Insomniac Nights and Morning Prayers at Longshan

Insomniac nights can be a doorway into mornings of revelation. One such sleepless night, I gaze until the stars shimmer briefly in the morning twilight before slowly fading away in the brilliance of the rising Sun.

When the mind runs a riot, my limbs take over. Footsteps carry me out of my cell, eyes smart gently in the chill of a winter morning, and through the underground mazes where colored MRT lines crisscross, I arrive at the doorsteps of Longshan Temple. In the corridors and alleys that run about the temple, I find the naked of the world, the homeless of the world, the outcasts and the renouncers.

It is difficult to draw finer distinctions these days. Economics is the sole criterion, the guiding ideology of our times. The market is the modern Chitragupta, measuring worth in money earned, palaces built, and glories bought and sold.

Not here in Longshan, or the many Longshans in the many corners of the world, where a nagging dissatisfaction draws longing footsteps in prayer, devotion, leisure, or simply a brief surrender and abandonment of the chariot of mind, dragging us through mud, sleet and concrete against the interminable ledger of our disappointments.

The tiled-sloping Chinese roof and the vast inner courtyard remind me of my village home. The architecture takes hold of you, takes off your outer garments, and naked we enter, in submission.

Some ceremony is about to begin. Old men and women bearing pocket editions find a square-feet of earth to squat in silent repetition of sounds whose purpose seems less to embroil us in the semantics of denotation and signification but somehow to rip our spirit away from the craving to find meaning everywhere and when the search fails, to impose some meaning, any meaning whatsoever, at any cost, than entertain the counterintuitive possibility, that meaninglessness may not be the nightmare we make of it.

In the many alcoves of the outer corridors that surround the inner temple, we have made deities out of our desires – for love, for peace, for success, for passing an examination – the list is endless, as endless as human desires. Some deities, such as the sea goddess Mazu, may not have had a visitor in a while.

Before the chosen deity, the body prostrates and mutters a quiet prayer. And lo and behold, a miracle, some feeling of a response rises within. If the mind is still racing, we may need the anchor of a question, and we enter the hallowed grounds of a ritual space, where the questioner, the seeker, the answer, and the sought become disembodied in a flow.

Ready with the question, the supplicant approaches the deity and bows, introduces herself and her worry, and throws the moon blocks (or jiao bei, 筊杯) on the ground. The moon blocks are a divination device that come in pairs, each with a flat surface and a round surface, metaphors for Yang and Yin.

Someone explains to me that if you get a Yin and a Yang, the answer is affirmative; if you get two Yangs, or the round side up, the deities are displeased with your problem and refuse to entertain with a wave of the hand, suggesting a clear no. Two Yins, facing up, means the deities are laughing at you.

I find the ideas of deities laughing quietly reassuring. Who does not laugh at themselves when the bubble of self-seriousness is punctured and the fog of delusion lifts? Through the alleys and by lanes of such questions, I think, we find a quiet spot, a garden, the root of a tree, a space to sit with ourselves.

So much human yearning for communion and conversation, a listening ear and a trusted friend is easily dismissed as superstition. I do not deny that rituals may easily, and very often do, become exercises in superstition. But such superstitions are found in the so-called scientific laboratories as much as they are to be seen in temples. How else do we explain the age where our loneliness drives us to pay for a listening ear in the figure of a therapist?

It is the query and malaise that lie beneath our search that require illumination, a touch of friendliness, and ears that do not judge, albeit they may laugh. Something in human social evolution has made us all cynical. Loneliness is merely the obverse side of the coin of cynicism. No wonder, then, that we find it easier to be naked before a stone god or a therapist than a friend, a fellow of flesh and blood.

Moving from alcove to alcove, eyes immerse in the minute carvings of the wood, enchanted by the wild hair and exaggerated expressions on the faces of deities: an arm raised, ready to strike and split the earth, a smile carved so broad it echoes through the silent halls.

In the inner courtyard, the Sun glows golden yellow and swirls in smoke rising from burning incense; a dance of light and vapour ensues, and I remember the school definition of Tyndall Effect, the collision of light with colloidal particles. Robed in the clothes of monkhood, a procession begins and sits before the Buddha in the inner temple. One moves from the deities of desire towards the desireless. Instead of answers to questions, cessation of questions.

All arrivals have found a spot by now. They sit with a pocketbook of chants open before them, following the strokes and squiggles of Chinese characters as sounds echo from the microphone. A certain quality fuses the sun, the smoke, and the sounds of the chant. It has nothing to do with words. I do not understand them. If I were to go after their meaning, something tells me I will miss the point.

So, I sit and drown in the sensations of the moment, succeeding each other seamlessly. A pair of eyes enchanted by the light, a pair of ears vibration to the rhythm, a body among so many, a silent lip, a listening ear, a free fall in presence.