Vulture Peak is not an empty mountain. This truth falls to me to tell — for I am one of the few who can still enter its outer courts.
What sealed three hundred years ago were the inner precincts. The outer courts — the lecture terrace, the arhat cloisters, the lotus pool, the spring where the Buddha was bathed — remain open by a thread. Only, no one comes.
I am the sweeping-boy of the lotus pool. My true form is a seed-pod of a twin-stemmed lotus; the old verger recited sutras by the pool sixty years, and recited me awake. Before he passed into stillness, he hung the outer courts' key around my neck with one instruction:
"Lotus thrones gather dust easily. Keep them polished. Whosoever's seat it is — polish it."
The outer courts hold eight hundred lotus pedestals, great and small. The arhats'; the bodhisattvas'; the guardians'; the wandering immortals' who came to hear the teaching. At the great assemblies, the old verger said, all eight hundred were occupied — petals spread, halos interleaving — like eight hundred lamps lit at once.
Now, all eight hundred stand empty.
Every day I rise at the tiger hour, draw water, wring the cloth, and polish from the east end to the west. Each pedestal, seven passes: rim, petal-face, petal-underside, stem-veins — none omitted. When the eight hundredth is done, the sun sets. Next day, again.
Three hundred years. A hundred and nine thousand days and more. Not one missed.
Why polish? The verger's instruction is half the answer. The other half I polished out myself: a seat that is kept polished is a seat still held. Left to three inches of dust, it becomes a seat withdrawn.
Not one seat of Vulture Peak may be withdrawn. While the seats stand ready, all who left may, at any hour, return and sit.
Polishing has taught my palms to read the pedestals — whose seat is whose, I know blind, by the petal-grain. And more: I can read a seat's warmth.
Listen carefully; this is the outer courts' greatest secret of three hundred years:
the empty seats are not all one temperature.
Of eight hundred, seven hundred seventy-nine are cool. Cool is no evil — it is the coolness of a master far from home, the coolness of a bed kept neatly made.
Twenty are warm.
Warm is strange. No one sits; the dust falls as everywhere — yet lay a palm to the petal-heart and there is a minute warmth, like a stove banked for the night. As if the seat's master never went far. Or as if some thread of the far-gone master still rests upon the seat.
Those twenty warm seats are none of them low in rank. Whose they are, forgive me — the polisher does not discuss the seated. That is the rule.
Strangest of all is the Thousand-Petal Throne.
At the outer courts' center, the greatest seat of all: the thousand-petaled treasure lotus. Whose it is, I need not say. Three hundred years ago, as the other seats cooled, it alone went neither cool nor warm — it began to shed.
One petal a year. No more; no fewer. Each withered petal dissolves where it falls, and from the spot springs one minute white flower; the wind takes it, the flower scatters into motes of light — and every mote drifts east.
East, friends. East of Vulture Peak is the way you came. The human world.
I have counted three hundred years. The throne's original number I never knew — but since my count began, two hundred eighty-one petals have fallen. And by recent close inspection, the petals remaining number nineteen.
One a year. Nineteen years to the last.
And when the last falls — what then? The verger never taught it. I have searched his ledgers by night, and found only one small line at a page-foot, which may or may not speak of this:
"Where the lotus ends, the lotus begins."
Where the lotus ends, the lotus begins. When the throne stands bare, does the old seat lapse — and a new lotus open? Open where? In the east? Those motes drifting eastward year upon year — have they been… planting something?
The day the medicine-basket boy entered the outer courts, I led him to the Thousand-Petal Throne. As he stood before it, the nineteenth remaining petal trembled. Once. Lightly.
For him alone. In three hundred years of polishing, the first time I ever saw a petal move of itself.
So I have passed the key to a fellow practitioner and joined the company westward — no: westward again. For west of the outer courts lie the true-sealed inner precincts; and west of those, the places even the old verger met only in scripture.
Nineteen years. The space of nineteen petals.
Before the throne stands bare, the four words must be understood — where the lotus ends, the lotus begins —
and one thing more: whether the eight hundred pedestals I have polished for three hundred years can still, in the end, wait their masters home.