香Incense

Coming home, I caught a familiar smell — put plainly, the smell of burning incense, and cheap stick incense at that, with a whiff of smoke and a faintly sharp scent, as if from the smell alone you could picture it: loose, coarse, earth-yellow sawdust mixed with all sorts of strange powdered fragrance additives, barely held together with chemical glue, nothing special. Perhaps it was because I’d been away so long and hadn’t smelled it in ages that I suddenly noticed it. Perhaps for me this, too, counts as one of the smells of home — though what we burn at home is a slightly finer black stick incense, much smoother-looking but the same in smell, and probably just as cheap. Yet even at a temple, what you most often smell is this same chemical scent. They say the Buddhas and bodhisattvas dine on the smoke of burning incense; I suppose those great saints and buddhas, like us lowly mortals, usually make do with the cheapest fare to fill their bellies.

Though I grew up breathing incense from childhood, if you asked me now I couldn’t name many kinds — apart from telling them apart by shape as stick, coil, or “dou” incense, I know none of the rest, let alone the precious varieties like ambergris or agarwood, which I’ve only heard of and cannot picture. Nor can I, for the sake of writing, force out some deep affinity between me and incense; a reader would see through such rare and wondrous claims at a glance, and there’d be no use in my spinning lies either — so I can only honestly relate some dull memories and scrape a piece together.

At home we burn incense on the first and fifteenth of the lunar month, usually before the porcelain Guanyin in the cupboard on the kitchen’s outer wall and in the little bronze censer set among the flowers and plants on the balcony floor. These two spots, one south and one north, link the living room and dining room; because there’s no partition between them, on incense days the draft through the house keeps carrying the scent from both sides throughout the home. Rather than being carried, though, I feel the incense moves of its own accord, as if it had a stubborn soul: even with my door shut, it still insists on squeezing through the crack to set my nose itching a while. We burn incense, but my parents aren’t Buddhist; by my vague impression, it was my grandmother who required it when I was very small. Sometimes she’d show up unannounced at mid-month for a surprise inspection, and finding none lit she’d nag my father for a good while, and later brought over a great bundle of incense. At first my father always grumbled about the bother of it, but with time it became an indispensable ritual of the household; when he’s away, he always reminds the family, and so we casually light a few sticks. If he does it himself, though, he goes to the trouble of carefully picking three sticks of the same length, holds them in both hands in the shape of the character 山 after lighting them, bows three times toward the bronze censer and the bodhisattva image, and then reverently plants them in the incense ash. Over the years the incense at home has never once run out, yet we’ve never bought any new — we still use that bundle my grandmother gave us long ago. Since I can’t remember how much she brought at the time, my imagination always conjures the scene of her knocking at the door dragging a big woven sack stuffed with incense; it genuinely frightened me for quite a while back then, and now the memory makes me stifle a laugh again and again.

My grandmother is a Buddhist — that’s what she always says when introducing herself and preaching — but what she actually believes in, besides the bodhisattvas and buddhas of every kind, includes all sorts of Taoist immortals. Every time we chatted she’d tirelessly urge me that believing in the Buddha is good, believing is good; once I got fed up and began quizzing her on basic Buddhist and Taoist knowledge — the original name of Taiyi Zhenren, the gender of Guanyin, and the like — and my grandmother was suddenly at a loss for words. I’d thought I would feel smug and relieved, but destroying another’s heart and faith is, after all, an evil sin, and I was suddenly stricken with guilt, so ever after I always listened eagerly to her tales of the immortals. The incense at my grandmother’s house, of course, never runs out: besides stick incense, there’s always coil incense burning, set beside an oil lamp made with a rush wick. All of it sits on the black-lacquered narrow wooden table that faces you as you enter the living room — besides the incense implements and the ever-burning lamp, there are also candles, red paper, and other offerings, very like the little square table before the bodhisattvas in a temple where people kneel and bow, except that at the far right of the table sits a microwave, that utterly incongruous thing, which, though it breaks the air of mystery, lets a plain rural life show through. Perhaps for my grandmother, kneeling and burning incense are as ordinary as eating and sleeping, and it’s only we who haven’t been “enlightened” yet who don’t understand.

Every morning at four o’clock, my grandmother rises on time to refill the ash, add oil, and kneel in prayer — her daily morning devotions. When I stayed there over the holidays, I was always woken in the morning by the curling fragrance. The house is built of grey brick, with two brick-sized skylights in the ceiling, and when the sun was good you could see, in the slanting shafts of light, the smoke drifting slowly and leisurely, like softly floating ribbons of silk — unlike ordinary smoke, you never saw it spread and disappear. As a child I never stayed long on these visits, partly because the room I slept in at the old house was too close to the courtyard, where every night wild cats, mice, and all manner of insects made eerie sounds that kept me from sleeping well, and partly because I couldn’t stand the poke of the straw-and-plank bed. Now, though, I often think of the place. The old stone house was built by the river, with a few households around it and, more than that, fields and trees; step out to the little ferry landing by the river and you could see sparse villages in the distance — no power lines or tall buildings, and, apart from a very few streetlights, not much sign of the man-made. The flavor of life, on the other hand, was thick: beside the little path of broken tiles underfoot outside the door stood a tricycle for hauling things; a luffa vine had been let climb the pillars of the abandoned second floor next door; even the few meters of land by the river had been put to use growing greens and strawberries, and another patch, too sloped to plant vegetables, had been set with a ginkgo tree and a mulberry — to this day I don’t know what the mulberry is for, but the ginkgo yields a good many white nuts every year.

This morning, meaning to go on with this piece, I lit a stick of incense in the room myself, pinched one end, and waved it around like playing with a sparkler. I’d imagined using the blue smoke as a brush to draw different patterns in the air, and then writing a fine long passage about it — but no matter how I shook it, the smoke was always the same: rising straight up from the tip, then swaying side to side in waves, then turning into ribbons that endlessly fold and flip, splitting into countless finer, paler streamers, until, divided smaller and smaller, they vanish. Sometimes it makes you suspect the smoke hasn’t disappeared at all, only that the limits of human sight can’t catch it. Now and then a few little ribbons recombine and drift a bit farther off, and all the while I kept hoping a few strands of blue would turn into a drifting, shifting cloud and linger long in the room. So I did my utmost to keep my hand still — and though my arm went numb, there wasn’t much change: they all broke apart and dissolved too.