Heart Sutra by Yan Lianke & Carlos Rojas

Author:Yan Lianke & Carlos Rojas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2023-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

02 Disciples

School resumed.

One joyful event followed another. First the frostbite on Yahui’s face improved and was no longer as prominent and itchy as before. Then, on the day the disciples returned to campus, many of them did not perform religious rituals when they saw one another. The Buddhist disciples did not turn their prayer beads or make Buddhist mudras; instead, when they saw their classmates, they simply hugged them or shook their hands. Similarly, the Daoist disciples did not take care to first step forward with their left foot and clasp their hands to their chest, and instead, regardless of whether they were greeting a follower of Protestantism or Islam, they would laugh loudly, embrace them, and pat them on the shoulder.

“I missed you!”

“I missed you, too. Would you like to come to my room this evening and have a drink?”

Then they would look around, as though afraid someone might be watching. When they saw that there was no one else around, they would exclaim, “Why don’t you come over to my room? Our religion has more investors than yours!”

These encounters resembled ones in which colleagues or siblings reunite after having been apart for several years. After greeting one another, the students would shout “Communism, Communism!” and take some local products from their home region and distribute them to their classmates and fellow disciples. Muslim disciples from the northwest brought wolfberries and red dates, Buddhist disciples from Xinjiang and Tibet brought raisins, saffron, and caterpillar fungus, while Catholic and Protestant disciples from Jiangsu and Zhejiang brought pastries, longjing tea, and pu’er tea biscuits. The religion building resembled a local product expo, with Maotai-brand baijiu brought by disciples from Guizhou, butter cake brought by disciples from Inner Mongolia, jujube slices brought by disciples from Shaolin in the Central Plains region, and vacuum-packed seasonings and suanjiang noodles for pepper soup brought by disciples from the Henan cities of Kaifeng and Luoyang. There was also Taiyuan vinegar brought by monks from Taishan Mountain and sesame sauce for Hubei hot dry noodles brought by Daoists from Wudang.

Yahui received many excellent gifts. Imam Tian gave her a box of wolfberries, Pastor Wang gave her a box of wulong tea from Fujian Province’s Wuyi Mountain, and Shuiyue shifu gave her a box of Belgian chocolates she said she had bought in Hong Kong. Even more remarkable were the rice noodles that an ethnic-minority priest had brought from Yunnan. He brought a table from his room, laid out more than a dozen single-use white plastic bowls, and placed a packet of rice noodles and seasoning in every bowl. Then he added boiling water and invited all the disciples to come and have a sample, filling the entire building with the pungent smell of Yunnan hot pepper.

The disciples also offered their teachers gifts, such that when the center’s professors and instructors returned home, they each had a large bundle of packages. The faculty who drove had full trunks, while those who biked resembled people trying to move all their belongings because their homes had been slated for demolition.

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