South Temple

Dante knew that compared to many of the people in Taiwan he appeared to be quite ego-centric. He wasn’t devoted to supporting his family group. He was in it for himself. Hopefully, he thought, the talent that he was nurturing in himself would make a splash and the world would understand and appreciate his specialness.

In Taiwan, it didn’t help his egotistical tendencies that everyone was always complimenting him about how smart and capable he was. Before he could spit out one word, strangers would be complimenting his Chinese.

Buddhism intrigued Dante on an intellectual level. The “Life is Suffering,” precept of Buddhism didn’t appeal to him, though. After all, he was enjoying life. What suffering?

Buddha Flower took Dante on a hike along a well-trodden trail on the northern edge of Taipei city. It followed a yellowish, slimy, polluted river and ended at an old temple. They had lunch at the temple, a simple vegetarian meal cooked and served by bald nuns. Buddha Flower explained that payment for the lunch was optional. She placed some bills in the collection box as they left.

As they were leaving the stillness of the temple back on the path through the tropical vegetation, some nuns began to chant. It was a low drone, almost like the buzzing of insects.

“What’s that?” Dante asked Buddha Flower.

“That is the Heart Sutra. It is the most important sutra for a Buddhist,” Buddha Flower said smiling.

“What does it mean?”

“Form is Emptiness. Emptiness is Form.”

Caught in the Rain

Dante pondered this existential challenge as he walked with Buddha Flower. How could nothing and something be the same thing? What did that mean in terms of how a person should behave? How could a whole religion be built around the idea that nothing is real?

As frequently happened in Taiwan in the summer, a thunder storm moved in suddenly and drenched Buddha Flower and Dante as they were walking back from the temple. They decided to lay down on the grass to dry off. Dante saw Buddha Flower’s slender torso and shallow-cupped bra through her wet cotton blouse which stuck to her, wet and transparent. The bra had flowers on it.

Suffering comes from desire. That was another Buddhist doctrine that Dante had learned. He couldn’t really refute that one. Dante wondered about Buddha Flower’s desires and if she had them like he did.

“I’m a mess,” she said.

“You look fine,” Dante replied. He thought about touching her skin . It looked cool and smooth with water beads sparkling as the sun beams broke through the clouds.

Jade was easier to touch than Buddha Flower

Chinese Art

Dante’s first art class in Taiwan was a calligraphy class. Chinese calligraphy appealed to him in ways that studying art in America never had. He felt connected with ancient Chinese scholars as he copied their masterworks. Practicing calligraphy was a meditative skill that his teachers assured him would make him a better, more focused person as well as cure his constipation.

It was a discipline that was supposed to teach humility. Dante was constantly being complimented on his shaky calligraphy, even though it was at the level of an average Taiwanese middle school student. The teachers took to Dante. He was a novelty. His calligraphy teacher sent him on errands. That was an honor, apparently.

As it turned out, calligraphy would be a constant in Dante’s life, a more dependable pursuit than marriage, often more rewarding than sex.

His calligraphy teacher talked about getting married to a woman that he didn’t really care for. He was in his 50s. She was in her 30s. It was his first experience with a woman, he said. The teacher said that over time he had grown fond of this woman. It took him about 15 years to warm up to her and now they had a good relationship. He felt some affection for her.

That different than marriages I grew up with, Dante thought

Don’t Marry Her

Dante swore to himself when he left Taiwan that he wouldn’t marry Jade. He remembered the exact moment that he vowed to himself not to marry her. She was bent over in his apartment sweeping the floor. At that moment, Dante was saw a crudeness in her, something that wouldn’t age well, he thought. He promised himself silently, that he wouldn’t marry her. Afterall, she didn’t ever seem to understand who he really was. She didn’t see his deeper side, he thought. She had some notion of what boys are like and just expected him to act that way. These pleads to himself were unheaded. They did marry.

As hospitable and interesting as Taiwan had been to him, the charm started to fade after 2 years. Dante started to feel a strong sense of alienation to the place and the people. He realized how American he was and thought of all the things he liked about America. Taipei seemed stagnant and shallow. The sense of humor was different. The street life that once thrilled him now just seemed predictable.

I better head back to the States and start a life there before it’s too late, Dante thought. Jade was upset by this plan

Bearing Children

In spite of Dante’s vow to himself not to marry Jade, he did. Her father paid for her to attend graduate school at NYU. She slept on a futon on the floor in an East Village dive with Dante and his brother Nik, for a while. Eventually they moved from the East Village to Jackson Heights, Queens.

They had their first child when Dante was in graduate school getting an MA in Asian Studies. It wasn’t an easy pregnancy for anyone involved. Jade didn’t like the college town they were in and spent a chunk of her pregnancy back in Taiwan. There, she could see Chinese doctors and have tiger balm rubbed into her belly by her father.

Charlotte was born after a long labor. Dante walked with Jade around campus for most of the day to encourage the baby to rear it’s face to the world.

Charlotte arrived late at night. The nurse asked Dante if it bothered him that his baby looked Asian. What an odd question to be asked moments after you have participated in miracle of bringing a life into the world. Maybe they always asked fathers in bi-racial births that question.

In the end, it was Jade who was profoundly unhappy being married to an American guy with half-white children. She eventually, after the divorce, moved across the country and seldom saw her children.

Marriage Dies

“Chinese don’t divorce.” Dante heard this from Jade and her relatives. Was divorce a tragic mistake? He knew many examples of okay divorce. His own parents included.

According to his understanding of Buddhism, it was his attachment to his ego that would cause him to end a marriage. The bad things he saw in Jade were just a reflection of what was inside himself. If he was at a higher state of enlightenment, he would look at Jade and everyone else with compassion because of the understanding that this whole reality he had constructed in his mind was empty. Emptiness is form. Form is emptiness. There is no such thing as good and bad. No such thing as a good wife or a bad wife. His monkey brain was deceiving him into believing that something could be gained from divorce just as it had deceived him by making him think that he should covet certain things in his marriage.

In Taiwan he had imagined himself to be so desirable. A rock star. An emblem of western licentiousness titillating the natives, stoking their desires. Any of those girls would be lucky to have him, Dante thought. Maybe self-deception was the root of his problems.

Regardless of what it said about Dante and his state of spiritual development, he got the divorce.

We Think With Words

When Dante first decided to study Chinese in the summer of 1980, a family friend, George Schneeman, casually tossed off the comment, “How can those Chinese think with all that gobblety-gook in their brains?” George, a painter and friend of the many New York poets and writers, was good at stirring up discussion. He did it from his perch four stories above the streets of St. Mark’s Place in the East Village.

Dante couldn’t refute an underlying premise of what George said. We use our words to think thoughts. The language you are thinking with influences the thoughts you can have. Can you have a thought without forming it in words? Try. Maybe Jade was right when she said that in spite of all his study, Dante really didn’t understand the Chinese. Buddhist meditation was designed to free a person from the thoughts jumping around like an uncontrolled monkey in the brain. Dante hadn’t been that successful at his attempts to meditate.

The character for form (色), actually means sex or color in modern Chinese. Dante liked those multiple layers of meaning in Chinese. This was in spite of the fact that teachers had told him that some of the layers of meaning he liked didn’t really exist for native Chinese speakers. Using his English vocabulary to think about Chinese created false meanings. On top of that all thoughts were empty, anyway.

Form is empty (空), afterall. The piece of paper was empty until Dante applied colors to it with his brush, hoping to make something beautiful, or at least, to communitcate something.