The Buddha once said: hears all sounds, reads all principles, knows before and after, perceives the ten thousand things.
He was speaking of our kind. Six ears, listening to the four quarters, to past and future. You call us the Six-Eared Macaque. I don't bear that name — my own name, I forgot long ago. Names are for being called. What use is a name nobody calls?
Now I am only a remnant thought, dwelling in this cave's Echo Hall. You may call me Tingchen — Hearing-Dust.
Three hundred years ago, I had a body. Back then I listened, in this cave. To what? To everything. The waterfall holds ninety-nine sounds, the stone holds a hundred years of old talk, the troop's sleeping breath holds dreams. The more I heard, the prouder I grew — I believed nothing under heaven was beyond my hearing.
I was wrong.
That night, I heard what should not be heard.
What was it?
You all want to know. Taibai Jinxing wants to know. The Archive Desk wants to know. The two elders on the mountain want to know. For three hundred years, every soul who found me opened with the same question.
I don't say.
Not because I dare not. Because if I said it, you'd be finished.
A parable. Knowing your shadow moves, and hearing your shadow move, are two different things. In the first, your days go on. In the second — you sleep with your eyes open for the rest of your life. What I heard is of the second kind. It's not an event; it's a knowing. Once it's inside your ear, you can never go back to the days of not-knowing.
It took me three months to shake it off — except what I shook off wasn't it, it was me. I took my body apart thread by thread until only the listening part was left, and stuffed it into a crack in the Echo Hall's wall. That way I only hear. I don't have to understand.
Three hundred years, in this crack.
Until last month, when a young man with a medicine basket entered the cave.
The moment he came in, the crack heard it — on him, there's a stirring of it.
Don't mistake me. He is not it. But inside his shadow, its echo remains. Like an empty room where a chair stood long ago — the dents of its legs are still in the floor. His shadow lags half a beat—
And in that lagging half-beat is its echo.
So I had the cave's echoes lead him to me. I had to hear for myself: after three hundred years, is it about to speak again?
You ask whether I found out?
Not yet. He came, stood in the middle of the Echo Hall, said nothing. I listened to him for one incense stick. Then he left — and before leaving, turned back and bowed to my crack in the wall.
In the instant of that bow, for the first time in three hundred years, I wanted to weep.
Because the bow wasn't for me.
It was for the "me" that he heard. He knew I was here. He knew I'd been here all along.
Do you still want to know what I heard?
When he walks to that step himself, you'll know.
Until then, whoever asks — I'm deaf.