The staggered ginkgo leaves, like the mind of the sun, sprinkled on the ground, made me unable to bear to step on it. The clear sky in early winter, but its huge body propped up? I looked up with it, and there was a thin cloud like a veil gently pulled away by the breeze, and the sky was full of infinite possibilities. Looking back, the golden leaves of the trees are still full of sunshine, and the divine radiance is lively in the heavens and the earth.
Why was this ancient temple located here during the Zhenguan period of the Tang Dynasty? Is it because the Surabaya water of the Master's "deceased is like a si" flowing next to him? Is it because of this tree-lined Andan? Or simply for the fountain of pearls that will never dry up? Maybe it's all the reason, but the location of this ancient temple must be related to this majestic ginkgo tree. Isn't the Dinglin Temple on Mount Fulai also built next to the 4,000-year-old ginkgo tree?
One summer day more than thirty years ago, I came to this tree to take shelter from the rain in the temple, but let the lightning that suddenly exploded be cut off at the foot of Ansan Mountain. Almost all the trees were crushed by the storm and rain, and only the giant tree in front of the temple was simply as stable as a mountain. Friends in Surabaya advised: Lightning is overhead, but you can't get close to that big tree. After all, the car could not let the line of sight be unobstructed, I still jumped out of the car, standing alone in the rain outside the car, caught in the enjoyment of observation. Of course, the darkness of the day is even more frightening, especially at the moment when lightning tears through this thick black cloud, the impressive canopy has become a rain waterfall like a burning rain, stretching out at an altitude of thirty meters, and the diameter of the tree, like pig iron, silently and uprightly meets the storm. Wind, rain, thunder, and electricity together create a mighty sound that shakes all things, but I still feel the low hum from the giant tree in this unified sound, a hum beyond the mighty sound, faint but magnificent and irrepressible.
Time has smoothed out many potholes in life, but at that time, the lightning-like realization was like a knife and no longer forgot: it cannot be as huge as it is, but it must strive to have such a spirit. Solzhenitsyn, who was imprisoned and exiled, said: "Life is not so short, if you can set a few milestones on the road of life." ”
The introduction card of the ancient tree says that it was planted by Confucius in that year. I didn't believe it, but I just thought that this wild ginkgo tree was already a strong life when Confucius was there, and it attracted the admiration of Confucius and his students. A botanist told me that the ginkgo tree was about 2600 years old. Also, Confucius's "apricot altar" may not be the apricot tree with apricots as people often say, but such a ginkgo biloba with beautiful scalloped leaves. Even, the "apricot altar" that can attract and take in the children of the commoners in all directions, the "apricot altar" that confronts the official government and nobles, must be mobile and informal, perhaps this ginkgo tree once had "disciples reading, Confucius strings singing and drumming" (Zhuangzi language).
100 million years ago, Ginkgo biloba dominated the earth at the same time as the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs went extinct, but Ginkgo biloba was left behind because of its special ability to survive — and only survived in China because of the rolling glaciers of the east-west mountains, and was once again spread around the world by China. The titles "biological champion" and "living fossil" wonderfully reflect its ancient and constantly renewed appearance. Long-lived and baby, this is ginkgo biloba. Although its evolution has slowed down and even shown signs of retreating in this 100 million-year-long existence, it still has broad prospects for development with the diversified life state of 15 close relatives. According to the classification of botanists, Ginkgo biloba is a terrestrial gymnosperm, but among the more than 800 kinds of gymnosperms known around the world, it is single-door and has no close relatives, so that it can only be listed as a ginkgo biloba, a family of ginkgo biloba, a genus of ginkgo biloba, and a single species. Diverse and unique, it can stand in time and space for hundreds of millions of years.
It was Surabaya Wenyou who "urged" me to see it in the late autumn of Gengzi, but it was already early winter when I saw it again. It is alone with me, making me feel a sense of glory and happiness. I know that its body has accumulated more than 2600 years of sun, moon, wind and rain, and the beating of people's hearts. Who can say that it does not have the gaze of Lao Tzu and Zhuangzi on its body? At that time, Li Bai would definitely come with Du Fu to come under this tree and look at Mount Tai not far away. Or it is a quiet night like a frost in the moon, and it invites you to raise a glass, so that the uninhibited feelings flow like a spring forest.
The ancient tree in front of Ansan Temple is a male ginkgo biloba. This reminds me of Saboro Hirase's great discovery in 1896 at Tokyo Imperial University in Japan: the male ginkgo tree has animal-like swimming sperm! Moreover, such passionate sperm, with cilia capable of flying at the top, can find a female couple 10 kilometers away. In fact, next to it, there is a young female ginkgo tree, which is the "lady" that posterity matched for it, only more than 600 years old. I looked at them on the left and the right, and couldn't help but smile, praying for the commonality of human nature. In the 1980s, the reproductive organ of ginkgo biloba plants, a complete seed fossil, was first found in the coal seam of The Yima Coal Mine in Henan Province, which suddenly confirmed the life history of Ginkgo biloba for hundreds of millions of years!
In fact, the ginkgo we know is only about the very small part of the ginkgo, even if this very small part is already so surprising. The deeply lobed ginkgo biloba leaves, the veins of the leaves from the base of the petiole to the top of the leaves but are not connected to each other, are surprisingly very strange. In particular, its callus ability and regeneration ability are rarely matched in the plant kingdom. It has hidden buds in all parts, which can sprout buds and grow into branches alone, and can be downward or upward, thick and can be hugged and stretched for several meters, and the renewal is not stopped. There is also "tree milk" (stalactites), also known as basal nodules, which is another magic point of its callus and regeneration: when the ginkgo biloba is injured by external forces, the tree milk quietly and strongly grows downwards, produces fearless root whiskers, and grows secondary trunks at the contact with the mother trunk, so that the tree is reborn. No wonder the plant kingdom also calls tree milk an asexual breeder. In the end, the development of the root system is the guarantee of the life of Ginkgo biloba. The main root side root is both vertically downward and horizontally extended, and the "Ansan giant" in front of him can be rooted down to a depth of 5 meters, and the horizontal extension of the root will be more than twice the projection of its canopy. The thought of it makes one admire: its underground part is even more spectacular than the above-ground part. The root system was even so strong that it could no longer fully bloom underground, and the thick root that twisted like a dragon was half naked on the ground. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, killed 200,000 people, and everything in the center of the nuclear explosion was wiped out, and in the high temperature of 40000 to 5000 degrees that even iron would melt, there were 6 ginkgo trees that did not die, and when the spring of the next year arrived, new shoots and new shoots miraculously sprouted. Think about the positive drama and comedy tragedy in our world, can we get some inspiration and comfort from these ginkgo families?
Circle after circle around it, stop and go, there is a province on the heart of the flood. For 2600 years, it has penetrated life and death, but it has never refused, never evaded, but really did itself. What about me? In the period approaching seventy, there will be greed and greed, and there will be reluctance and vanity. This ancient tree seems to be telling people: Think of the universe in which we live every day. The universe has 200 billion milky ways, and each milky way contains 200 billion solar systems, and the radius of the universe is 46.5 billion light-years; The length of existence, the universe is 13.8 billion years, the solar system and the earth are 4.6 billion years, the upright beginning of human beings is only 400,000 to 500,000 years, and the history of human civilization is only 4,000 to 5,000 years. Scientist Shi Yigong has a comparison, he set the history of the universe as a month, so that the calculation: the solar system is equivalent to 10 days, the dinosaurs who ruled the earth for 200 million years are 8 hours, the upright beginning of human beings is 1 minute, and the history of human civilization is only equivalent to one second.
Therefore, "The heavens and the earth are not kind, and all things are dogs" (Lao Tzu). And this old ginkgo biloba, regardless of these, is only in the location of Anshan, Surabaya, Shandong, China, a stop is 2600 years old. Whether it will stand at this location for another 2600 years, we cannot know. But I seem to understand that this great tree that holds up the canopy of heaven loves the land where its roots are deeply rooted, and stands on its own immortal life as a monument that is new and new day by day.
(2020, 12, 22 written in Jining Fangyuan Reclamation Desert Zhai, published in Dazhong Daily Harvest Supplement on January 10, 2021)
About the Author:
Li Musheng is a famous writer, essayist, poet, and senior editor. Born in 1952 in rural Jining, Shandong Province, he began to engage in literary creation in the 1970s, and has published a collection of poems "Cuigu", a biography of "Confucius in Cloth", and a collection of essays "Qiaomu Sensen". The essay collection "Midnight Sunshine" won the first Taishan Literature and Art Award in Shandong Province, the essay "Quiet on the Weishan Lake" won the first Guo Moruo Prose Essay Award of the China Writers Association, and the essay "Tang Dynasty, the Flower of Freedom" won the Bingxin Prose Award of the China Prose Association, and his works were selected into various anthologies, anthologies, college, middle and primary school reading books, and middle and high school examination papers across the country.