The new book by Christina Miu Bing Cheng ), entitled Tracing Macau Through Chinese Writers And Buddhist/Daoist Temples (2013), is a publication by the Macau Foundation, with the support of the Macao Scientific and Cultural Centre. The author has previously published Macau: A Cultural Janus (1999) and In Search of Folk Humour: The Rebellious Cult of Nezha (2009).
Tracing Macau is made up of a reunion of six essays, or Lanterns as they are referred to, first published in the Review of Culture. Four of them have been presented at international conferences. They depict the enlightened side of Macau as a Christian and Holy City, a Rome of the Far East, a Chinese religious city, while also showing its darker side as the Eastern Monte Carlo or Far East Las Vegas. Nevertheless, the author reminds us several times that the multiple characteristics of Macau are an essential part of its charm.
The first Lantern – The Peony Pavilion: A Crossroad of East-West and South-North
This essay presents a brilliant dramatist to us, Tang Xianzu (唐顯祖 , 1550-1616), who was demoted to work as a clerk in the southernmost coastal area of Guangdong Province and visited Macau in 1591. He incorporated the experience in his most celebrated play Mudan Ting (牡丹亭), Scene 21 “An Audience with the envoy” (Jie yu 謁遇).
Macau became a Portuguese settlement in 1557 and Tang was fascinated by what he saw, the flourishing commerce, the lovely sophisticated ladies… he was so impressed that he registered the encounter in his dramatic romance or marvelous tale (Chuanqi 傳奇) The Peony Pavilion.
The play is a miraculous love story about Du Liniang (杜麗娘) and Liu Mengmei (柳夢梅). She is from the north, Jiangxi Province, he is from the South, Guangdong. She meets him in her dream and they consummate their love in the Peony Pavilion. Not long after, she dies of lovesickness and he helps her soul (魂) to return to life. They marry and live happily ever after, but only after overcoming the resistance of her northerner father to a southerner son-in-law.
The Peony enjoyed similar popularity in the Eastern world as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in the West.
For this enlightened writer, Qing (情), or feelings, and in this particular case, love, govern the world. Only feelings can give us a true purpose for living, because they are rooted in the heart as xinxue (心學), the School of Mind/Heart of Wang Yangming (王陽明) defended by the time of Ming Dynasty.
True feelings can abolish the boundaries between life and death – this is the essential message of the light from the first lantern in this book, which takes place against a backdrop where North meets South and East meets West.
The Second Lantern – Wu Li: In Search of the Western Lantern
Wu Li (吳歷) or Wu Yushan 吳魚山 (1632-1718) visited Macau in 1681, in its heyday as a prosperous commercial center. He stayed in Macau for four years, until 1684. He was ordained as a priest in Nanjing in 1688, and until his death in 1718 he proselytized in Nanjing, Shanghai and Jiading. Wu Li was a great painter, poet and calligrapher. Living under Manchu occupation, in political and social chaos, he was afraid of expressing his ideas, so he turned to painting.
“Painting was the safest form of artistic creation that would provoke the least surveillance and suspicion from the Manchu,” Christina writes in her book.
Although Wu Li had met Buddhist monks and had many Daoist friends, he was not fulfilled. So at the age of 50 he came to Macau in order to learn about the Western Dao, Christianity.
He searched for the Western Lantern (西燈) to obtain inner illumination. He searched for the word of the Christian God.
Wu was born in Changshu, Jiangsu Province.
“He was baptized when he was a boy, he joined the society of Jesus at the age of 51 and received ordination to priesthood at the age of 57,” notes the author, leaving behind his career as painter-scholar.
When he joined the Society of Jesus, he was probably thinking of a paradise on earth (桃園), a Land of Peach Blossoms, many times depicted in his paintings and sung about in his poetry (桃溪集). He received the guidance of Rougemont, a Belgian Jesuit (魯日滿, 1624-76), and always thinking of the transcendent world, believed that somehow Macau could be a bridge, due to its status as “Head of Christendom in the East” or “bridgehead for Christianity”. And he learnt Dao (道) or ‘the way’ in Sanba (三巴), the Chinese name for the Church of Saint Paul’s.
The second Lantern, the Western Lantern of Wu Li, is a religious one, shining with and by the love and the word of the Christian God. As Jonathan Chaves points out, Wu was the first to create Chinese Christian Poetry as we can see in the poem “The Western Lantern”:
燈自遠方異,火從寒食分。試觀羅馬景,橫讀辣丁文。
蛾繞光難近,鼠窺影不群。驚看西札到,事事聞未聞。
The Lantern coming from afar is different.
The fire after the cold food festival is rekindled.
I try to imagine the scenery of Rome,
And read Latin in horizontal lines.
A moth hovers around the light, but unable to come near,
A rat peeps from the dark, but not in a group.
I am excited to see the arrival of letters from the West,
And learn everything I never heard of before
The Third Lantern – Leung Ping-Kwan’s New Poetry on Old Macau
Leung Ping-kuan (梁秉鈞) was a writer, a poet, a translator, an essayist, and critic of films and culture who lived from 1949 to 2013.
Writing under the pen-name Yesi (也斯), and a native of Xinhui (新會) Guandong Province, Leung visited Macau in 1973. Influenced by Hu Shi (胡适), known as the “father of modern Chinese Poetry”, he described Macau as a dreamland using ‘New Poetry’ style (xinshi,
新詩) a form using free verse, without pattern or rhyme.
He described Macau in two phases, the first portraying landscapes and landmarks, the second concerning the history and culture of Macau.
“Leung portrays Macau as a dreamland for people of fame, but is a land of broken dreams in reality,” notes Christina.
His lantern illuminates with poetry, New Poetry, and shines, spreading nostalgic feelings and fear for Macau’s uncertain future after 1999, as we can see in the poem Leung wrote six months before the return of Macau to China :
In Front of A-Ma Temple
The temple is closed
even A-Ma has time to rest
we’ll just have to sit by the sea
and run our own maritime matters
drinking we face the rolling grey waves
on the bottle gold characters celebrate Macau’s return to China
today’s weather is unsettled: cloudy or clear
when dusk comes it’s a little stifling
the beer is cold enough
but can’t slake our thirst
why are the distant hills split in half?
those plants drifting on the water
can they be leaves in self-banishment?
when, through layered clouds,
will break bright starlight?
The Fourth Lanterns – The Harmonization of Buddhism and Daoism in Lian Feng Miao
The fourth essay is entitled The Harmonization of Buddhism and Daoism in Lian Feng Miao (連峰廟), in English, Lotus Peak Temple. The author explains: “The words ‘lian feng’ (蓮峰) refer to Macau’s cartographic shape and its location, as Macau is likened to a lotus flower; the peninsula itself resembles the bud or flower and the isthmus the stem. The Summit of the hill just behind the temple is called the Lotus Peak. ”
Christina calls attention to the religious syncretism found in this temple, as well as in the others presented in the fifth and sixth essays: Nuwa Temple (女媧廟) and Guan Di Old Temple (帝古廟). Here we can find the three religions of Chinese people – Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, known as sanjiao (三教) – all together through the most representative deities.
In 1592, Lian Feng Miao Temple was first dedicated to the Taoist Goddess of Sea, Tian Fei (天妃), Tian Hou (天后), Mazu (媽祖)or A-Ma (阿媽). In 1723, it was enlarged with the addition of a hall dedicated to Guanyin (觀音), the most important feminine Buddhist goddess. And later, the temple received a statue of Lin Zexu (林則徐), in 1989, in commemoration of 150th anniversary of his visit to Macau. The Imperial Commissioner of the Qing dynasty represents the Confucian influence in the temple.
In the courtyard, near the statue of Lin Zexu, one finds two other minor Taoist supernatural beings, the God of Soil and the God of the Five Grains of Lian Feng (連峰社稷之神), and also a guardian stone, ‘the Stone that dares to Undertake the Mount Tai’ (泰山石敢當).
One can also meet other gods related to the Buddhist world, such as Dizang Wang (地藏王), the King of Hell or Nether Regions, and Wei Tuo (韋陀), the defender of Buddhist faith.
We discover many other deities proving the mixture of religions, for example Wu Di (武帝), popularly known as Guan Gong (關公), the God of War, Literature and Wealth, which has three different biographies, and many, many other mythological deities, folk immortals, Deities of Culture and especially one of the founders of Chinese Civilization: Shen Nong (神農), the God of Agriculture.
The fifth Lantern – Matriarchy at the Edge: The Mythical Mother Goddess Nuwa
This essay is dedicated to Nuwa (女媧). She represents part of the Chinese cosmogony, namely the Creation Myth. She is the mother of all Chinese and savior of human life.
Nuwa Temple (女媧廟) is located not far from the Ruins of Saint Paul’s at the junction of Rua das Estalagens (草堆街) e Travessa dos Algibebes (高尾街). It was built in 1888. After a fire in 1914, the temple was renovated and received the image of Patriarch Lu (呂祖), one of the Gods of Literature.
As well as Nuwa and Patriarch Lu, other deities venerated in this temple include: Dragon Mother of Yuecheng (悅成龍母), a deity associated with sea and fertility; Guan Yin (觀音), the Buddhist Bodhisattva of Mercy; Guan Gong (關公), Lord of War and Literature; Zhong Kui
(鍾馗), the Slayer of Devils; and Zheng Yin (鄭隱) and Ge Hong (葛洪), both Taoist Healing Immortals. In this temple we also find Buddhist Deities, for instance Wei Tuo (韋陀), Dizang Wang, and many others, which clearly represent the Chinese Religious Syncretism of the Three Religions.
The main deity is Nuwa, half snake, half human. She is the female deity for the Creation story. As the author writes: “she represents an important mythic theme: matriarchal dominance, which is perhaps the intended reaction to the patriarchy of Chinese society.”
The light from her lantern illuminated a matriarchal society, where a goddess of fertility ruled and bestowed children, protecting all women, including the prostitutes of Rua da Felicidade (福隆新街), the red light district street not far from Nuwa Miao.
Her lantern also protected marriage and match-making (媒神) in Macau for centuries until, and as Christina notes, the arrival of the “dominant divine virgin trio”, namely the Virgin Mary, the mother of the Christian God, Tian Hou, the Taoist Goddess of the Sea, and Guan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, took her place.
The Last Lantern – Sanjie Huiguan: The Myth and the Cult of Guan Di
San Jie Huiguan (三街會館), the Guildhall of Three Streets, has been a UNESCO listed heritage site since 2005, and also bears another name: Guan Di Gumiao (關帝古廟). This lantern shines upon Guan Di, based on the historical character of Guan Yu (關羽, A.D 162-220). He is depicted as a heroic warrior in the historical novel Three Kingdoms (三國演義).
Apparently the temple is dedicated to three Taoist gods: Guan Di, the God of Wealth (財帛星君) and the God of Annual Cycle (太歲星君), but the biography of Guan Di is highly syncretic, showing Taoist, Buddhist and Confucian connections. Guan Di is the guardian deity of traders and merchants.
“Throughout the ages, the historical mortal Guan Yu has been promoted as the incarnation of yi (義). The concept of yi widely comprises the ideas of honour, righteousness, loyalty, faithfulness, honesty and friendship,” writes the author.
He is also portrayed as the God of Literature and holds a book as an attribute. While Nuwa’s light stands for femininity, Guan Di’s light represents the best ideal for masculinity. He had an enormous height, beard and red face all symbolizing masculinity. He was a great warrior, possessing unbelievable physical strength.
He shone as a big star of virtues, particularly Confucian virtues: loyalty, rightness, benevolence and bravery as we can read in most of his shrine (忠義仁勇關聖帝君). He has supernatural magical powers of bringing wealth, generosity and justice to his believers, just as Nuwa brings fertility and marriage to her worshippers. The difference between these two lanterns in Macau is that the female light of Nuwa was replaced by other powerful feminine goddesses, but the light of Guan Di remains irreplaceable.
Tracing Macau through Chinese Writers and Buddhist/Daoist Temples by Christina Miu Bing Cheng (2013) is available at the Portuguese Bookshop.
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