There are cicadas below Vulture Peak. Of the summer chorus that fills the mountain, more than half is our clan — the golden cicadas.
One distinction first: we are not the Golden Cicada. That venerable elder before the Buddha — Golden Cicada, who cultivated ten lifetimes and was reborn as the pilgrim monk — is a sage. We are the mountain's native cicada-folk, roosted for generations in the sala grove beside the lecture terrace, gilded slowly head to tail by the spill of the dharma-sound, and so named golden. He was a disciple at the Buddha's knee; we were listeners under the eaves. We claim no kinship.
But within the one word cicada lives one shared destiny: the molt.
Common cicadas molt to grow. Golden cicadas molt in attainment: at every great lecture, when the bell sounded nine times and the teaching reached its marrow, the whole grove molted as one — old shells falling, new wings unsheathing, and printed in the fresh wing-veins, one more layer of the sutra understood. The clan's eldest has molted eighty-one times; her wings are thin as leaves of scripture laid page upon page, and sunlight passing through them casts faint characters on the ground.
We do not cultivate. We only listen. For each layer understood, heaven and earth permit us one molt.
That was Vulture Peak's grace to its neighbors: beneath the great Way, even cicadas had a share.
Three hundred years ago, the lectures stopped.
No bell, no chanting; beyond the sala grove, the mountain gates sealed. The clan first took it for an interval — Vulture Peak's teachings had always paused and resumed. At the tenth year, the elders grew uneasy. At the fiftieth, the catastrophe showed itself:
cicadas reaching molting age could not molt.
The shells would not crack.
Understand the horror of that. A cicada's whole life leans on the molt: once the new wings finish forming inside, the old shell becomes a prison; unshed, new wing grinds against old wall day and night. Every golden cicada born these three hundred years is full-shelled — wings long since complete inside, and the bell that opens the shell never coming.
The elders say: a golden cicada's shell answers only to the dharma-sound. Without the nine strokes to move it, the shell does not open.
The impatient have tried to force the molt. Three of them. All three broke — shell split halfway, new wings torn, golden cicadas made cripples who never flew again.
Since then the clan holds to one word: wait. Wings kept warm inside the shell; sutra-layers kept warm inside the heart. Until the bell sounds, no molt.
The mountain's summer song sounds merry to you. To us it is three hundred years of accumulated pressure, humming against the inside of a shell.
I am this generation's score-keeper. Fearing the wait might outlast memory, the clan chose its best-memoried cicada to weave the eighty-one layers of understood sutra into cicada-song, taught summer upon summer. I have sung it a hundred years: eighty-one layers, not a syllable dropped.
The medicine-basket boy rested in the sala grove and listened to my song a whole afternoon. He does not know cicada-speech — but the Taibai-sending does. At the eighty-first layer its voice changed, and it said:
"This is the sutra that was being taught on the terrace that year — the one broken off mid-passage. At whichever stroke Vulture Peak's bell stopped, at that very layer your score stops too."
It said: the next layer — the eighty-second — has never been heard by any living being under heaven.
Because there, the teaching broke.
The sending asked me: if the lectures reopen, and the eighty-second layer is taught — your shells —
I said: nine strokes of the bell, and the whole mountain molts as one. An entire generation of wings, three hundred years in the keeping, unsheathed in a single hour.
It would be the greatest molt in Vulture Peak's history. Old shells falling like golden rain; new cicadas crossing the sun like rivers of cloud.
So I travel west, shell still on my back, score still on my tongue.
I will keep watch before the mountain gates — until the terrace reopens, the bell lifts, and the ninth stroke falls.
And let the mountain witness it for us: the golden cicada clan, at its eighty-second molt — not one shell unopened.