Free Tracking Bodhidharma by Andy Ferguson Page A

these false pretenses, Japan invaded other parts of North China, including the city of Tianjin. That time left an indelible impression on Jimmy.
    The Japanese army confiscated virtually all the food grown around Tianjin. Food prices skyrocketed, and starvation soon spread. Jimmy’s father made a good salary for his day, but it still only paid for a minimal existence when food prices soared. Only seven years old, Jimmy saw starved bodies on the street every day. The suffering made a deep impression on him. In the midst of such hardship, Jimmy’s father still concentrated on teaching Jimmy to speak English. When the war ended in 1945, it took months for Kuomintang troops to reach Tianjin. American troops, however, landed in Tianjin almost immediately and were warmly greeted as liberators. Jimmy’s dad soon got a job as an interpreter for the American forces.
    Twenty years later, during the Cutural Revolution, Jimmy suffered due to his father’s previous relationship with foreigners. Well-educated and fluent in English, he was designated one of the “stinking ninth category” and sent down to the countryside to be “re-educated” with the peasantry. Buddhist Jimmy took this in stride.
    â€œI liked working with the farmers. They were very nice. I liked planting vegetables and growing things. But many people from the city, especially young people, hated farming and couldn’t wait to return to their homes. They especially hated southern rice farming, where they were forced to wade in deep mud and endure parasitic bites.

    â€œAll during that time, of course, I didn’t dare say that I was a Buddhist believer. All religions were being persecuted, not just Buddhism. We had to be quiet until the reforms came along in 1978 under Deng Xiaoping.
    â€œWhen I was eleven years old, during the Japanese occupation, my whole family took lay Buddhist vows, and we all became vegetarians. We just all went down to the local temple and took lay vows and then stopped eating meat. I think the experience of the war brought my parents to this step. At that time the Japanese had set up a phony Buddhist Association that promoted their control over Buddhist practice. But we, like everyone else, knew that the Japanese organization was phony, and we wouldn’t have anything to do with them. The temple we went to was run by an old Chinese monk we’d known a long time.
    â€œAfter the Cultural Revolution, I studied many Buddhist scriptures and more or less understood them. However I never really studied the Shurangama Sutra. In the 1980s I communicated with my Buddhist teacher Dharma Master Xuan Hua, who was then in the United States. He said that of all the sutras, the most important was the Shurangama Sutra. Of all the sutras, it was the one I really didn’t understand, but the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas [in Ukiah, California] gave me a copy of this sutra in English, and I found that although I couldn’t understand the Chinese version, the English version was very clear. I finally understood this sutra, and oh, it was like the whole universe had revealed itself to me! When I finally understood that sutra, I felt like the luckiest person on the planet!
    â€œIn the 1980s, I got a job as an interpreter with the United Nations, and this allowed me to travel to places like South Africa. Have you been there? In the city of Durban, there’s a big population from India and many people are vegetarians. Out of a population of two hundred thousand people, about seventy thousand are vegetarians!”
    After lunch Jimmy invites me to come to his office at nearby Hai Chuang (“Ocean Banner”) Temple. The temple grounds serve as a wooded park, and Jimmy does his translation work in a small office there. He also gives lectures on Buddhism to the local community.
    Inside his sparse office, he uncovers a large pile of red books and hands me one.

    â€œHere is the Shurangama Sutra, I published