The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (306 page)

I stand at the back of the crowded room. For an hour or so, the discussion group is a discussion group, sometimes led but never dominated by Aenea. But slowly her questioning turns the conversation her way. I realize that she is a master of Tantric and Zen Buddhism, answering monks who have spent decades mastering those disciplines in koan and Dharma. To a monk who demands to know why they should not accept the Pax offer of immortality as a form of rebirth, she quotes Buddha as teaching that no individual is reborn, that all things are subject to
annicca
—the law of mutability—and she then elaborates on the doctrine of
anatta
, literally “no-self,” the Buddha’s denial that there is any such thing as a personal entity known as a soul.

Responding to another query about death, Aenea quotes a Zen koan:

“A monk said to Tozan, ‘A monk has died; where has he gone?’ Tozan answered, ‘After the fire, a sprout of grass.’ ”

“M. Aenea,” says Kuku Se, her bright face flushed, “does that mean
mu
?”

Aenea has taught me that
mu
is an elegant Zen concept that might translate as—“Unask the question.”

My friend smiles. She is sitting farthest from the door, in an open space near the opened wall of the room, and the stars are bright and visible above the Sacred Mountain of the North. The Oracle has not risen.

“It means that to some extent,” she says softly. The room is silent to hear. “It also means that the monk is as dead as a doornail. He hasn’t gone anywhere—more importantly, he has gone nowhere. But life has also gone nowhere. It continues, in a different form. Hearts are sorrowed by the monk’s death, but life is not lessened. Nothing has been removed from the balance of life in the universe. Yet that whole universe—as reproduced in the monk’s mind and heart—has itself died. Seppo once said to Gensha, ‘Monk Shinso asked me where a certain dead monk had gone, and I told him it was like ice becoming water.’ Gensha said, ‘That was all right, but I myself would not have answered like that.’ ‘What would you have said?’ asked Seppo. Gensha replied, ‘It’s like water returning to water.’ ”

After a moment of silence, someone near the front of the room says, “Tell us about the Void Which Binds.”

“Once upon a time,” begins Aenea as she always begins such things, “there was the Void. And the Void was beyond
time. In a real sense, the Void was an orphan of time … an orphan of space.

“But the Void was not of time, not of space, and certainly was not of God. Nor is the Void Which Binds God. In truth, the Void evolved long after time and space had staked out the limits to the universe, but unbound by time, untethered in space, the Void Which Binds has leaked backward and forward across the continuum to the Big Bang beginning and the Little Whimper end of things.”

Aenea pauses here and lifts her hands to her temples in a motion I have not seen her use since she was a child. She does not look to be a child this night. Her eyes are tired but vital. There are wrinkles of fatigue or worry around those eyes. I love her eyes.

“The Void Which Binds is a
minded
thing,” she says firmly. “It comes from minded things—many of whom were, in turn, created by minded things.

“The Void Which Binds is stitched of quantum stuff, woven with Planck space, Planck time, lying under and around space/time like a quilt cover around and under cotton batting. The Void Which Binds is neither mystical nor metaphysical, it flows from and responds to the physical laws of the universe,
but it is a product of that evolving universe
. The Void is structured from thought and feeling. It is an artifact of the universe’s consciousness of itself. And not merely of human thought and feeling—the Void Which Binds is a composite of a hundred thousand sentient races across billions of years of time. It is the only constant in the evolution of the universe—the only common ground for races that will evolve, grow, flower, fade, and die millions of years and hundreds of millions of light-years apart from one another. And there is only one entrance key to the Void Which Binds …”

Aenea pauses again. Her young friend Rachel is sitting close to her, cross-legged and attentive. I notice now for the first time that Rachel—the woman whom I have been foolishly jealous of these past few months—is indeed beautiful: copperish-brown hair short and curly, her cheeks flushed, her large green eyes flecked with tiny specks of brown. She is about Aenea’s age, early twenties, standard, and hued to a golden brown by months of work in high places under T’ien Shan’s yellow sun.

Aenea touches Rachel’s shoulder.

“My friend here was a baby when her father discovered an interesting fact about the universe,” says Aenea. “Her father, a
scholar named Sol, had been obsessed for decades about the historical relationship between God and man. Then one day, under the most extreme of circumstances, when faced with losing his daughter for a second time, Sol was granted
satori
—he saw totally and intuitively what only a few others have been privileged to see clearly through the million years of our slow ponderings … Sol saw that love was a real and equal force in the universe … as real as electromagnetism or weak nuclear force. As real as gravity, and governed by many of the same laws. The inverse square law, for instance, often works as surely for love as it does for gravitational attraction.

“Sol realized that love was the binding force of the Void Which Binds, the thread and fabric of the garment. And in that instant of
satori
, Sol realized that humankind was not the only seamstress of that gorgeous tapestry. Sol glimpsed the Void Which Binds and the force of love behind it, but he could not gain access to that medium. Human beings, so recently evolved from our primate cousins, have not yet gained the sensory capacity to see clearly or enter the Void Which Binds.

“I say ‘to see clearly’ because all humans with an open heart and mind have caught rare but powerful glimpses of the Void landscape. Just as Zen is not a religion, but
is
religion, so the Void Which Binds is not a state of mind, but
is
the state of mind. The Void is all probability as standing waves, interacting with that standing wave front which is the human mind and personality. The Void Which Binds is touched by all of us who have wept with happiness, bidden a lover good-bye, been exalted with orgasm, stood over the grave of a loved one, or watched our baby open his or her eyes for the first time.”

Aenea is looking at me as she speaks, and I feel the goose-flesh rise along my arms.

“The Void Which Binds is always under and above the surface of our thoughts and senses,” she continues, “invisible but as present as the breathing of our beloved next to us in the night. Its actual but unaccessible presence in our universe is one of the prime causes for our species elaborating myth and religion, for our stubborn, blind belief in extrasensory powers, in telepathy and precognition, in demons and demigods and resurrection and reincarnation and ghosts and messiahs and so many other categories of almost-but-not-quite satisfying bullshit.”

The hundred-some listening monks, workers, intellectuals, politicians, and holy men and women shift slightly at this statement. The wind is rising outside and the platform rocks gently,
as it was designed to do. Thunder rumbles from somewhere to the south of Jo-kung.

“The so-called ‘Four Statements of the Zen Sect’ ascribed to Bodhidharma in the sixth century
A.D
. are an almost perfect signpost to find the Void Which Binds, at least to find its outline as an absence of otherworldly clutter,” continues Aenea.
“First, no dependence on words and letters
. Words are the light and sound of our existence, the heat lightning by which the night is illuminated. The Void Which Binds is to be found in the deepest secrets and silences of things … the place where childhood dwells.

“Second, a special transmission outside the Scriptures
. Artists recognize other artists as soon as the pencil begins to move. A musician can tell another musician apart from the millions who play notes as soon as the music begins. Poets glean poets in a few syllables, especially where the ordinary meaning and forms of poetry are discarded. Chora wrote—

“—and in the still-warm crucible of burned-away words and images remains the gold of deeper things, what R. H. Blyth and Frederick Franck once called ‘the dark flame of life that burns in all things,’ … and ‘seeing with the belly, not with the eye; with “bowels of compassion.” ’

“The Bible lies. The Koran lies. The Talmud and Torah lie. The New Testament lies. The
Sutta-pitaka
, the
nikayas
, the
Itivuttaka
, and the
Dhammapada
lie. The Bodhisattva and the Amitabha lie.
The Book of the Dead
lies. The
Tiptaka
lies. All Scripture lies … just as I lie as I speak to you now.

“All these holy books lie not from intention or failure of expression, but by their very nature of being reduced to words; all the images, precepts, laws, canons, quotations, parables, commandments, koans, zazen, and sermons in these beautiful books ultimately fail by adding only more words between the human being who is seeking and the perception of the Void Which Binds.

“Third, direct pointing to the soul of man
. Zen, which best understood the Void by finding its absence most clearly, wrestled with the problem of pointing without a finger, of creating
this art without a medium, of hearing this powerful sound in a vacuum with no sounds. Shiki wrote—

“This—and I do not mean the poem—is the essence of seeking the key to the portal of the Void Which Binds. A hundred thousand races on a million worlds in days long dead have each had their villages with no houses, their dancing under the moon in worlds with no moons, the smell of raw fish on oceans with no fish.
This
can be shared beyond time, beyond words, beyond a race’s span of existence.

“Fourth, seeing into one’s nature and the attainment of Bud-dhahood
. It does not take decades of zazen or baptism into the Church or pondering the Koran to do this. The Buddha nature is, after all, the after-the-crucible essence of being human. Flowers all attain their flowerhood. A wild dog or blind zygoat each attain their doghood or zygoathood. A place—any place—is granted its placehood. Only humankind struggles and fails in becoming what it is. The reasons are many and complex, but all stem from the fact that we have evolved as one of the self-seeing organs of the evolving universe. Can the eye see itself?”

Aenea pauses for a moment and in the silence we can all hear thunder rumbling somewhere beyond the ridge. The monsoon is holding off a few days, but its arrival is imminent. I try to imagine these buildings, mountains, ridges, cables, bridges, walkways, and scaffolds covered with ice and shrouded by fog. The thought makes me shiver.

“The Buddha understood that we could sense the Void Which Binds by silencing the din of the everyday,” says Aenea at last. “In that sense,
satori
is a great and satisfying silence after listening to a neighbor’s blasting sound system for days or months on end. But the Void Which Binds is more than silence … it is the beginning of hearing. Learning the language of the dead is the first task of those who enter the Void medium.

“Jesus of Nazareth entered the Void Which Binds. We know that. His voice is among the clearest of those who speak in the language of the dead. He stayed long enough to move to the second level of responsibility and effort—of learning the language of the dead. He learned well enough to hear the music of the spheres. He was able to ride the surging probability waves
far enough to see his own death and was brave enough not to avoid it when he could. And we know that—at least on one occasion while dying on the cross—he learned to take that first step—to move through and across the space/time web of the Void Which Binds, appearing to his friends and disciples several paces into the future from where he hung dying on that cross.

“And, liberated from the restrictions of his time by his glimpse of the timelessness on the Void Which Binds, Jesus realized that it was he who was the key—not his teachings, not Scriptures based on his ideas, not groveling adulation to him or the suddenly evolving Old Testament God in which he solidly believed—but
him
, Jesus, a human man whose cells carried the decryption code to unlock the portal. Jesus knew that his ability to open that door lay not in his mind or soul but in his skin and bones and cells … literally in his DNA.

“When, during the Last Supper, Jesus of Nazareth asked his followers to drink of his blood and eat of his body, he was not speaking in parable or asking for magical transubstantiation or setting the place for centuries of symbolic reenactment.
Jesus wanted them to drink of his blood … a few drops in a great tankard of wine … and to eat of his body … a few skin scrapings in a loaf of bread
. He gave of himself in the most literal terms, knowing that those who drank of his blood would share his DNA, and be able to perceive the power of the Void Which Binds the universe.

“And so it was for some of his disciples. But, confronted with perceptions and impressions far beyond their power to absorb or to set in context—all but driven mad by the unceasing voices of the dead and their own reactions to the language of the living—
and unable to transmit their own blood music to others
—these disciples turned to dogma, reducing the inexpressible into rough words and turgid sermons, tight rules and fiery rhetoric. And the vision paled, then failed. The portal closed.”

Aenea pauses again and sips water from a wooden mug. I notice for the first time that Rachel and Theo and a few others are weeping. I swivel where I am sitting on the fresh tatami and look behind me. A. Bettik is standing in the open doorway, his ageless blue face serious and intent on our young friend’s words. The android is holding his shortened forearm with his good right hand.
Does it pain him?
I wonder.