On the night of my tribulation, snow fell on the Flaming Mountains for the first time in three hundred years.
The heavens had not changed. I had. In the moment the samadhi fire and the sweet dew of the pure vase merged inside me, every wrongful flame within a hundred li was pressed out for one breath — and the moisture of the sky came down as snow. The people of Scorched-Earth Keep rushed out with torches, thinking calamity. The children caught snowflakes on their palms and laughed themselves hoarse — no child of the Flaming Mountains had ever seen snow.
I stood on the summit watching that field of torchlight and laughter, and understood at last what this tribulation had been for.
Not for the fire. For the two words: Holy Infant.
I coined the title myself, in the old days. The Holy Infant King — what arrogance. Armored in the samadhi fire I was born with and my parents' great names, five hundred years of cultivation, burning down whomever I pleased. The gods shook their heads at the very words: so small an infant, so vast an insolence. Then the Bodhisattva took me, and the title became an old debt — the joke I dared not remember while grinding ink in the Southern Sea.
She never once mentioned those words. Except one day, sweeping bamboo leaves, I mocked myself aloud: what nerve your disciple had, Master, to style himself the Holy Infant. She answered with a sentence I did not then understand:
"The title was never wrong. Your reading of it was."
I read it rightly now.
Holy is not the holiness of thrones. It is the thing in fire that refuses to be dirtied — the same flame can cook elixirs of harm or warm a stove that saves; the hair's breadth between them is the holy. And Infant is not the infant of infancy. It is the infancy of fire itself — no first flame in this world was ever kindled to burn a human being. Every first flame was for warmth, for light, for food. Infant means: the fire still remembers what its first tongue of flame was lit for.
The Holy Infant King: the king who keeps fire true to its first flame.
That is the reading the title always deserved. It took me three hundred years of detour to arrive at it.
Now I do three things in the Flaming Mountains.
First, I quench the wrongful fire. The elixir furnace is smashed, but its seed-flames fled into the earth-veins and surface through the rock-seams still. That fire burns no wood — it burns the grievance in human hearts. My samadhi fire smothers it thread by thread. Fire to govern fire: in all the world, only this furnace of mine can do it.
Second, I light the hearth-fires. Across eight hundred li of scorched land, the villages are filling again, one by one. When a new village raises its first stove, I come and light the first fire. Mother says I have become a village stove-god making his rounds, with no kingly dignity left at all. Father said quietly: more dignity than the old version.
The third thing I do only at night: I am waiting for my fire to recognize something.
Since the merging, there is a strain of sweet dew in my flame. Each midnight, the fire bows itself slightly toward the southwest — the direction of the Southern Sea. To whom my fire pays its respects, I know perfectly well.
But this past half year, after bowing southwest, the flame turns due west — and trembles.
Due west. The west of Vulture Peak. Or a west farther than Vulture Peak.
The Bodhisattva's last sentence lies burning against my heart. And this tremor of the flame seems to be counting down the days on that sentence's behalf — the nearer the day, the sharper the tremble.
The medicine-basket boy asked me: Great Sage, is your fire pointing the way?
I said: not pointing. Recognizing kin.
This fire of mine is half the samadhi of my mother's womb and half the Bodhisattva's dew. The samadhi half knows the Flaming Mountains for home. And the dew half —
whom the dew recognizes, we will learn on the day the trembling peaks: we will walk due west together, and keep walking until the flame goes still.
Whatever stands there — that is the answer.