Visit an elm tree
Wen 丨 Alai
In malcolm, there were only two things I really had to do.
One of them is to go and see a tree.
Yes, a tree. It is said that this tree is an elm tree from the distant Wutai Mountain in Shanxi.
Of the nearly 20,000 inhabitants living in Malcolm, perhaps very few know the connection between the tree's history and Malcolm's.
This tree is in the courtyard of the CPPCC dormitory area of Aba State. The roots are inlaid with neat and clean cement square tiles. In the past, I used to go in and out of this place a lot, because in this courtyard, there are many legends related to Jiarong's past. After liberation, they bid farewell to the hereditary territories of their respective families and began another life as United Front activists that their ancestors could not have imagined in the past.
At that time, I went in and out of this courtyard in order to sit idly in some old people's homes, and occasionally from their words, I would reveal a little nostalgia for the past era. I'm certainly not interested in a little nostalgic mood when they're old. Rather, in their casual nostalgia, they grasp a little sensual fragment of their past life. There has never been a lack of such sensual fragments in our history, not to mention that there is no slightly complete history in the whole of Jiarong itself.
That's when I noticed the big tree. Because this is a kind of tree that is not found in the entire Jiarong area. So, I'll be looking at it consciously or unconsciously all the time.
An old man told me that this was a tree from a Han chinese place, an elm tree, that a high monk had brought back from Mount Wutai many, many years ago.
I asked, "Who is this monk?" ”
The old man shook his head and said, "I don't know, that was a long, long time ago." ”
On one side of the building I used to go to was the yard and the elm tree in the center of the yard, and on the other side of the building was an open-air stadium with thousands of seats. This place, an important public place in the city, is surrounded by thousands of stepped open-air seats from three directions. On the other side of the patron, there is also a public place: the Palace of National Culture. On the three floors of the Palace of Culture, there are some art exhibitions during the festival, and more often than not, those spaces are often used as venues. When the meeting is bigger, it will move from the Palace of Culture to the stadium outside.
I think every city in China, big or small, will have similar settings, similar public spaces. If that were all there was to it, I wouldn't need to describe it here. Although many people who have stayed in this city longer often reflect the changes in this public place and condense the changes of a city, saying that it was just a large dusty square under the earthen platform. Now in front of the magnificent building of the Palace of Culture, it is an earthen platform made according to local conditions. At that time, the leader spoke and stood on it, and the judge pronounced the prisoner on the top, and so on, and many people had heard of such topics. And when I sat in the building separating the stadium from the elm tree, I knew that the place was much older.
This history is related to the elm tree and to the origin of the name of this mountain town.
The old people who once went through the sea said that in the location of the stadium and the palace of national culture, it used to be a temple. The name of the temple is Malcan. At that time, the temple was full of incense, so it got such a name related to light.
Malcom Monastery was once a Bon temple.
After more than a decade of war in Jinchuan, because Tusi and the local dominant Bon religion supported each other and relied heavily on each other, after the war Qianlong ordered all Bon temples in the Jiarong area, especially in the Dadu River Valley, to convert to Buddhism. The idols enshrined in Malkang Monastery were changed from the Bon patriarch Sinrao Miwo to the Buddhist Shakyamuni and gelug master Tsongkhapa in yellow monk's hat.
After Malkan converted to Buddhism, he still maintained a relationship of alms with the local toastmasters who had been rewarded in the Battle of the Two Golden Rivers, and many of the major ceremonies of the Chokki Toast were held in this temple.
At that time, in front of Malkang Temple, there was a wide river beach with white poplar. The most memorable thing is that once a year between winter and spring, the ceremony of exorcising evil spirits and praying for peace and auspiciousness is held in front of the temple once a year to ward off evil spirits in the region. Each time, the unfortunate among the faithful are identified as "ghosts" by the monks and driven into the icy Somo River. In such mass gatherings, the unfortunate must receive inhuman fear before they receive death; and for many more, it must be a barbaric and exciting game.
Every year, religion offers a farce of life and death, between man and man, and the inhuman to the numb public in a very noble name.
People enjoy it too.
Now, in this place, the most exciting thing is the occasional death sentence on the stadium. There, one can see the color of death in advance and smell the smell of death from a person who is deeply trapped in the fear of death. Times have changed, and the death of those who are pronounced is not a choice of others, but a choice made by the sins of their hearts for their lives. However, from generation to generation, the psychology of the spectators has not changed much.
One or two of the old men who told me stories were also in charge of the people's livelihood in the past. But now they were calm and told me the story of the square. They told me that the place where these buildings of the CPPCC are now located is the daily living quarters of the monks of Malkang Monastery.
Among them, there was a lama who went on a pilgrimage to Mount Wutai and came back with this tree.
Old people have two theories about this tree.
One theory is that the lama, on a long journey, folded a section of a branch as a crutch, returned, inserted it in the soil, and sprouted new branches and shoots the following spring. That is to say, the tree came to a foreign land thousands of miles away, which is a kind of accident.
The second thesis is held by a deceased monk who said that the lama had brought back a seed from the temple on Mount Wutai, and when he came back in winter, he only had to put the seed on his pillow and dreamed of a large tree with vigorous branches and leaves. After I dreamed about it, I knew that this symbolized the prosperity of the Boundless Dharma in Jiarong. So, when the earth thawed in the spring, he planted the seed in front of the door.
Now, the tree has grown, but the Dharma may not have shaded the world as the dream indicates.
Only this tree is still standing here, in a cramped space, trying to move upwards, seeking the sun, seeking the caress of birds and wind. When the wind blows, the wide leaves of the tree always seem particularly noisy.
(Source: Essays of Alai)
Ah Lai was born in Malkang, Sichuan in 1959. He began writing poetry in 1982 and turned to fiction in the mid-to-late 1980s. He has won the 5th Mao Dun Literature Award and the 7th Lu Xun Literature Award for Novella. His major works include the poetry collection "Somo River", the novel collection "Blood stains of the old years", "Silversmith in the Moonlight", the essay "Ladder of the Earth", "The Ideal Country of Grass and Trees: Chengdu Phenology", the novel "Dust Settled", "Empty Mountain", "King Gesar", "Notes in the Clouds" and so on.