A highlight of each week in Peru has been the trip with Wendy to Villa Corazón de Buda, a Buddhist temple in a town about 45 minutes outside Lima. The drive is pretty, Wendy and I always stop to pick up fruit and some breakfast and I enjoy the drive through the hills away from the bustle of Lima. I’m not quite sure how I would describe Cieneguilla. Definitely not rural, but not quite suburban in the American sense, but nonetheless not very urban.
The first couple months, the shifu of this Buddhist community was in the United States. He splits his time between Cieneguilla and Auburn, Alabama. I met him for the first time two weeks ago.
Shifu is in his mid 80s, bald with bushy white eyebrows, and speaks in slow calculated Mandarin. He wears saffron colored robes during the service and changes into loose fitting grey robes for lunch. When I had been to Cieneguilla before shifu had returned, lunch was a chatty, gossipy affair. We gabbed as we chowed down on fried tofu, corn, and greens grown in the temple grounds. People would swivel the lazy Susan whenever they wanted, even just to get one more piece of pineapple. While he was away, shifu’s large chair at the table would sit empty, while the rest of us would sit in folding chairs around the rest of the round table.
With shifu back in Peru, lunch has become silent. Everyone sits with good posture. People check twice to make sure no one else is grabbing food before turning the lazy susan. Everyone seems to be making more effort to eat quietly, the occasional and accidental loud clang of a serving spoon or chopsticks drawing looks from everyone around the table, and the searing stare of shifu. It is nice eating at a table with all the chairs full. After we all say a quick prayer after we finish eating, the two people sitting next to shifu help pull the chair out away from the table and help him up and then he walks by himself back to his room on the second floor of the temple. After he retires for the afternoon, the gabbing in Cantonese, Mandarin and Spanish starts up again.
On the drive back to Lima after meeting shifu for the first time, Wendy explained that before he devoted his life to Buddhism, shifu had worked with NASA and had gotten a PhD in engineering. Before coming to the U.S., he had studied at National Taiwan University.
My grandfather, my mom’s dad, had also gone to college at National Taiwan University (Tai Da) and had gotten a PhD in chemical engineering and done work with NASA. My mom remembers driving to Cape Canaveral from Houston (my grandpa taught at University of Houston) for the launch of Apollo 11. Grandpa CJ, as we refer to him in our family, passed way in his late 50s before my parents got married. There is a lot I don’t have very clear in my head about his life. Where did he learn to speak Mandarin if he grew up in Taiwan when it was a Japanese colony and spoke Taiwanese at home? What did his hands look like? What did he like to read? I have never heard what his voice sounds like. I do know he was about 5’ 3” and although my mom never thought he really had an accent, my dad always points out that CJ had a very thick accent. I have visited the temple in his hometown where his ashes are and the library in town that is named after him to honor his accomplishments abroad. As the first in his family to ever to go college from a small town in Taiwan, the fact that he went to one of the top universities in Taiwan and then went on to work as a professor and with NASA is quite astounding. His life in so many ways paved the way for future generations of his family to pursue interesting careers and have access to education that his parents simply didn’t have. I don’t think about him often enough, perhaps because I never met him, but hearing about shifu’s life in American academia redirected my thoughts towards my grandpa. And I couldn’t stop wondering if shifu actually knew CJ Huang.
I told me mom about it and asked if she remembered if CJ worked with a guy who had gone to Tai Da. I realized I didn’t know shifu’s name (I still don’t know it), but did know he had studied and worked at Auburn University. It wasn’t quite ringing a bell, but my mom, with Bubs’ help, wrote out some more details about CJ’s work and was excited to ask shifu about it.
When I told Wendy about the striking similarities between shifu and CJ, Wendy told me I should first talk to Sherry, who lives at the temple, to figure out the best time to talk to shifu. Sherry told me after lunch, shifu would speak with me. Wendy reminded me to talk to him about bigger questions, not just like a specific question about his life.
I ended up talking to shifu for over an hour. He sat cross legged in his grey robes. I told him about my grandfather and asked more generally about how he thinks people across generations and long distances are connected to one another. We talked about the latter for an hour, but I got no conclusive answer about my grandfather. He didn’t seem keen on talking about his life before he committed himself to Buddhism. He did mention that he worked more on mechanics rather than chemical engineering things. I think there is a reasonable chance that he didn’t know my grandfather, but still want to do a little more digging. Our conversation (I hope the first of many) felt a bit out of a movie. A wise Chinese man speaking with a young traveler about what he called “lifeology. “
Shifu maintains a faith in Buddhist teachings, while also not abandoning his rationally driven life of scientific inquiry earlier in his life. He explained how Buddhist teachings discuss things like relativity, which were then proved scientifically thousands of years later. He spoke a lot about affinity. He asked me why when I encounter a group of people, I feel more inclined to chat with one person over another. He spoke about how probably that new acquaintance knew me in a past life. He doesn’t believe in the reincarnation of actual bodies, but of people’s spirits, he does. This sort of idea he did acknowledge is impossible to prove, but he has developed a trust in Buddhist teachings. He said that once you develop trust with someone, you take what he or she says to be true, even if you didn’t see or hear something first hand. He feels he has developed that type of relationship with Buddhist teachings. At the same time, he maintained the importance of people taking charge of their own lives. Environment can have some effect, but the only person who can experience and live your life is you. You can’t have someone else experience something on your behalf.
In the car with Wendy back to Lima, I told her how I’m still not sure if shifu knew my grandfather or not, but I had a lot to think about nonetheless. She laughed and seemed unsurprised. He’s like that, she said.