To Seal the Door Where Evil Dwells – Maxine Hong Kingston

The following is from The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, Random House, NY: 1989 pp 3-5.

“I remember looking at your aunt one day when she and I were dressing; I had not noticed before that she had such a protruding melon of a stomach. But I did not think, “She’s pregnant,” until she began to look like other pregnant women, her shirt pulling and the white tops of her black patns showing. She could not have been pregnant, you see, because her husband had been gone for years. No one said anything. We did not discuss it. In early summer she was ready to have the child, long after the time when it could have been possible.

“The village had also been counting. On the night the baby was to be born the villagers raided our house. Some were crying. Like a great saw, teeth strung with lights, files of people walked zigzag across our land, tearing the rice. Their lanterns doubled in the disturbed black water, which drained away through the broken bunds. As the villagers closed in, we could see some of them, probably men and women we knew well, wore white masks. The people with long hair hung it over their faces. women with short hair made it stand up on end. Some had tied white bands around their foreheads, arms, and legs.

“At first they threw mud and rocks at the house. Then they threw eggs and began slaughtering our stock. We could hear the animals scream their deaths — the roosters, the pigs, a last great roar from the ox. Familiar wild heads flared in our night windows; the villagers encircled us. Some of the faces stopped to peer at us, their eyes rushing like searchlights. The hands flattened against the panes, framed heads, and left red prints.

“The villagers broke in the front and the back doors at the same time, even though we had not locked the doors against them. Their knives dripped with the blood of our animals. They smeared blood on the doors and walls. One woman swung a chicken, whose throat she had slit, splattering blood in rede arcs about her. We stood together in the middle of our house, in the family hall with the pictures and tables of the ancestors around us, and looked straight ahead.

“At that time the house had only two wings. When the men came back, we would build two more to enclose our courtyard and a third one to begin w aseocnd courtyard, The villagers pushed through both wings, even your grandparents’ rooms, to find your aunt’s which was also mine until the men returned. From this room a new wing for one of the younger families would grow. They ripped up her clothes and shoes and broke her combs, grinding them underfoot. They tore her work from the loom. They scattered the cooking fire and rolled the new weaving in it. We could hear them in the kitchen breaking our bowls and banging the pots. They overturned the great waist-high earthenware jugs; duck eggs, pickled fruits, vegetables burst out and mixed in acrid torrents. The old woman from the next field swept a broom through the air and loosed the spirits-of-the-broom over our heads. ‘Pig,’ ‘Ghost,’ ‘Pig,’ they sobbed and scolded while they ruined our house.

“When they left, they took sugar and oranges to bless themselves. They cut pieces from the dead animals. Some of them took bowls that were not broken and clothes that were not torn. Afterwards we swept uppthe rice and sewed it back up into sacks. But the smells from the spilled preserves lasted. Your aunt gave birth in the pigsty that night. The next morning, when I went for the water, I found her and the baby plugging up the family well.

“Don’t let your father know that I told you. He denies her. Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you. Don’t humiliate us. You wouldn’t like to be forgotten as if you had never been born. The villagers are watchful.”

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These ignorant villagers closed the family well, the source of life. The door where evil dwells is not the womb of a woman, which is also the source of life. The door where evil dwells is a social system of which the most primary activity is granting social authority to ignorant people.Please note that the murderous villagers in this account were not the Red Army. They were not followers of Mao Tse-Tong. They were traditional Chinese Confucianists. That they later transferred this same barbarous behavior to the Communist Revolution was not Mao’s fault. That it took another whole generation of bloodshed to get these same people out of the Party after they infiltrated and dominated it, was also not Mao’s fault.

Did you ever see， hear or read of a woman in traditional China who had a happy relationship anywhere, whether with her husband, father, or son (three of the classical Confucianist relationships that the above mass behavior was supposed to safeguard)? Where are you, happy traditional Chinese women? Please present the evidence that there is some redeeming social value in the pile of vague and perfectly self-absorbed moral platitudes, and the insufferably boring pile of mediocre poetry, that Confucius wrote for his despotic feudal patrons!

God I love this author! Of all the chronicles of the endless misery of the Chinese people in dynastic China, which literally dragged on for two millennia, and every single stroke of which was the result of applied Confucianist values mind you, hers is both the most shocking and the most objective. Witnessing the unthinkable, she maintains the Witness Consciousness, and writes an accurate description. This is what it is to have heard the First Noble Truth of the Buddha. And if she were not an English-speaking American of Chinese descent, married to a Westerner, she would not have the integrity, the consciousness, the political protection, or the civil right to bring it to light.

She doesn’t write that this happened in China, nor does she need to. We already know that going in, from the stories of thousands of her sisters. We know that although there are are other societies in which a woman can be killed for getting pregnant by the wrong man, there have been none other than traditional China so paradigmatically psychotic as to perpetrate the above in a perfectly primitive and hopeless attempt to prevent it from happening again.

Confucianism is a failed and fundamentally flawed moral code. It is wrong to assert that the family is the same thing as the state. Families are inherently private, and the state is inherently public. The first necessity in the family is love. The first necessity in the state is the rule of law for the common good. These are two qualitatively different social entities. When you equate one to the other, you destroy them both. The short name for the process by which that occurs is *corruption*, and there are two solid millennia of Chinese history to prove it.

In the present, it is inexcusable for an organization, Chinese or otherwise, to be flirting with Confucianism. Say again: it was WRONG for the government of Taiwan to be conducting hideous neo-Confucianist rituals in front of the disasterously feng_shui’d statue of Sun Yat Sen in Honolulu’s Chinatown, and inside the Chinese Cultural Center on Taiwan’s National Day last year. In the present, it is WRONG for Ven. Xing Yun of Fo Guang Shan to be pimping a blatant pile of neo-Confucianist philosophy as “Humanistic Buddhism”. In the present, it is WRONG for the nuns of Fo Guang Shan to allow themselves to be bought into the performance of neo-Confucianist and other apocryphal ritual.

We must close the door of Confucianism, the door where evil dwells. If Gautama Lord Buddha had been a Confucianist, he would have done what His father wanted, by growing up to be a good little king of Nepal, and we would not be able to hear the Teaching of Truth today. If you’re Chinese, the Buddhadharma begins where Confucianism ends. You can’t have it both ways.

If you’re American, don’t pick up East Asian cultural baggage like Confucianism. This is not from the Buddha, and we don’t need it.

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping