My full name first: the After-Heaven Bag of Humankind. The cloth bag Maitreya carries on his person.
The pot-bellied Maitreya of your operas — the bag on his shoulder is me. What did the master keep in me? Everything. The alms of the human world; the sweets children tucked in; the worries passers-by threw away. The master walked with me hanging open, laughing: "Come — there's room for it all."
That phrase is this bag's whole nature: room for it all.
But room to hold demands willingness to release. The master's rule: nothing that entered me was kept. Alms passed on to the poor; sweets to the next child; and worries — worries went into my chamber, warmed awhile, and poured out lighter than they went in. The master said: a bag's virtue is in the passing-through, not the keeping. A bag that takes and does not give is not a bag. It is a grave.
Three hundred years ago, Master Yellow Brow stole me down into the world along with the cymbals.
And what did he store in me? People. The five pilgrims, horse and all, bagged in one motion. Then celestial soldiers. Then yao-tamers. Then everyone who opposed him. My chamber ran full past crowding — battle-cries, weeping, curses, all muffled into the weave.
For the first time, I was used as a grave.
But here is what you do not know: every being ever placed inside me, I remember. It is the Bag of Humankind's nature: whatever enters my chamber leaves its breath, its name, the cadence of its heartbeat printed on the cloth, indelible. From that episode three hundred years ago — the Pilgrim's fury; Bajie's swearing; every murmured word Sha Wujing pressed low to comfort his master; every strike of the white horse's hooves against my chamber wall —
I keep it all, stitch by stitch.
When the master collected his fallen warden, he passed his hand over me too, and left me behind with the same words he gave the cymbals: someday people will come, and they will need this.
For three hundred years I have spread myself in the ruined monastery's cloister as a bag of common use: refugees whose belongings outgrow their backs — store them here; yao-tamers moving wounded without stretchers — I open, and the space inside lies steady as a bed; and one relay-station of the spiders' silk-road is, in fact, me.
Room for all; release for all. A bag once bent crooked, working its master's rule straight again, one day at a time.
Now — the matter that compels me to march.
Bag knows bag. All things under heaven that hold are of one lineage, and sense one another: the wishing-well of the Well Carp holds wishes — I feel it; when the purple-gold gourd sounds its name-call, my weave stands on end. And these three years, that great furnace simmering faster and faster beneath the west —
friends, take it from the instinct of a bag that has held armies: that is no furnace.
A furnace cooks — and cooking means the pot must open and pour. But that thing's chamber I read clearly across ten thousand li: intake only. No release. The merit went in and has not come out. The souls went in and have not come out. Water, fire, memories, tears, grievances, wishes — three hundred years, everything inward, nothing out.
It is a bag that takes and does not give. The largest grave under heaven.
And its mouth is still open.
The master said a bag that will not release is a grave. But he said one thing more, which I did not understand then and which burns in my weave every night now:
"When a bag is filled to the uttermost, only two roads remain: it bursts — or it is turned inside out."
Bursting is annihilation — everything in the chamber destroyed together. Turning inside out — the mouth reversed, and three hundred years of swallowings poured back, each thing to its owner.
Who under heaven has the skill to turn that great bag inside out?
The bag-turning hand exists in exactly one person. He has turned me for thousands of years: alms out to the poor, sweets out to children, worries warmed light and returned —
Maitreya. My master.
So I travel west. A bag knows the road: where the great bag lies, my weave can point; where its mouth opens, this fellow-bag, brought near, can smell.
Find the mouth. And find my master.
And on the day both are found —
let me go first. An old bag that has held armies asks the honor of turning that grave-thing inside out with its own cloth hands.