page 2 of 3 Finally, China. The first encounters were not promising. As chance had it, I moved backward in time, first finding the late Chan Buddhist writings. By the 10th century, Chan itself had already degenerated into warring schools (ah, these humans!), but some of the words caused me to keep looking back and back. Which finally led me to the discovery that the earliest Chan document, which is perhaps even the first written Chan document, appears to have survived more or less intact and unsullied. Probably because on the surface it seems to be (almost willfully) harmless. Attributed to the semi-legendary Sengtsan, the so-called third Zen Patriarch, and written around 600 CE, the "Hsin Hsin Ming," a poem of 542 characters, was the guide, the map I had been seeking all along. (The title, very roughly, means "Verses of the Faith Mind.") I've written elsewhere about the poem and its usefulness. The point here is that when I finally went to China, I was going toward the place, the culture that had produced the one piece of writing that had most helped me on my serpentine way. It of course should've come as no surprise, once I was in China, that, after fifteen hundred years of internecine bloodiness, a hundred years of colonial rape, and fifty years of applied materialism, not much was left of whatever had produced the Hsin Hsin Ming. Not much? Nothing, as far as I could tell. Traveling with a native-speaker friend, neither in city nor in countryside could I find the least trace of what once was. My eyes were open for outward and visible signs. My heart was open for less physical hints. Nothing. And I found myself thinking about a word and a concept which I normally dismiss as irrelevant and misleading: piety. Impious or not, here we come > >
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