'But how?' the young woman said.

'Well, first, of course, there are the children. We are literally reincarnated in new beings, though they are the mix of two previous beings – two beings who will live on in the twistingladders that detach and recombine, passed on to subsequent generations.'

'But that's not our consciousness.'

'No. But consciousness gets reincarnated another way, when the people of the future remember us, and use our language, and unconsciously model their lives on ours, living out some recombination of our values and habits. We live on in the way future people think and talk. Even if things change so much that only the biological habits are the same, they are real for all that – perhaps more real than consciousness, more rooted in reality. Remember, reincarnation means return to a new body.'

'Some of our atoms may do that literally,' one young man offered.

'Indeed. In the endlessness of eternity, the atoms that were part of our bodies for a time will move on, and be incorporated in other life on this earth, and perhaps on other planets in subsequent galaxies. SO we are diffusely reincarnate through the universe.'

'But that's not our consciousness,' the young woman said stubbornly.

'Not consciousness, nor the self. The ego, the string of thoughts, the flow of consciousness, which no text or image has ever managed to convey – no.'

'But I don't want that to end,' she said.

'No. And yet it does. This is the reality we were born into. We can't change it by desire.'

The young man said, 'The Buddha says we should give up our desires.'

'But that too is a desire!' the young woman exclaimed.

'So we never really give it up,' Bao agreed. 'What the Buddha was suggesting is impossible. Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire, bacteria feel desire. Life is wanting.'

The young students thought it over. There is an age, Bao thought, remembering, there is that time in your life, when you are young and everything seems possible, and you want it all; you are simply bursting with desire. You make love all night because you want things so much.

He said, 'Another way of rescuing the concept of reincarnation is simply to think of the species as the organism. The organism survives, and has a collective consciousness of itself – that's history, or language, or the twistingladder structuring our brains and it doesn't really matter what happens to any one cell of this body. In fact their deaths are neces sary for the body to stay healthy and go on, it's a matter of making room for new cells. And if we think of it that way, then it might increase feelings of solidarity and obligation to others. It makes it clearer that if there is part of the body that is suffering, and if at the same time another part commandeers the mouth and laughs and proclaims that everything is really fine, dancing a jig like the lost Christians as their flesh fell off – then we understand more clearly that this creature species or speciescreature is insane, and cannot face its own sickness unto death. Seen in that sense, more people might understand that the organism must try to keep itself healthy throughout its whole body.'

The young woman was shaking her head. 'But that's not reincarnation either. That's not what it means.'

Bao shrugged, gave up. 'I know. I know what you mean, I think; it seems there should be something that endures of us. And I myself have sometimes felt things. Once, down at Gold Gate…' He shook his head. 'But there is no way to know. Reincarnation is a story we tell; then in the end it's the story itself that is the reincarnation.'

Over time Bao came to understand that teaching too was a kind of reincarnation, in that years passed, and students came and went, new young people all the time, but always the same age, taking the same class; the class under the oak trees, reincarnated. He began to enjoy that aspect of it. He would start the first class by saying, 'Look, here we are again.' They never knew what to make of it; same response, every time.

He learned, among other things, that teaching was the most rigorous form of learning. He learned to learn more from his students than they did from him; like so many other things, it was the reverse of what it seemed to be, and colleges existed to bring together groups of young people to teach some chosen few of their elders the things that they knew about life, that the old teachers had been in danger of forgetting. So Bao loved his students, and studied them assiduously. Most of them, he found, believed in reincarnation; it was what they had been taught at home, even when they hadn't been given explicit religious instruction. It was part of the culture, an idea that kept coming back. So they brought it up, and he talked about it with them, in a conversation reincarnated many times. Over time the students added to his growing internal list of ways reincarnation was true: that you might really come back as another life; that the various periods of one's life were karmic reincarnations; that every morning you reawakened to consciousness newly, and thus are reincarnated every day to a new life.

Bao liked all of these. The last one he tried to live in his daily existence, paying attention to his morning garden as if he had never seen it before, marvelling at the strangeness and beauty of it. In his classes he tried to talk about history newly, thinking things through yet again, not allowing himself to say anything that he had ever said before; this was hard, but interesting. One day in one of the ordinary classrooms (it was winter, and raining), he said, 'What's hardest to catch is daily life. This is what I think rarely gets written down, or even remembered by those who did it – what you did on the days when you did the ordinary things, how it felt doing it, the small variations time and again, until years have passed. A matter of repetitions, or almost repetitions. Nothing, in other words, that could be easily encoded into the usual forms of emplotment, not dharma or chaos, or even tragedy or comedy. just… habit.'

One intense young man with thick black eyebrows replied, as if contradicting him, 'Everything happens only once!'

And that too he had to remember. There was no doubt at all that it was true. Everything happens only once!

And so, eventually, one particular day came: first day of spring, Day One of Year 87, a festival day, first morning of this life, first year of this world; and Bao got up early with Gao and went out with some others, to hide coloured eggs and wrapped sweets in the grass of the lawn and meadow, and on the streambank. This was the ritual in their ring of cottages; every New Year's Day the adults would go out and hide eggs that had been coloured the day before, and sweets wrapped in vibrantly coloured metallic wrapping, and at the appointed hour of the morning all the children of the neighbourhood would be unleashed on their hum baskets in hand, the older ones racing forwards pouncing on finds to pile in their baskets, the youngest ones staggering dreamily from one great discovery to the next. Bao had learned to love this morning, especially that last walk downstream to the meeting point, after all the eggs and sweets had been hidden: he strolled through the high wet grass with his spectacles taken off, sometimes, so that the real flowers and their pure colours were mixed in with the artificial colours of the eggs and the sweet wrappers, and the meadow and streambank became like a painting or a dream, a hallucinated meadow and streambank, with more colours, and stranger colours, than any nature had ever made on her own, all dotting the omnipresent and surging vivid green.

So he made this walk again, as he had for so many years now, the sky a perfect blue above, like another coloured egg over them. The air was cool, the dew heavy on the grass. His feet were wet. The glimpsed sweet wrappers broke in his peripheral vision, cyanic and fuchsia and lime and copper, sparkier even than in previous years, he thought. Putah Creek was running high, purling over the salmon weirs. A doe and fawn stood in one brake like statues of themselves, watching him pass.