| A
recollection - one Tzu Chi volunteer's experience in Hualien
in a letter to a friend |
 |
By Susannah Lin
August 28, 2002
Chinese Version
Sunday, One week
later
My dearest friend,
The solar time reads September 1, 2002. I
have just returned to Taipei from Hualien. It rains now as I
write and I look west to you, sous le ciel de Taipei. Dawn was
still dark and sleepy when I left Taipei one week ago.
Looming westward mountains that are never
absent of fog and the eastward Pacific the color of translucent
indigo border the city of Hualien. I've never seen water of
this blue, of this piece of the rainbow. Growing up as an American,
I counted on infallible certainties such as, "The sun sets
over the Pacific" but on my train ride down I witnessed
the Pacific hosting the rising Formosan sun. Perhaps such simple
redirection of reality might best describe my feelings about
my time in Hualien.
I became still with thought as an acceptance
of innate principles entered my heart more profoundly than I
ever thought could be possible. And it humbled me. Who thought
it could be so simple? Could it be enlightenment? I met a girl,
and I have her to thank for this. Here is my story, my friend.
- __________________ -
Sunday, One week earlier
August 25, 2002
Riding the southbound train to East Taiwan, Taipei grows further
distant. This journey, I leave behind a city not only dense
with people, smog, and incensed smoke produced by the passing
of Gui Yue (Ghost Month) but a city filled with suffering.
I carry with me memories of the Taipei burdened
by sorrow.
On the afternoon of the Day of the Dead (23
Aug 02), I sat on the edge of the center courtyard of Long Shan
(Dragon Mountain) Temple. You can pay homage to Kuan Yin, the
goddess of mercy here. This day, red candles were aflame from
thousands of prayers, each candle lit from the hope of one person's
request. I sat there, beleaguered by the heat and thoughts of
a woman I saw here the day before yesterday.
I remember when I passed through this woman's
orb that the sunlight dimmed in her presence. Pale from sorrow,
she was afflicted from some distress known only behind the vacant
look in her eyes. I turned to watch her as she stared at the
ground, unblinking. Her tissue, now knotty and small, was worn
from her tears, as it lay exhausted in her half-opened hand.
Her hand showed no strength as it rested in her lap. I still
think of her and wonder if mercy will concede.
That same morning a man poisoned his ailing
mother to death. Diabetes consumed his mother's health. He simply
had no money, no job and what he thought to be no solution.
And later, a rescue crew began drudging the bottom of a river,
gray from pollution, in search of someone presumed to have committed
suicide when his mismatched slippers where found along the waters'
edge.
My friend, what desolation in life conspires
within us to befall under such acts of desperation? What suffering
encumbers so much painful isolation that the path chosen to
end this hopelessness can only lead to the loss of life? There
is a yet another path to choose, and I beg the world to see
this.
Three hours later, I am at the Abode of Still
Thoughts in central Hualien. Hualien is a place where the sick
and able have come to regard as Hope's beginning. Hualien is
where the Tzu Chi Foundation first began. Tzu Chi is the bloom
from a seed of aspiration from a frail and simple Buddhist nun,
Dharma Master Cheng Yen, poised in certainty for the restitution
of our damaged world through deeds committed in compassion.
- __________________ -
Wednesday
August 28, 2002
3:50 AM. I awake to the clapping of two wooden boards and sour
sleepiness in my mouth. My eyes still closed, I hear hushed
footsteps in their quickened pace. I must hurry and make myself
presentable in my white pants, black belt, blue shirt and blue
hair ribbon. I must prepare my knapsack for the coming 18-hour
day ahead.
As I rise from the top of the giant wooden
bunk bed that sleeps eight, I ask myself what I've been asking
every morning since I've been here: "What will I do for
love?" This is not an ordinary question that serves as
my guide. The Tzu Chi concept of Da Ai (literally 'great love')
isn't simply translated just into the love that you have for
the things you do or have for one another. Those things are
true, yes, but Great Love is the meaning and action behind what
you do.
Great Love is not an obligatory action, but
one filled with careful thought guided by compassion that is
intent on preserving the peace of the future with a belief in
the goodness of tomorrow and your capability in achieving it.
Great Love is placing your heart in front of you on the path
of everyday life. It is not the same thing as putting your heart
into the things you do. It is more.
4:10 - 6:00 AM. The deep drumming resonating
from inside the Kuan Yin Hall calls on us to enter. We sit on
the floor and chant the Wonderful Lotus Sutra in Taiwanese by
candlelight. During moments of silent meditation a nun taps
the small wooden gong. Another nun enters the temple. The door
creaks. The fans above me turn. The candles flicker; the heat
from their flames swirl the incense smoke below one of three
smiling white Buddhas before me. Another morning of this and
I will come to learn to sit in stillness.
We emerge from the temple and step into the
red vapory glow of dawn's rising sun. Above the archway of the
sleeping monks, birds now sing and the aroma from small white
blossoms hypnotizes the air.
It is time for breakfast, a nearly12-hour+
process owed to the loving care of a kitchen full of nuns. And
it is vegetarian, of course. Then at 7:00 a.m., it is time to
return to the Hall and its adjoining reception room to listen
to Tzu Chi founder, Dharma Master Cheng Yen and volunteer reflections.
Every day the Master and volunteers who brave the spotlight
are broadcast simultaneously on Tzu Chi TV around the world.
The program is called "Enlightenment of this World".
It is indeed a rare and undeserved privilege
for me to see and hear her speak. I sit before her and I am
unable to understand what she says when she speaks Taiwanese.
I am unable to understand more than half of what she says when
she speaks Mandarin. And yet there are hundreds of thousands
of the sick and society's rejected who wouldn't want anything
more than to be where I am. I want to be where I am, for although
I may not understand much of what is said, I understand the
magnitude of what is done. I understand why.
8:30 AM. Nearly 100 volunteers load buses
headed for the Tzu Chi General Hospital to start their day of
supporting patient morale. Today will be different. This afternoon
I will accompany a small group of volunteers for a home visit.
And by this evening, what has transpired will in no way leave
me the same.
- __________________ -
2:00 - 5:00 PM.
In a heat intoxicated room lays a girl on a hospital bed. This
is her bedroom, her home, and her life. Outside her 7'x10' bedroom
cranks a tired AC unit and two rattling fans in vain. Inside
her bedroom more than ten of us are standing less than an inch
apart from each other and still there is not enough space for
us all to see her. The paint on the walls peels from the heat
and humidity.
The girl is paralyzed from mid-chest down.
The muscles in her limbs have shrunken and gone pale. She wears
a diaper. She is 33 years old. She lies in this bed with a large
smile. Her shaven head brings out the wideness of her smile.
About five years ago a truck hit her and crushed
her and her motorcycle. One week prior to the accident, she
had a dream that this would happen. And all her life she has
lived in the threat of her mother.
Growing up, her mother would feed her less
and less so that she would not gain weight. Her mother will
make her unbecoming for fear that she would be abducted into
prostitution. Her mother would yell; scream at her over her
poor grades. She spent all her time at school. At school there
was food and peace to study, but her grades did not improve.
"Why are you so stupid?" "Why
are you so damn useless?" These are the things she would
hear in a blur as her mother took her by her hair and slammed
her head against the wall. But she never fought back. She never
spoke back against her mother. She would worry for her mother
if she returned home later than usual.
"We only kept you because you look like
him." "I can't get rid of you because you're his favorite,"
her mother would say. Her parents' marriage was not strong with
devotion or with loyalties. Her father would bring home women
while her mother was away and tell her to keep busy elsewhere.
He would gamble their savings away.
Now she is crippled, trapped in her dream
and in a house with such living memories and no physical way
out. Yet she smiles.
Her mother will come home, disgusted with
her withering body and her incapacity to care for herself. Her
mother, in rage, will take sharp pointed objects such as pens
and drill them into her knee. I saw the fresh unhealed holes.
They go right through to the other side of her left knee.
And during times like these, she never fights
back and she never talks back. She never gets angry. She only
sings. She sings to soothe her mother's anger. When it's over,
she doesn't complain. Her love and spirit have not followed
her body's lead.
And I feel that I could die in sorrow for
her, my friend. She has every right to hate, to feel regret
over what her life has never given her, what her life can never
be. Yet she smiles. She sings. I see with no exception the rare
karmic beauty she holds within herself that many of us will
never have the grace to endure.
Her one truest wish is to have her picture
taken with the Dharma Master; her next wish is to volunteer
for Tzu Chi. When asked what her third wish would be there is
only silence. She wishes no more in her life. She doesn't spend
all her time wishing her mother would be different. She doesn't
think about "what if the accident never happened?"
She is not consumed with self-pitying thoughts every minute
of her life, which is now spent in a bed beside her mother's.
These thoughts are absent. She only thinks of meeting the person
of her inspiration and being a part of a cause to simply help
people because you can.
And she smiles before me with no ill will,
no self-pity, and no fear - only Great Love. Why? Because of
her deep acceptance of her destiny and of a responsibility that
we all share: Always be good to your parents.
Great Love is not without suffering. But I
have learned, my friend, that this suffering will bring Great
Love to set us free.
It nears midnight. Tomorrow I will awake and
ask myself the same question I've been asking myself every morning¡K.
Your Susannah
