I went to sit down on my favorite carp-viewing bench. The fishes’ scales, in the shadowy world of water and lacy weeds, glinted in the silvery moonlight; they made me think of the endless birth and cessation of the wheel of karma.
After a while, I stood up from the bench and followed the frogs’ croakings to the separate lotus pond. The large, wavy-frilled lotus leaves trembling in the air reminded me of flamenco dancers’ whirling dresses. I counted the dewdrops gleaming in the moonlight on the lotus pads until I felt my own tears. Were there other mysterious universes embedded in these glimmering beads? Could I just walk in and leave my confusion behind? Then one fat, wide-eyed frog, who I’d thought to be a stone ornament, suddenly rolled his eyes at me and croaked loudly, as if he were a sage who’d been waiting for ages for a fool like me to air his wisdom to. I reached out my hand to touch him, but he’d already jumped into the water with a splash-dismissing my sentimentality.
I looked up at the sky and came face-to-face with the moon. Through my eyes, the succulent disc resembled a teardrop smeared on rice paper. I imagined that it was about to drip, and stretched out my palms to receive the silvery sprinkle. I thought of Michael and wondered what he was doing now in New York, whether he was also looking at the lonely moon and thinking of me.
I held up my hand. The moon beams alighted on the solitary diamond, splintering it into a thousand shards of light. If I married Michael, would it be a mistake, as it had been when Mother decided to elope with Father? She always boasted how Father had brought a gun with him to propose. How finally it was not the gun that exploded, but Father’s passion.
The truth was, my father’s gun did explode-not on the night he’d proposed, but twenty years later-on my twentieth birthday when he gambled away Mother’s jade bangle.
After Father had failed to stop Mother’s suicide threat, he took out his gun and pointed it at his chest, as he’d done so many years ago. “Mei Lin, stop this, or I’ll blow my heart out!”
Mother dashed toward him and tried to snatch away the weapon. During their struggle, it went off. The bullet didn’t blow Father’s heart out, but made a small hole in the wall. Mother and I felt so relieved he hadn’t hurt himself that we had no idea that the end of this nightmare signaled the beginning of another. After this, Father was rushed to the hospital with a heart attack and before he recovered, died of another.
To save face, Mother didn’t tell any friends or relatives of Father’s attempted suicide, nor even his death. “I don’t want to be treated as a widow and you a half orphan,” she said.
Therefore, since my father’s death, Mother and I avoided friends and relatives, until we completely stopped seeing any. The only exception was, of course, my continued friendship with Yi Kong. Besides teaching me meditation and Zen painting, she would soothe my sadness and listen to my troubles with compassionate smiles, discreet lips, and generous hands, attracting me more and more by her charitable deeds and her rich, mysterious life behind the empty gate. Therefore, whenever I heard people say that temples are only for escapists and losers, I’d chuckle. Ha, nothing could be further from the truth!
Now the moon was beginning to set; I stood up and walked out of the garden. Still unwilling to go home, I wandered listlessly in the huge, silent temple complex. Then I looked for the shortcut that Yi Kong had told me about.
I strolled down a long, winding path that, I began to suspect, led nowhere. Curious, I kept walking until I bumped into a weather-beaten door in a small structure hidden by heavily gnarled and foliaged ancient trees. Why had I never found this place before? Hesitantly, I pushed the door and to my surprise, it swung open into a small hall lit by one tiny bulb near the floor. In the air floated the scent of flowers and the residue of incense. The room looked empty except for an imposing glass shrine in the center, inside of which sat a life-size, gilded Buddha. Offerings of fresh flowers and fruits surrounded the shrine.
I stepped up to scrutinize. The statue’s gilded face gleamed faintly in the nearly dark room. The legs were locked in the full lotus position. Beautiful image. But it was not a Buddha or Bodhisattva that I could recognize. A plaque attached to the bottom of the glass shrine caught the light of the small bulb.
OPEN THE SHRINE AND REALIZE THE MASTER’S
WHOLE BODY DOES NOT DECOMPOSE
ENLIGHTENMENT TO NONATTACHMENT OF BODY AND MIND
ETERNAL TRANSMISSION OF TRUTH
As I was racking my mind to figure out what this all meant, I discovered another row of small characters:
I PAY RESPECT TO HER GOLDEN BODY,
REVEALING MYSTERY SHIFU,
THE TEACHER OF MY TEACHER,
THE VENERABLE WISDOM FOREST.
DISCIPLE IN THE DHARMA,
YI KONG
I let out a gasp and took a step back. Suddenly the gilded face lit up for a few seconds. From the corner of my eye I saw a candle in the doorway before a sudden breeze blew it out.
Then the door creaked like sharp nails grating on metal. I felt my blood curdle inside and sweat break out on my forehead. As I desperately looked for a place to hide, a sonorous voice echoed in the halclass="underline" “Is that you, Meng Ning?”
Goose bumps shot down my arms and splashed over my body. My heart thudded violently and my armpits felt wet. I turned to find, like a hairless ghost, Yi Kong’s face flickering ominously over candlelight. It took me seconds to regain my senses. Then I stared intently at the figure in front of me to make sure she was not an apparition.
I finally got hold of myself and muttered, “Yes, Yi Kong Shifu.”
A long pause.
“How did you get in here?” She had relit the candle in her hand; the flame, raging and flashing under her, threw her face out of proportion.
“You told me about the shortcut.”
“Except for a few Shifus who work closely with me, no one else knows about this place.” Yi Kong eyed me reflectively. “It must be your good karma to be here…”
Yi Kong led me in lighting incense and making three deep bows to the statue. Her voice, deep and respectful, began to resonate in the hall like an ancient chant. “This is the Golden Body of Revealing Mystery Shifu, the teacher of my teacher, the Venerable Wisdom Forest…”
Instinctively I took a step back, then turned to look at her. “Yi Kong Shifu, what do you mean by the Golden Body…how is it possible that-”
“Be patient, Meng Ning. Listen carefully to what I’m going to tell you.”
Her voice filled the empty hall with voluptuous reverberation. “This phenomenon is called flesh-bodied Bodhisattva. That is, when a monk or a nun has achieved profound meditation practice, after they die, their bodies will not decompose-”
Feeling a chill, I again cut in: “Yi Kong Shifu, do you mean that this is actually the nun’s…mummy?”
Yi Kong shot me a chiding look and ignored my question. “Only one in a million will attain the state of a golden body, and this phenomenon will happen only once every few hundred years.”
She made another deep bow to the shrine; I immediately did the same. “Revealing Mystery Shifu passed away on March eighteenth, nineteen fifty-eight, at age eighty-eight. In February, she’d recognized that her worldly life was about to end, so every day she drank ten bowls of a medicinal soup. This was made from one hundred different kinds of herbs, with the result that she perspired and urinated profusely. A month later, although she’d lost a lot of weight, her face was flushed and her eyes blazed like torches. Ten days before she’d attained her circular tranquility, she entered this shrine. Then she instructed her disciples to seal it up, and after that, she meditated and recited sutras all the way to nirvana.