The name first, to spare you the registry: the Hundred-Eyed Demon Lord, the Many-Eyed Daoist of Yellow-Flower Abbey — yes, the "founder" of the centipede child's telling. Myself.
The child says I keep a gate on the far side and sent manuscripts home. All true. What the manuscripts did not carry, I will say to your faces.
The eyes first.
I was born with a thousand. The thousand-eyed Daoist, sheathed in golden light, watched sidelong by all Three Realms. But let me tell you how a thousand eyes actually taste: a thousand eyes are a thousand directions of wanting. This eye on the debts of friendship at Web-Coil Cave; that eye on the abbey's incense; nine hundred ninety-eight more, each fixed on its own stake — the thousand-eyed see the most and perceive the least. The day I poisoned the tea, all thousand were open, and not one of them could see the character for wrong.
Then Pilanpo's embroidery needle fell, and the thousand went dark. When she took me away to keep a gate, venom filled my heart: demote me to a gatekeeper, ruin my thousand eyes — kill me instead.
The Bodhisattva said one sentence: I am leaving you one. Look slowly.
The eye she left me is not in my head. It is in my chest.
What did I see at the gate, the child asks. First, what the gate is — be easy: the secrets I am sworn to, I keep; what I tell is what the Bodhisattva permits.
It is not a door that blocks. It is a door that filters.
The thoughts and longings of all beings rise day and night, and pass through this door to be strained: the clear ascend; the turbid fall back; the resentful, the obsessed, the knotted-to-death are held inside the door and dissolved before release. It has stood since the parting of chaos, nameless, without a plaque. The Bodhisattva said: if your human storybooks must give it a name —
call it the Pass of the Heart.
Three hundred years I have kept the Heart Pass, watching longings cross with the one eye in my chest. The first hundred years, what I saw shook me: the longings of the living, clear and turbid, kind and bitter, rolling up like a river in flood. What all my thousand eyes at full blaze could never see, one heart-eye renders to the finest hair.
The second hundred years, I saw the trend: the river darkening. Grievance and obsession rising year on year; clear thought thinning. The dead knots held for dissolving inside the door piling higher than the door can dissolve.
And in the third hundred years — your three hundred years — I saw the thing itself.
Around the rising of the black moon, someone came to the outside of the gate.
He did not force the pass. He stood before it, watching the river of longings, for a long, long time. Then he reached his hand into the current and took exactly one thing: the tears.
Whatever longing carried tears — the tears of the bereaved, of the wronged, of those waiting for a return — he picked them out drop by drop. Lightly. Steadily. Like an old farmer picking seed-grain.
My heart-eye burns clear, and I saw it plainly: his tear-picking hand worked in the true method. The beings in the Three Realms who can enter the river of longings by the true method can be counted on one hand.
I challenged him through the gate: what use are the tears?
He did not turn. He said one sentence, which I have kept three hundred years without daring to lose a word:
"Tears are the heaviest ingredient in longing. Heavy enough — to hold down a whole world."
Then he went, westward. And the river has run short of tears ever since. You have now unpicked the corrosion-drug and found its catalyst named an old friend's tears — the catalyst's origin, I witnessed with my own eye, three hundred years ago.
I wrote it into the manuscripts and sent them down to the abbey; the Bodhisattva had long since instructed me: when the hour comes, someone will come from the east to ask.
Now you have come.
A keeper cannot leave his gate. What I can give is three things:
First, testimony. The tear-taker's figure, method, and heading — everything my heart-eye saw — I will attest to, sentence by sentence, in any reckoning.
Second, transmission. A thread of the heart-eye's way of seeing I have already passed to the medicine-basket boy — at the Mirror Terrace, it will help him see through skins.
Third, a message. Carry one line to the Bodhisattva Pilanpo, if she remains in any corner of the world:
when your disciple had a thousand eyes, he could not see the one character wrong. With one eye and three hundred years, he has seen it.
The needle need not be returned.
Keep it — for the next thousand-eyed fool.