The Overnight Train to Xanadu

  The Creative Way

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree.” 

                                                                    - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Slim Mandarin dolls and Manhattan mamas amble along the Bund in Shanghai, signaling each

other with their Prada handbags.  Disney World Towers wink back the crowds with a Chinese flair. At Starbucks even the bankers must wait in line.  A goldfish in a plastic bag waits to gain nirvana for some Yankee-Doodle-Dandie gawking on the quay, while beggar boomtown demigods hawk Rolex watches two for ten.  In Suzhou the silkworms spin their tensile threads while weary Chinese women sit at looms from dawn to dusk weaving their silk into rugs. 

At the summer palace in Beijing the dower empress Cixi continues to dream her opium dreams

In the Hall of Happiness & Longevity, while invading foreign devils unleash the dogs of war.  The stone boat remains immobile.  Moonlit Lotus Lake shimmers in the night as Li Po’s ghost rises from the still waters.  Paper lanterns glow from passing pleasure boats where young women sit on the moonlit stern strumming the pipa.  They sing beautiful love songs as the boats glide peacefully through the ancient sea.  Overhead the stars. 

China flirts with democracy like a coy young maiden; and lifts her social skirts one micro-inch at a time.  As she shadow-boxes with her rich and fecund past, she juggles the unwelcome thought that happiness is not to be found in the profits of corporations – no one can serve two masters.  The first generation of China’s one-child program has now come of age, spoiled princes and princesses who now knock on heaven’s door wanting to know – why?

China, the mistress of passion and instigator of change, is also the birthing bed where both dreams and nightmares are born.  Will she end up bewildered by the devil of prosperity?  Can Mao Zedong co-exist with the Buddha mind?  And can the Buddha mind co-exist with America’s version of Das Capital? while tariff wars continue to rip apart the fabric of the common good?  No one can serve two masters.  And as the gravity of the western trade winds continues to ruffle the prayer flags in Tibet, Wal-Mart enters stage left and moves to center stage.

Stark white Pagoda surrounded by grey-green bamboo sits on the misty hill while stanzaic monosyllables drone the temple’s walls.  The Buddha smiles.  A wonder moment while climbing the Great Wall: do walls keep the unwanted out?  Or do they encircle and contain the folks inside?  In either case this greatest of all walls is a monument to failure.  On the over-night train from Beijing to Xian I dream of Xanadu, stately pleasure domes, and emeralds flashing in the sun. 

Terracotta boom-box Charlies buried in a common ditch keep watch over Qin Shi Huang’s tomb.  The charioteer now revealed still gazes ahead, his eyes steadfastly fixed on the legendary road that takes the enlightened man into the vast and dark unknown.  Vishnu knows the way. Yangtze river putt-putts chug away at the currents of time.  The government commands the waters back, shouting down from Beijing: “Get you gone to higher ground you lucifers of salt!”    And the village sinks beneath the rising tide.  

Beautiful Apsares spicy girls in spike heels and silk gowns stroll indifferently past the bug-eyed local boys in Chengdu.  The lotus bud unfurls.  Flush toilet mind sets modeled on Kierkegaard ponder squat-toilet balancing acts based of the precepts of the Tao Te Ching – uncomprehending.  “We urgently request that you keep yourself clean while in the Happy Room.”  Profit? And it does – if a man loses self, his own world – he gains the world…for what?  

This brash new-age China may one day hit the wall of loneliness driving a red Ferrari and dressed to the nines in a gown by Armani.  Beneath the silk and lacquer sensuality lies the 8-fold Buddha mind, hidden, protected from greed, and un-mindful of the fragrant scents.  But in Lhasa, blind beggars mingle with the hucksters at the Jokhang Temple. And the band plays on disturbing the hot-pot solitudes and yak-butter soliloquies.  The night birds in Tibet have fallen silent, while black vulture perch on the arm of death waiting to liberate the Buddha consciousness.  

Fast trains and new sewer pipes are OK I guess, but Richard Gere says that the yak butter in Tibet is turning rancid.  And from far-off Dharamsala, the Dhali Lama weeps as he watches the Chinese merchants get off the train in Lhasa ready to do business.  As we climb the 400 steps of the Potala Palace (they rise ever higher!), we remember the middle way.  Ah! Poor Prince Rama! The daemon merchants have broken in and carried off his willing wife.  She doesn’t seem to mind, and never once looks back!  How can I point the finger at the idolatrous East while my own people in the West bow down daily before the multitudinous idols of wealth, power, and fame?

Wonder moments in Bangkok: do the ghosts of Graham Green and Thomas Merton hang out at the Bamboo Bar in the Oriental Hotel?  And is their catholicity The Heart of the Matter between them?  Or do they toast their respective Elected Silences in a perfect understanding on each other? And did Merton achieve the enigmatic Buddha smile before his tragic death in Bangkok?  A puzzlement.  

Signs and contradictions.  Jungle Jim fends off the Hong Kong CEOs with chopsticks, while Confucius ponders the gravity of the western freight.  As the Star-Line Ferry makes its way to the gambling halls in Kowloon, Shiva dances in its wake.  And from Victoria Peak the British empire’s view no longer extends to Trafalgar Square.

In Siem Reap, Somerset Maugham dines with Jackie Onassis at the Grand Hotel Angkor - both dressed in white, while Jackie Chan takes La Femme Piège for a spin on his bike.  A white robed Buddhist nun at Angkor Wat smiles at me – she has no teethe.  The dark threads of Red Guard atrocities intertwine with those of the Khmer Rouge, the Taliban, and Islamic Terrorists.

And the band plays on.

The great wheel of the Asian ethos (Sunyata, Samadhi, Moksha, Karma & Nirvana) spirals down to this one unifying truth: the seed must die.  Handsome young Cambodian boy floats in a dishpan beside the tourist boat begging for alms.  He is a land-mine victim and has no legs.  At the Gate of the Dead a naked little Khmer boy peeing in the mud.  Frangipani petal-gods celebrate the gentle fall of banyan leaves that covers the Red Guard’s blood-filled path. We watch from the terrace while sipping Oolong Tea.  And the band plays on.  

At days end a soft rain falls over Angkor wat.  In the fading glow we hold our umbrellas aloft and toast the ancient stones and vagrant ghosts with blood-red wine.  The gentle rain sifts through the mists of time, and we see visions embedded in the stones, a living memory of a forgotten dream.  Do not despair dead poet, your poem embedded in the stones at Banteay Srei is still read with mindful joy.   

We exiles from Eden now hasten homeward unmindful of the vast Pacific’s reach, the yellow dust of China still clinging to our shoes.  The engines of the 747 drone on, a monkish airborne chant – oomah, oomha,  oomha – high above the cresting waves.  We drift away in restless sleep and wonder if it was all a dream:  Xanadu, pleasure domes, and emeralds flashing in the sun.  

                                                                                                                                     - Tim Cronley