Trigger warning for self-harm and sexual assault.
Yahui was found on the doorstep of a rural Buddhist convent and has known nothing else for most of her eighteen years of life. Her lack of worldliness makes her a perfect vehicle for Yan Lianke’s satirical Heart Sutra, which explores the way that five of China’s religions—Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism—have had to contort themselves to survive the country’s political order and corruption. The uneasy relationship between the religions and Chinese communism leaves Yahui struggling to decide if the deities are real, if the secular world is a better fit, and which set of rules she should follow to be a good person.
When we meet her, Yahui is taking classes at the National Political University in Beijing on behalf of her ill (possibly dying) teacher. The University’s religious school can grant master status to its graduates if they can learn the right things to say on their exams, where every answer must perfectly reflect the subservience of religion to politics while also showing the students’ sincere faith. The names of the courses the students have to take are hilariously awful: “Socialist Structures of Chinese Religion,” “Tutorials on Marxist-Leninist Religion,” and “On the Relationship Between This Religion and Political Leaders.” Meanwhile, the director of the religious program is working on a treatise comparing religions to tug-of-war and requires the male students to participate in religion-v.-religion matches. Money is everywhere as students are goaded into donating increasingly large amounts of money to the religious program and the match purses. Yahui is also tempted by a determined young Daoist priest named Gu Mingzhang, forbidden meat dishes, and the possibility that maybe the secular world fits her better than a religious life.
Punctuating all this secularism are papercut illustrations of an imagined story of Guanyin and Laozi meeting, marrying, and parting as they debate their roles in the world. Laozi contemplates the heavens and the ultimate good while Guanyin travels around the world, alleviating sorrow and suffering as she goes. The papercuts were created by Shang Ailan and are one of my favorite things about Heart Sutra. Although the story the papercuts tell is fictional, for me, they provided a wonderful counterpart to Yahui and Gu Mingzhang as they struggle to navigate the bewildering schemes and expectations of the National Politics University.
Yahui and Gu Mingzhang’s trials at the University grow more intense. Gu Mingzhang wants to find out who his real father is, hoping that his real father will be someone important enough to secure a comfortable life. Yahui eventually begins to doubt the possibility of being a faithful nun and decides that she wants to purchase an apartment in Beijing and pursue a secular life. Both of these desires entangle Yahui and Gu Mingzhang with a sinister political official known only as Nameless, who manipulates the naive youngsters for his own ends. Nameless mentally torments the two so much that they both have nearly fatal crises of faith that culminate in some horrific self-harm.
What I was left with at the end of Heart Sutra was more complicated than one might expect from a satire as cutting as this. Most of the characters lose—their lives, their fortunes, their political ambitions—but the characters who can keep their heads seem to come out all right. These characters manage to cultivate an inner peace. They don’t display their faith outwardly but they try to act according to the dictates of their faith as much as possible in the push-and-pull of life in a thoroughly secular (and often corrupt) world. I appreciate the balance these characters are able to strike.