The eldest seniority in a meditation hall belongs not to the abbot, but to the ever-burning lamp.
Monks have generations; the lamp has none. Abbots pass into stillness, new abbots take the seat — the lamp is the same lamp. This wick of mine burned before the Buddha of the old hall below the Lesser Thunderclap for one thousand years. Seven abbots I watched enthroned; seven I watched pass.
A wick that burns a millennium unconsumed is not fed by oil. The old abbot said it plainly: an ever-burning lamp's wick burns the heart of offering. For every degree of sincerity in the one who lights it, the wick grows a degree. A thousand years of relayed sincerity burned me from a reed into a point of awareness.
The day I took form, I stepped out of the lamp-bowl, bowed to the Buddha, then bowed to the lamp. The old abbot, unstartled, asked only: the wick has left the lamp — what of the lamp?
I said: your disciple will return every night, and go on burning.
By day I was the hall's sweeping-boy; at nightfall I returned into the bowl to continue my thousand-year flame. I keep that rule still — the monks went west, the hall emptied, the elder wooden fish marched with the company, and I return to the lamp every night.
The lamp must not go out. What brother Oil-Stealer said at Gao Village matches our order's lamp-precept word for word: oil may be stolen, debts may be owed — but the lamps: not one is permitted to die.
Why does a lamp-wick cultivate the arhat way, of all paths?
The old abbot's teaching. An arhat, he said, means one worthy of offerings — receiving the offerings of gods and men, guarding the true Dharma, declining nirvana, remaining in form among the living. Wick, he said: you have received a thousand years of offerings. You are half an arhat by birth. What you lack is only the guarding.
Guard what? The Dharma. And what is the Dharma? The old abbot pointed at the lamp: when it is dark — being lit. That is the Dharma.
So that is my practice. No profound meditation; one work only: wherever it is dark, go there and be lit.
A village worried by night-things: I perch on the roof-beam till dawn — wick-light, and the crooked cannot approach. A caravan on a night road: I ride the wagon-shaft a stage. And after the internment hall fell, when the de-nailed yao-tamers woke screaming night after night — I burned in their barracks for three months.
Trifling merit; I claim no fruition. But this small light of mine has one virtue other lamps lack:
it knows which way to shine.
A thousand years before the Buddha branded the lamp-wick with the bearing of the Presence. Every day at the tiger hour, my flame bows of itself toward one direction — once, toward the altar-shrine of the great hall.
The shrine has stood empty three hundred years. My flame now bows west.
At first I called it habit. But these three years, the angle of the bow is moving. A little more each year, a little more — as if the one I bow to is not seated in place, but slowly, slowly, being moved.
Does a Buddha move? Moved where?
I told the company. The Taibai-sending had me draw the three years of bearings, line by line. It studied the ink-strokes a long while and said:
"It is not the Buddha that moves. It is the seat the wick bows to that is moving."
The seat is moving. What seat? Moving toward what? The sending would say no more.
So I entrusted the old hall's lamp to the family at the mountain's foot, with full ceremony, and joined the westward company — by night, I am the camp's lamp.
A wick that has burned a thousand years knows nothing else.
When it is dark — be lit.
And stay lit, until the place where that moving seat finally comes to rest.