Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [44]
Even today, the Singing Sands shift in the wind, sending out their hypnotic howl.
AT THE NORTHERN EDGE of central China, the Polo company emerged from the perilous Desert of Lop into the remote province of Tangut, known as the Western State. About a century earlier, the region had declared independence from China, and now owed allegiance to the distant Kublai Khan. Marco found evidence of Nestorian Christianity even here, but Buddhism, the official religion of the Tanguts, prevailed. It was, as Marco notes, a place of intense devotion, filled with “many abbeys and monasteries.”
For the first time, Marco took more than passing notice of the Buddhist “idols,” and despite his reflexive attempt to dismiss them, they made a lasting impression. Some images extended “ten paces.” They were fashioned variously of wood, earthenware, stone, or bronze, and, most impressively, they were “all covered with gold and very well worked and wonderfully.” He even found a few good words for the “idolaters”—that is, the Buddhists—who “live more decently than the others, for they keep themselves from…sensuality and other improprieties.” And yet, he notes, “if a woman invites them in love they can lie with her without sin, but if they first invite the woman they reckon it for sin. But I tell you that if they find any man who has lain with a woman unnaturally, they condemn him to death.”
The more Marco considered “idol” worship, the more analogies to Christianity he found: “They make the festivals of their idols at different times as we do of our saints, and they have something like the calendar where the feasts of their idols are arranged on fixed days.”
Entering deeper into the Buddhist ethos, he tried to explain the lunar calendar: “They have a moon calendar just as we have the monthly, and in this way they reckon the time of year. And they have certain moons when all the monks of the idolaters for anything in the world would not kill beasts nor flying birds, nor shed blood, for five consecutive days of the week, or four, or at least three, nor would they eat flesh that was killed in those five days, and they hold them in reverence as we Christians hold in reverence the Friday and the Sabbath, and other vigils.”
Later, he perceived still more similarities between Buddhist and Christian forms of observance. “You may know quite truly that all idols have their proper days dedicated to them, on which days they make solemnities and reverence and great feasts in their names every year, as our saints have in the special days.” Sacred and profane seemed to intermingle, indeed, to be interchangeable. It was all very baffling, and bracing, for the young Venetian.
MARCO’S DESCRIPTION of the size of Buddhist monasteries would leave Europeans in disbelief. Some establishments sheltered two thousand monks, “who serve the idols according to their custom, who dress more decently with more religious garments than all other men do.” The monks “wear the crown of the head shaved and the beard shaved,” he accurately notes, “beyond the fashion of laymen. They make the greatest feasts for their idols with greater singing and with greater light than were ever seen.”
Outside the monastery walls, anarchy reigned. “The lay people can take up to thirty wives,” Marco says. “He holds the first wife for the greatest and best. If he sees that any of his wives is old and is not good and that she does not please him he can well put her away and can take to wife the sister of the wife divorced, and do with her as he likes, and take another, if he wishes. Again, they take cousins for wives, and they are also allowed to take the wife of their