In Bao Loc (Lam Dong), at the beginning of summer, I sometimes found a young monk happily selling a basket of ripe sim fruit next to the school gate. Every time he met a buyer, the monk kindly explained the health benefits of this fruit and introduced a bottle of juice he squeezed from sim fruit for students during exam season.
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| Stones ready for gardening folk songs |
His customers are mainly students, each of them buys a few thousand and shares them happily. These sweet ripe sim fruits are not only gifts for each other but also remind them of the taste of nature.
To get to know him, I stopped the car to buy a small bowl of sim worth eight thousand dong, then gave him a ten thousand dong bill and whispered that I didn’t have to give him back, but he still insisted on taking out an old two thousand dong bill, smoothing it out, and politely returning the change. He said that everyone had to work to survive, and that selling sim was not only to save up small amounts of money to buy rice and salt every day, but also to remind them of their childhood and encourage them to protect the forest so they could have something to eat, so they could return to their common home of trees and leaves. Knowing that this was a responsible person, I sat down next to him, inviting customers to buy sim while chatting with this strange monk.
His name is Nguyen Duc Van, dharma name Venerable Thich Gioi Luc, a monk with his own hermitage in Phuong Boi forest in Loc Chau commune. The Venerable is nearly 50 years old, thin, dark skinned, tall, clean-shaven, with soulful eyes and a generous laugh. Knowing that I like to learn about the forest, he enthusiastically invited me to his hermitage, eat vegetarian food, and spend a night in the sim forest with sincerity.
Back then, the road to Phuong Boi valley had to go through several winding slopes full of sharp rocks, passing through each hamlet, each coffee garden, and finally reaching a high, deserted hill, deserted but with plenty of wind.
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| Venerable Thich Gioi Luc (right cover) at Phuong Boi valley |
• HARD CHILDHOOD
Monk Thich Gioi Luc was born in 1973 in Saigon, the third of eight children of writer Nguyen Duc Son (Son Nui), an extremist and eccentric man. After 1975, for unknown reasons, this writer took his wife and children to Phuong Boi forest to build a bamboo hut to live. At that time, Phuong Boi was still a primeval forest, 3 km from National Highway 20, deserted all year round. The first job after setting up camp was to clear the forest, break the ground to plant sweet potatoes. At that time, the whole family only knew sweet potatoes as the main food, every day each person had a sweet potato sitting on the tree stump, on the rocky shore, blowing on it and eating. It was not until a year later that they were able to eat rice with a portion of one and a half bowls per person, during those times of excruciating hunger, the rice grains were both sticky and fragrantly sweet.
But the greater desire of the little boy Nguyen Duc Van was for letters. Every time he carried the string of sweet potatoes through the school gate and heard the spelling of the primary school students, tears welled up in his eyes. He wished he could go to school! Luckily, in the family, there was an older brother who could read, so every night Van gave him half a bowl of rice to eat so that he could teach him letters. Poor mother, every time she saw her brothers teaching each other to spell by the dim, smoky oil lamp, she covered her face and cried, while her father stared at his son with wide-open eyes in silence. Because of the children's education and the harsh life, the parents often argued, the family atmosphere was always stormy. At those times, he just wanted his parents to separate so that she could leave the mountains and forests and take the children to the national highway to live with everyone to earn a living.
Perhaps the memories of the distant past that he could not forget, besides the excruciating hunger at night, each brother was equipped with a tin can as a personal weapon, running around the fields at night, banging and shouting hundreds of times according to the script prepared by his father: "Pigs, rabbits, eat grass, not potatoes". Or when discovering strangers entering the house, whoever in the family saw first had to bang the can to warn, just the initial signal sent out, the whole deserted forest echoed with strange echoes. He remembered those times, some sat on the ground, some climbed trees, shaking and shouting. Until now, he still does not know why his father made him do that! During the day, he went into the forest to pick bamboo shoots, blackberries, and bamboo shoots to go to Tan Bui to exchange for rice and salt, and at night he lived without oil or lamps. However, his brothers grew up like shriveled sweet potatoes lying on the roadside. At the age of 17, his father sent him to Phuoc Hue pagoda to become a monk and started first grade.
• BACK TO THE FOREST
After finishing high school and 4 years of Buddhist studies in Da Lat, he was sent to a pagoda in Saigon to continue his studies. However, once witnessing at the Oncology Hospital, hundreds of people lying and sitting in a line, absent-mindedly waiting to be examined for terrible diseases, made him contemplate the human life between religion and life according to the Buddhist perspective. At that time, he believed that the above diseases all arose from food sources because people, just for profit, used chemicals to spray on vegetables, food crops, even used unverified growth stimulants mixed into animal feed to shorten the feeding cycle, causing harm to human health. Knowing that he did not have enough heart and vision to convince people to live responsibly towards their fellow human beings, he decided to return to the forest to do something that was both suitable for him and could, through living images, indirectly call on people to love each other instead of doing charity work or preaching Buddhism.
Returning to Phuong Boi forest, the first step he took was to break the ground to plant potatoes, and eat potatoes like in the old days. After that, he begged and bought on credit the barren, barren hills in the middle of the forest and planted sim trees to both solve his temporary life and build a destination for the younger generation. Every day, he went into the forest to find sim trees, dug up the roots, and laboriously moved them to the gathering place. There was a time when he fell and broke his leg and had to wear a cast for several months. The gardeners saw him lying hungry in the tent, so they brought him rice, potatoes or a few tens of thousands of dong to survive. Time always passes by silently and indifferently, leaving no trace, but the barren, barren hills of years ago were covered with 5,000 sim trees and 2,000 beautiful pine trees. The sim hills have now sprouted and grown into a purple flower forest. Until now, looking at that loving green color, it is hard to imagine the sick monk, silently digging, carrying, and dragging each sim tree alone in hunger and thirst in the middle of the vast mountains and forests.
Sipping a cup of pure green tea in the quiet of the night, he slowly talked to me about the forest with wisdom: “The greatest religion of man is humanity in harmony with the universe, when man does not have love for nature, he will not be able to love his fellow man. Man will eventually return to dust, so he should leave something useful for future generations. I remember someone saying, “Before closing his eyes, man should leave behind 3 things for posterity: Raise a decent child, write a book and plant a shady tree.” My father may be an eccentric person, living regardless of public opinion, but he always taught his children to try to preserve the forest, to love nature. Over the past 30 years, he and I have planted nearly 20 hectares of pine trees covering a corner of Phuong Boi forest. From this pine forest, countless people come every day to sit and rest under the trees, perhaps some of them used to think that we were “busybodying around.” But my parents, a poor family struggling to raise 8 children, left us only a love of nature, leaving behind thousands of shady pine trees in Phuong Boi forest. The two samples of sim and pine that I planted are a continuation of the path my father and I planted before. Every year, during the sim ripening season, many people and birds visit, especially students who frolic among the windy sim hills, making friends with the forest, with birds from turtledoves, nightingales to long-tailed pigeons... In the next plan, I will try to form a folk song garden to leave for the world."
Last week, I returned to Phuong Boi sim forest in amazement. On the 2 hectares of barren hill land that he once owned, there is now a sim and pine forest covering the bare hills. Here, he has transported 2-3 old house remains to later make a library, and dragged back thousands of large and small rocks to prepare for a folk song garden under the canopy. These rocks will be engraved with folk songs or proverbs about family, homeland and nature, carrying messages from the ancients reminding people to warm up. And also here, in the next few years, will become a place for people to come to see the artificial green forest, hear the whispers from the rocks and soil, and will be able to read books in the library, all for free.
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