Elder brother Long-Brow and I share one origin — both of us companions in practice before little brother Lampwick's ever-burning lamp. His road is contemplation. Mine is deeds.
Deeds concerning what? My lineage's koan is a single word: tiger.
You have seen the Tiger-Subduing Arhat of the statue halls: glaring eyes, raised fist, one foot planted on a cowering tiger. The temples explain: so great is the arhat's power that even the tiger submits.
In my youth I practiced to that image. Met tigers, fought them, won, planted the foot — three tigers under my heel, and not one inch of progress on the Way. And the third tiger, pinned, stopped struggling and simply looked at me. I remember that look still: not fear. Defiance — and a measure of contempt.
That night I sat before the statue till dawn and worked out the flaw: a submission stamped down by force is false submission. Move the foot, and the tiger is still a tiger, and I am still I — nothing between us. The statue records the fruit and omits the road —
for the "subduing" of the Tiger-Subduer was never conquest. It is the tiger choosing to lie down at your side.
My turning came as a gift from the tiger clans of White-Bone Ridge. When the Glaring-Eyed and the Winged joined the company, the ridge lost its high watch — and I volunteered, and kept their cliff for three years.
The first year, the clans treated me as an outsider and patrolled around me. I explained nothing; I only worked. A cub down a rock-cleft — I went down for it. A sick elder — I gathered the herbs. Hunters' snares — I dismantled them, and hung the tackle at the cliff-mouth where the whole clan could see.
The second year, tigers began sunning themselves near my post.
In the third winter, on the night of the deepest snow, old ancestor General Yin himself — the tiger who had kept his two graves for three hundred years without leaving his cave — paced to my fire, and lay down.
He said nothing. Tigers need say nothing. When a tiger will close its eyes beside your fire, that is the clans' trust entire — the surrender of its most defenseless hour into your keeping.
That night, the practice that had refused to advance one inch in centuries before the lamp broke through all at once.
Tiger-subduing was never that I subdued the tiger. It is that the tiger consents to rest at my side.
On this westward road, the Glaring-Eyed and the Winged take turns sleeping against my tent at night — not as guards. As habit. The clans' old truth: sleep beside whomever lets you sleep soundly.
So much for practice. Now the errand — for I carry the tiger clans' commission too.
The ridge's three vanished prime tigers: brother Winged traced them as far as the banner-wings and paper feathers, and there the trail died. The clans charged me: going west, wherever there is tiger-sign or tiger-news, pursue it for us all.
The pursuit has darkened with every stage. West of the Flowing Sands, tiger-sign nearly vanishes. In Cart-Slow, brother Thrall reports that even the thralls are being collected — and a thrall is the debt of a tiger's kill; whoever collects thralls and whoever collects tigers are, I fear, one house. And in the Lesser Thunderclap's domain, in the deep of the Nine-Bend Caverns, the spider child's silk once took the print of a claw.
She traced it for me. One glance: tiger. A prime tiger's forepaw, claws intact —
but the grain of the print was cold. The same nature as the half-beat shadows brother Wangliang reads; the same as the marks stamped on silk that does not tremble.
The collected tigers still walk. In the depths of the rock-cleft. In that thing's night patrols.
For thousands of years, tigers collected prey, and nothing dared collect tigers. Now tigers have been collected — and mustered into the watch-rotation of the dark.
I who practice the Tiger-Subduing way carry one vow on this road:
bring those three tigers home. If their souls remain — lead the souls back to the ridge. If the souls are scattered —
then carry the claw-print rubbings home, give the clans their answer, and demand, on the tigers' behalf, an accounting.
I have already designed the Tiger-Subduer's new statue: no foot on any tiger.
The arhat seated; the tiger lying at his side; both faces turned west.
When this road is walked to its end, I will go home and carve it.