The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (12 page)

The murder had happened just like that, under his playful, delirious hands and arms.

So he lay on the loose gneiss, probed mistrustfully and coolly to see if everything was now well, if enough had happened now.

When he stood up hours later, he found himself calm. As if something was sleeping under his ribs, screened by high cupboards and tables.

It grew dark. A sickle moon stood over the sharp edges of the gorge. He pushed on upwards and sat in a tramp’s hut, a half buried wooden structure under an overhanging rock. The hut was empty.

Soon five came creeping with lanterns. They knew of Wang’s deed, were proud he had come back to them. A bandylegged footpad offered him the whole jug of heartwarming ginseng that hung around his goitrous neck. They crowed over the lean T’ouszu, leaped in front of Wang miming their idea of the throttling. He drank, stopping up his ears. Then he yelled over their noise, asked them for help. His blood brother Su-ko had not been buried, his body cut in pieces. He, Wang, had to leave early in the morning; they must help him, right now in the night, to conduct a funeral service for his restless blood brother.

They ran up in groups, more vagabonds arrived from huts farther down. Flitting of white paper lanterns. They bore themselves quietly as if they were in a house of mourning and prayed for their own peace. And they drank.

With drooping back, stare fixed like a widow’s, Wang sat on the mud floor beside a low wooden frame, a bier, on which a bundle of cloth, a crude doll, lay. Wang had his knife in his hand, from his loosened queue cut a strand of hair, placed it on the bundle. The oldest of the tramps, a weakminded, good-humoured dodderer with no teeth, a model of griminess, tripped forward to the bier, laid a tealeaf in a scrap of red paper on the doll’s mouth. He wound a long shawl made from torn-up trousers around the legs of the corpse so it could not jump up and would rest in peace. From outside they heard in the silence a creaking, scraping, rustling; someone in front of the hut was wildly and unceasingly swinging a huge sackcloth on a strip of wood through the warm air: the soul banner; he was enticing the dead man’s spirit out of the night air.

The little old Simpleton bowed endless times in the four celestial directions, called amid leaps and handraisings on Kuei-wang, king of the underworld, commended the newly arrived spirit to him. And all these vagrants, young and old, thrown together by chance, recalled at that moment the festival of the fifth day of the seventh month when a little boat carries the Kuei-wang downstream, the Lord of Demons in his black jacket with the collar of tigerskin, apron and boots of tigerskin, trident in his hand; tufts of his black hair jut far out from under his diadem. And behind him, stiffly, stand the little funny demons, he with the square cap, he with the bull’s head, he with the horse face and the ten chubby-cheeked Princes of Hell red as turkeycocks, all there to be stared at.

Carefully four of them carried the bier with the doll outside, Wang in the lead, the others staggering, huddling behind, with the
lantern down a short path to the stony field, strewing little balls of flour right and left for hungry ghosts. Lowered the effigy into a shallow grave. Little scraps of paper flared, money for the dead; rags and tatters smouldered evilly, his suit of clothes.

They climbed back up grunting with the bare planks. The lanterns swayed. Morning greyed over Chinan-fu. When they tramped into the hut, Wang had disappeared.

Fearful of the lictors and fearful of the horrors in Chinan-fu Wang Lun fled northwards. He crossed the borders of Shantung, traversed the plain of Chihli in the autumn, and by way of the narrow Hun-ho and through heavy storms of snow reached the safety of the Nank’ou mountains in northwest Chihli. He avoided all towns. Mostly he was alone. Often he went hungry; earned a few cents when the need was great by carrying loads, hauling coal; but he never stuck at it. Any job repelled him before long. His nature had nothing of his countrymen’s vegetable patience. He begged.

When it grew cold and autumn rain soaked through his tattered smock, he fell in with ten footpads. They waited three days and nights outside the county town of Tu-an until a lightly guarded caravan came by, carrying brick tea. They removed quilted jackets from the howling merchants, and with polite mockery let them proceed.

He spent the whole winter in these mountains. They swarmed with hermits, monasteries small and great: the holy mountain Wut’ai-shan was nearby. All winter through, the broad highways and narrow paths were noisy with traffic. Men streamed down from the northern passes with horses, pack mules, camels. They brought gifts, offerings to the more southerly mountains where monasteries reared from colossal bare cliffs. Walls of yellow stone fell sheer away; the processions straggled up twisting carved-out
paths into the rarefied air.

Wang Lun endured the hard months by a narrow river with foaming rapids. The river broke through the granite mass; enormous brown surfaces plunged vertically downwards; they tilted, inclining meekly towards the imperious water. Few rocks projected above the black surface; waves spun past them white with spray. Farther east where the river penetrated the receptive plain the cliffs receded, with new outcrops; in the distance everything levelled off.

Beside a mountain track, under an overhanging boulder covered with evergreen firs, Wang Lun dwelt with a hermit. No rain, no snow fell into their sheltered hut; the icy wind slid shrilly past out of the gorges. On warmer days he descended to where little watermills worked beside the river, stamping mills with sandstone hammers dropping into sturdy mortars, grinding wood and talc for candles. Beggars congregated down there, runaway criminals, idlers, footpads. Wang led a double life. He went restlessly up and down and sat, waiting for something or other, now here, now there. Only fleetingly, with a tightening of his wide mouth, a wrinkling of his low forehead, did he think of Chinan-fu, of the wallgirt town of thousands. Only in his penetrating gaze, which was often fixed quite vacantly, was there still something of a little whitewashed wall, a flashing of sabres, a long, long sitting in a wayside shrine for homeless spirits. His right eye, moving beneath a conspicuously heavy upper lid, twitched slightly and swivelled outwards.

Besides, while still down on the plains he had recovered his insolent, unrestrained playfulness. He toyed with the idea of entering the roofers’ guild. He soon had his associates at the watermills under his thumb. His strength and vigour alone were not much use to him in this violent company. The deciding factor was his playful way of manipulating people. This he had learned from old T’o: how to listen, humble and cajoling, draw it out unobtrusively,
touch it up slightly in repeating it, substitute, unremarked and with a wonderful openness that simulated honesty, what he himself wanted.

The ruffians he squatted on his heels with all day wavered in their opinion of him. Some of the younger ones didn’t take him seriously; they considered him half-crazy, with a dreadful adroitness, a sort of ape man. Wang became vicious when anyone took his tricks ill, let his amiability fall like a mask, uttered nasty threats; when he withdrew blackly, avoided company for days at a time, it only showed them how confused he was. The older ones kept a distance. They didn’t grumble at his childish playfulness; what struck them were the spells, not rare, of weird abstraction. They felt awe in the face of such things. They sensed a heavy suffering in him, and they thought of suffering as a capability, a gift. The lowly people embodied the ancient spirit of the race; more than in the educated there flowed in those whom life had battered, cast adrift, the profound sentiment: “Who tries to conquer the world by action will fail. The world is of the spirit; it should not be disturbed. Who acts, loses it; who cleaves, loses it.” Wang gave them a comfortable feeling. They were his followers, in their way were brotherly towards him, almost motherly towards the strongest of them all.

The thin pounding of hammers, the steady gushing of the river rose as far as the hermit’s lair. Beside the mountain road, with pious inscriptions engraved at every turning on the rock walls, Wang Lun sat with Ma No.

He had come to Ma one day begging. Wang had expected a bearded man in meditation, who would supply soft words from his store. Instead a highpitched voice assaulted him as he climbed the steps. At the entrance to the hut a hand grabbed at his sleeve, pulled him round. A pointed face came close to his, asked in a barely comprehensible dialect what he wanted. His sharp eyes had
meanwhile got used to the gloom. Ma No wore a coat of little coloured patches, laid over each other like fishscales. He was small and slightly bent, moved like an eccentric old man, had a disconcertingly young, fresh face, long beaked nose, fine mouth with orator’s dimples, unsure eyes that recoiled from every object like rubber balls. He piped rather than spoke.

At his first glance around, Wang Lun’s heart pounded. It reminded him of the dark temple of the Patron of Music Han Hsiang-tzu in a distant town. As he mumbled a few meek phrases and Ma pressed a lump of goat’s cheese into his hand he stood rooted, posed questions about the statues on the little shelf. Ma placed himself with his back to them, uttered rapid words that Wang could not follow. The polite, curious beggar calmly asked more questions, concocted some story about a priest in Ch’i. The hermit started, made a wondering face at the vagabond’s learning. Finally Wang explained that he had taken up residence an hour from there, was employed at a stamping mill, asked the wise gentleman to instruct him in the powers of his gods, since he was dissatisfied with his own gods. Grudgingly Ma No offered his strange guest tea.

And that was the beginning of their acquaintance.

The restless man who later shared his house with the runaway from Shantung was a monk who had fled from P’ut’o-shan, that marvellous southern isle.

Silent and mild his Buddhas sat in the rear of the hut. Earlobes extending down to their shoulders; blue hair knotted over round foreheads with the third eye of enlightenment; distant gazes; radiant, almost evanescent smiles on plump full faces, protruding lips; slender hands raised primly to their breasts; squatting on slim round shanks, feet turned sole up like a child in the womb. Ma gave the Buddhas, or Fos as Wang called them, various names; they all
looked the same. Only one Buddha was different, whose name had reached even to Shantung: a goddess, Kuan-yin. She stood among the others, carved in rock crystal, innumerable arms writhing from her shoulders like snakes, mouth pursed as tenderly as a soft breeze passing over a meadow.

And with a wrenching jolt Wang heard what these Fos taught: that no man shall kill. Ma No was puzzled by Wang. He laughed at him: the judges taught as much already. Wang, embarrassed, said Yes; but his brows shot up, his right eye rolled spasmodically and swivelled outwards. He nodded: “The Fos teach well. The judges teach well. But only your Fos are right, Ma.”

Ma loved the Buddhas helplessly. At times he would shout his ambitious desires, and the desires they had not fulfilled, into their great trumpetmouths of ears, and stand bleating in front of them. At other times despair overwhelmed him; he stretched senseless on the bare stone floor. They gazed out over him with their fleeting smiles. He busied himself with them, felt they were his masters, and the more he busied himself, the less they meant to him.

Yet it had never occurred to him to do as Wang once suggested when he found the faces of the Most Glorious Perfected Ones covered in thick dust again: load the statues onto a cart, push them to the north side of the road and carefully, one by one, tip the Fos into the rushing river.

Ma hated his guest for this thought. He felt he’d been found out, because Wang seemed to know he couldn’t do it. And deep inside he was jealous of this guest who came out so casually with such a monstrous, unheard-of plan and seemed ready to carry it out at once. He cursed Wang at length, lying on the prayer mat in front of the shelf, for Amithaba to hear: what wicked things that man had said, and how he was now controlling himself, suppressing himself, taking refuge in the Law, in the Teaching, in the great
pious Fellowship, as the formula ran. He focussed, murmuring the name A-mi-to-fo without stopping, went over himself in rapture like a stalking cat over a path; he saw the path snaking thinly away, a thread that pulled him, over the first rises, then over the four steps of blessedness. Now caught by the current, now turning back, now never turning back, now Arhat, Lohan, sinless worthy regarding with the same eye gold and clay, catalpa and mimosa, sandalwood and the axe that will fell it. And up above, Paradise, where those who would flow together separate, shrink back as from too strong rays: spirits of the finite light, the unconscious, those who feel no pain, the inhabitants of nothingness, and at last those who dwell where there is neither thinking nor not-thinking.

Silent and mild the Buddhas sat on the shelf. Earlobes extending down to their shoulders; blue hair knotted over round foreheads with the third eye of enlightenment; distant gazes; radiant, almost evanescent smiles on plump full faces, on protruding lips; slender hands raised primly to their breasts; squatting on slim round shanks, feet turned sole up like a child in the womb. An hour-long stillness filled Ma’s dark hut. If his abbot, the Chanpo, had walked in and taken him by the shoulders like before and regarded the sharp abstracted face with his cold eyes, that quiet, scornful laugh that Ma had heard so often would have followed. Every time, before he could form a question for his wise teacher, the old man walked away shaking his head. And Ma, shivering, devastated, unwillingly answered his own question as he rubbed his blue cold fingers: one cannot fly to the heaven of the Gods; the sons of Sakya must walk up to the crest, over the four steps, the four difficult steps.

Ma was incapable of walking from the moment he knew where the path led. On P’ut’o, the island, in the Hall of Absorption, a feeling had come to haunt him at the end of a seafarers’ Mass
that went through him like a stake, soft and unbending at the same time, and twisted slowly inside him. And then came a painful bitter rapture, and then a double waving of silken cloths, red and yellow, one from each side. The cloths, big as shrouds, joined themselves together, rolling in ceaseless motion; he slid down into the hollowness, the hollow centre. His feet were bound with bandages like the feet of a corpse. The draught from the cloths lifted him slightly, and yet he slid on in a straight line. A fan palm came. Something grey, large sped towards him, an egg, a gigantic grey pearl. At the sight of it madness bubbled up in him, he groaned, pulled himself upright, ran over stalks in a field, swam around the pearl wringing his hands and lost himself against it in a lapping wave.