Category: China

The China Daily reports on a contemporary hermit who lives in a cave.

The caves that pock the mountains of Shanxi province’s Datong were inhabited for millennia until they were cleared out half a century ago – except for one person.

Zhang Dehua is Datong’s last cave dweller.

The 79-year-old was the only resident who didn’t move out of his grotto in Donggetuopu village when the government built a road and new houses for locals in 1952.

“I like my cave home,” Zhang says.

“It’s warm in winter and cool in summer. I don’t have a family. So, when everyone left, I stayed.”

Zhang Dehua, long a widower, was a farmer, whose family discovered the caves as a haven during the Japanese occupation of the 1930s. Zhang Dehua has few possessions, and is helped by a local taxi driver who discovered him and promotes free services to the area’s elderly. But the healthy Zhang Dehua, who now gets regular visitors and tourists dropping in to see his cave, remains content to stay where he is.

URL: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2012-09/13/content_15754609.htm

Sympathetic article titled “The sound of silence is the height of seclusion,” in China Daily, describes the contemporary hermits of the Zhongnan mountains. The hermits are Taoist and Buddhist. Li Jiwu, a researcher in religious studies at the Shaanxi Academy of Social Sciences, “who has been studying the mountain’s hermit culture for five years, believes these reclusive people perform vital work on behalf of the society they’ve shunned, both by setting an example to others and by passing on the wisdom they’ve acquired.”

Quoting Li:

Although these people live far away from modern society, they are actually helping it. They’re like a mountain stream that brings fresh water down into the town – the water eventually reaches it one way or another.

The hermit culture has been associated with the mountain for so long that the local authorities and people are very supportive towards those setting up their mao peng [i.e., “grass hut”].

The authorities even allow hermits to live in an abandoned village located higher up the mountain. The villagers moved out in the 1990s as a part of a poverty alleviation program. The village accommodates about 16 hermits, and although they live close to each other, they rarely talk.

Not everyone can cope with the hardship and loneliness on the mountain, especially lay practitioners. I have seen many quit within weeks because there is always something they can’t let go, such as wealth or even the Internet. People should realize that it is not a getaway holiday. Being a hermit is a serious lifestyle choice.

URL: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2012-03/29/content_14936505.htm

From the China Daily website, an article on a man inspired by Bill Porter’s search for hermits related in Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits who pursued his own search for hermits.

The article is titled “Man finds spiritual life through hermits” and describes Zhang Jianfeng’s efforts to contact over 600 hermits in Zhongnan Mountain, the same mountainous vicinity that Porter explored.

URL: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2012-02/16/content_14627189.htm

PHOTO: Zhang Jianfeng (left with three hermits (© CFP – ChinaFotoPress)