cn).

  However, the officially atheist Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power in 1949, cutting the hermits’ political connections.

  The anti-religious campaigns reached fever pitch during the decade of upheaval beginning in 1966 known as the Cultural Revolution, when many of the temples and shrines in the Zhongnan Mountains were destroyed and their denizens dispersed.

  Nonetheless, experts estimate that several hundred hermits survived the period unscathed deep in the hills, with some even said to be unaware that the CCP had taken power.

  Their numbers have risen since Beijing relaxed religious controls in the 1980s.

  “Twenty years ago, there were just a few hundred people living in the Zhongnan Mountains. However, in the past few years, the number has increased very quickly,” Zhang said. “Now perhaps there are too many people blindly moving to the mountains.”

  “There are incidents every year — people eating poisonous mushrooms, or freezing to death — some people lack common sense,” he added.

  Much of the hermit revival can be attributed to US author Bill Porter, a one-time resident of Taiwan and former ICRT newscaster, who in 1993 published the first book about the mountain-dwellers.

  Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits was a commercial failure in the US, leaving Porter, who was then living in the US, on government food stamps.

  However, its 2006 Chinese translation became a hit, selling more than 100,000 copies.

  “In the 1980s, no one paid the hermits any attention, because everyone had a chance to make a buck and improve their lives materially,” the shaggy-bearded author said. “People thought it absurd to go in the opposite direction.”

  Now he observes more well-educated former professionals among the denizens of what he calls “hermit heaven.”

  One who did not want to be named told reporters that he was a Chinese government official on sabbatical.

  “You get a much wider mix, people who are jaded or disillusioned in the current economy and are seeking something more,” said Porter said, a respected translator of Buddhist and Taoist poetry under the name of Red Pine (赤松).

  China’s decades of breakneck economic growth have created a substantial middle class, but a few of them now openly question materialist values.

  About a dozen young people from across China live in a clump of wooden huts which acts as a testing ground for aspiring hermits, albeit outfitted with electricity and a DVD player.

  Liu Jingchong, 38, moved in after quitting a lucrative job in Guangzhou this year and plans to live completely alone.

  “I felt that life was an endless circle: finding a better car, better job, a better girlfriend, but not going anywhere,” he said, sitting cross-legged on a cushion. “When I am alone on the mountain, I will just need shelter, a pot and seeds from the pine trees.”

  More than half the hermits in the range are said to be women, and Li Yunqi, 26, spent several weeks at the cottages.

  “I like the life of a hermit, living on a mountain. I came here for inner peace and to escape the noise of the city,” she said, wearing a puffy pink coat and fiddling with a smartphone as an off-road vehicle carried her down a muddy path to civilization.

  Additional reporting by staff writer
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