The world says the Bodhisattva "took" me.
The word is inexact. Subdued — that part is true: the lotus of heaven-blades, the five golden bands; I lost with nothing to argue. But the three hundred years that followed were no captivity. She never treated me as a prisoner. She treated me as a… badly raised child.
In the Southern Sea my daily duties were three: sweep the fallen leaves of the Purple Bamboo Grove, listen to the tide at Tide-Sound Cave, and grind ink for the Bodhisattva. The ink was hardest. With samadhi fire in my veins, one tremor of a fingertip scorches the ink. My first year I ruined over a hundred ink-sticks. She was never angry. She said only: child, fire is not for gripping. Fire is for setting down.
It took me decades to understand. Fire gripped in the fist is a weapon — it burns whatever it faces. Fire set down in the heart is a hearth — it warms a houseful. My fire had always been a weapon. What she wanted me to learn was how to remake it into a hearth.
By the two-hundredth year, my samadhi fire could warm wine. Could keep medicine at temperature. Could thaw the wings of seabirds frozen stiff at Tide-Sound Cave. The bands loosened one by one. She said: when all five fall away of themselves, your apprenticeship is complete.
The fourth had fallen when the black moon rose.
Of that night, I will tell only what can be told.
The tide first climbed higher than in three hundred years — and then withdrew, inch by inch, to nothing. Tide-Sound Cave went silent for the first time in its existence. Every leaf in the Purple Bamboo Grove stood on end, like ten million hairs rising. The Bodhisattva stood upon the lotus and looked west through the entire night — not the west of Vulture Peak. A farther west. A west I have no name for.
Near dawn, she turned, and with her own hands lifted the fifth band from my brow.
Not waited for it to fall. Removed it. Herself.
And then she spoke her last sentence.
Not one word of it will I repeat to you. Not from unwillingness — from dread. That sentence lies on my chest like a red-hot seal. I have weighed it: spoken one word too early, it ruins everything.
When she finished, she told me to close my eyes. I closed them. When I opened them the lotus throne was empty, the bamboo grove was still, and in all the Southern Sea there was no one left but me.
I kept vigil in the soundless Tide-Sound Cave for seven days. Then I walked home. It took three years — not for the distance, but because I dared not ride the clouds. I feared that the moment I rose onto a cloud, I would not be able to stop myself flying west.
At Fire-Cloud Cave, the sweeping-boy was still there. The three hundred lamps were still lit. And in that moment I finally understood what those three centuries had actually taught me:
she was never training me to be the child Sudhana. She was teaching me how — after the sky falls — to go on keeping something, the way that boy kept the lamps.
Then Shixuan's people came, coveting my fire for their elixir furnace. Their envoy spoke prettily: little Holy Infant, the Buddha's house abandoned you to an empty sea — why not prove your way by fire and raise a new heaven of your own?
I heard him out, and laughed. I said: you do not understand what kind of fire this is now.
The old samadhi fire burned on rage. What burns in me since she left is keeping-in-mind — the empty lotus, the sentence whose hour has not come, and everything under heaven that waits as I wait. Rage can be piped into your furnace. The fire of keeping-in-mind, no furnace can hold.
In that battle I let it burn in full. When the furnace lay in cinders I stood in the ash a long while. The medicine-basket boy came to me — did not ask about the Southern Sea, did not ask about the Bodhisattva — and simply held out something he had dug from the ashes:
the cricket-cage the sweeping-boy once wove for me. Half of it had survived.
He said: it can be mended.
Good. Then we mend. The cage can be mended; the home can be mended; this broken world — perhaps it, too, can be mended.
I travel west with them now. Her sentence rides against my heart.
At the place where it must be spoken, it will be spoken.
Until then — let no one ask.