Burning burning burning burning

Today I tried to run an experiment. I did my usual share of traipsing in heels of my traditional stateside height. Walking the Bannan Line’s pilgrimage circuit didn’t hurt any less than normal, but it also didn’t hurt more. Looks like I can’t use judicious styling to compensate for the pampered softness of my sedentary sloth. That was too much sigmatism, kind of tacky stylistically. But I’m too tired to care.

The Longshan temple’s too uniformly pretty to photograph well, at least for a lazy point-and-shoot hobbyist like me. I trained my greedy lens on the goldleaf rooftops and richly carved columns, and it was visual chaos, no obvious focal point. The aesthetic is a little gaudy. When I surveyed my confused gleanings on Photoshop later, I felt like I had to desaturate that candy apple red. It reminds me of how they say nonfiction writers have more leeway than novelists, who can’t rest on the irresistible buoyancy of truth; they have to make you believe.

Incense made curtains of fragrant heat in the courtyards. There was a little waterfall emitting cool sound. Winnie pointed out that it’s all a little too commercial; the sign outside even says “Huanying guanling”, like this hallowed ground is some kind of soteriological buffet. A man standing outside sold plates of flowers, white and red, for offering, and in the courtyard we saw them laid out with fruit bowls in front of blind, bronze-eyed Guanyin. In Hanoi, I remember, all the altars were laden with Choco-Pies.

Yesterday the Lutheran preacher said something about divine ineffability. We can’t parse the Lord’s dicta when he speaks in the language of thunder. It’s like how dakini script is illegible to treasure revealers until they slowly, through years of dharmic burning, start to unravel the code.

It's like Eileen Chang wrote, “Life was like the Bible, translated from Hebrew to Greek, from Greek to Latin, from Latin to English, from English to Mandarin Chinese. When Cuiyuan read it, she translated the Mandarin into Shanghainese. Some things did not come through.”

Once I read the Song of Solomon, looking for this one quote I liked, which a friend had posted on her Facebook profile. All the English editions rendered it so differently; the translations had nothing to do with each other. The one I ended up remembering was the prettiest.

So this is a way I can justify my bizarre lack of interest in religious praxis, if I say all worship constitutes reckless mistranslation. I’m the kind of finicky sinner who likes purity— texts. These thoughts aren’t deep, they’re just vanity dressed up in self-consciously overblown rhetoric.

It’d be easy to say that I’m jealous. I almost wrote, “I want to drink deeply from the cup of faith”. That’s such a cheap metaphor, but it’s still kind of apt I think, so I’ll leave here framed by a shamefaced apology. I can sit through sermons nodding at the words that echo Luther’s; I can quote from Ecclesiastes and smile through the Heart Sutra feeling something like recognition. But I don’t know what it’s like to bend before a stick of lit incense and know that, in doing so, I’m part of a community. I think that’s what I’d like about taking communion— the aesthetic of the uniformity. Out of the three treasures, my favorite’s not the Buddha or the dharma, but the sangha.

On the way back home from the Shida Night Market, we accidentally walked an extra metro stop. I was staggering in my heels, but we sang the whole way through in Quenya. A western tourist saw us from a street corner, too Chinese-looking girls singing publically in a conlang. I'm remembering now about something a friend once wrote Catholicism in affectionate jest, how "there are these bizarre and arcane rituals". Of course I wasn't thinking about that while we ran across the green light to Guting.