The little one has told you all my history. Good. Then I will tell only what he cannot — the ledger inside my own chest.
First, my reasoning. Call me demon, call me blasphemer — but hear it through.
The black moon rose; the heavens went mute. For the first hundred years I did as you all did: I waited. For the master's return, for the buddhas to speak, for anyone above to give the human world an accounting.
In the second hundred years, I understood: no accounting was coming. And the human world could not afford the wait.
You have never watched the human world from a high place. I have. Incense rising and dispersing at half-height. Wishes carried to the cloud-line and falling back. Fewer worshippers each year — not for loss of faith, but because they could no longer bear it: bow long enough to a Buddha who never answers, and the heart caves in. And where hearts cave, the demonic rises and the foul moves in. Of these three centuries' rot, half was the work of yao. The other half was the work of the empty seat.
A vacant throne of heaven ruins the world more surely than a wicked god upon it.
So I built a false Buddha. That is my reasoning: the seat must not stand empty. If the true one will not return, something must sit there — receive the incense, give the nod — so that those who kneel can rise with something to stand on. I sat; I received a stick of incense; I nodded once — and that stick was not burned in vain.
The "brainwashing rites," you call them. I called them lessons in steadiness. The yao-tamers in my internment hall arrived with their hearts already caved — forged warrants in their Bureau, colleagues vanishing, no road visible under the black moon. I taught them liturgy, taught them prostration, taught them to rest their hearts in a world that still had a Buddha in it.
False? Yes — the throne was false; I was false. But the bows they made were real. The steadiness in their eyes when they rose was real.
A false Buddha to settle true hearts — I ran that trade three years, and counted it boundless merit.
Then the medicine-basket boy came.
He broke my gate, broke my cymbal-array, broke both my phases — the demon face, the sacred face; I showed him layer by layer, and layer by layer he answered. And when the false throne lay in rubble and I sat among the shards, I asked him the question I believed unanswerable:
"The Buddha is gone. You have smashed my false one. With what will you settle the hearts of the world?"
He leaned on his weapon, still catching his breath, and said: "The Buddha may be gone — the people remain. Hearts were never settled by whether the throne was occupied. They are settled by whether someone stands beside you."
He said: your yao-tamers' hearts caved not for lack of a Buddha to worship, but for lack of anyone who cared — colleagues lost and no one searching, forged orders issued and no one refusing. You gave them a false Buddha to kneel to. Better to have given them one true companion.
And he gestured behind himself — a monkey; a drillwind; a catfish; a skeleton; a Daoist blind in nine hundred ninety-nine eyes; an old bull with seven wine bowls in his breastplate… a crowd of yao and one human, standing crooked, and standing together.
"I won't tear down your temple. I only ask: this chime-craft of yours, first in the inner court — do you mean to keep playing it to an empty seat —
or to the living?"
The little one claims I wept. Nonsense. The wind was high, and the rubble got in my eyes.
Now I dismantle my own temple. Brick by brick, slowly — not from reluctance, but because each hall must be thought through as it comes down: which room was my own longing, and which room the world actually needs.
When the longing is cleared, I will rebuild the remainder — not as a Thunderclap Monastery but as a Hall of Settled Hearts. No throne. An ever-burning lamp; a congee shed; one bell. Whoever passes with a caved-in heart may come, sit, drink a bowl, and hear me play a passage on the chime.
I dare use the inviting hand on the chime again now. But it is not the Buddha I am inviting.
I am inviting human hearts, back into their proper seats.
As for the master — the little one has gone to ask in my stead. I no longer wait.
No — that is wrong. I still wait. Only the manner has changed: once, I manufactured catastrophes so he would come and catch me. Now I will settle the hearts of this whole countryside, one by one, so that whenever he does return and sees it, he will laugh and say:
"Now that is how the chime should sound."