A Very Brief History of an Obscure Buddhist Sect

Epilogue
Her family had no idea this was going to be their last dinner with their daughter, neither did she. She laid out her most prized and essential possessions on the floor of her room to make sure that she had enough to make her journey. She had sold her possessions bit by bit over the past year as to not arouse any suspicions that she was leaving the country for a while. A friend told her that while everyone was going to gurus in India, a spiritual master who resided in the Yellow Mountains of China was rumored to have a direct line of discipleship to the Buddha himself. However, since it was almost impossible to visit China, no one made a pilgrimage to him. She was determined to see him. She had spent her undergraduate and graduate years studying Mandarin Chinese and had taken many trips to China for academic and State purposes. If anyone was going to make this journey, it might as well have been her, she thought. She left her family a letter detailing her desires to seek a meaningful life and she felt that whatever meaning she was looking for had to be found in the East. She did not tell her family where she was going. After several weeks of hard travel, beaten down by jet lag, she made it to the small village on the Yellow Mountain. She thought it was only going to take about ten days to make this trip. She realized how stupid it was to think that there would be cute ashram set-ups ready for the hippies to visit. There were none. When she asked about the said spiritual master, the locals were confused and weren’t even sure what she was talking about. They were more interested in her white skin and blonde hair and the fact that a white woman spoke Chinese. What she wanted seemed impossible. Maybe it was just a hokey legend or some spiritual attainment gimmick that people were peddling around. She finally met a local who, although not entirely confident in who she was referring to, nonetheless, told her about a man who was becoming very old and had survived a sinking ship that drowned a Zen master who was from this village. The local told her that the old man could be the Zen master’s disciple, but he rarely spoke and no longer talked about his past. This information made her more relieved than ecstatic. This search had tired her and aged her in a mere few weeks.The old man’s house was a short walk from the village’s community water well. She explained her purpose to the old man and his wife. They were confused by why a young American woman would travel this far to his village and think that he was a spiritual master. He told her plainly that he was just a farmer. She understood. They were just ordinary farmers. She realized that whatever she wanted to find, whatever it was, probably wasn’t there in the village. She broke down in tears, knowing that this might be true, that she was so naive in her confidence in her plans for this, that she exhausted all of her resources for this, and that she was exhausted. The old couple did not know what to do, so they offered up a room for her to stay. So, she stayed, for the next several decades. She did not meet the spiritual master she wanted to find. She learned to farm. She learned to cultivate the Yellow Mountain Tea. She took care of the old couple until they died, then, she died too.

A few of the children who learned English from her made a small grave with the epitaph:

Anne Eliot
Our Beloved Teacher
December 20th 1941
June 9th 2011