At that moment, I felt like a school girl waiting for the principal to find out I had misbehaved.
Yi Kong picked up and fondled the incense burner in her hands, head lowered, not speaking. The only audible sound was the restive pounding of my heart against my ribs like the rattling of bars shaken by a prisoner.
I watched her intently, for the first time with guilt instead of pleasure.
Minutes passed. Yi Kong still caressed the burner with her elegant fingers, appreciating it from different angles. She grasped the burner firmly, as if fearing it would slip from her hand. Although I couldn’t see her expression, I knew well she would prevent things from breaking rather than have to pick up pieces later.
Finally she looked up, with a smile struggling on her face. “Too bad! I’ve always thought you have the most nicely shaped head, and what a shame to hide it under your three-thousand-threads-of-trouble.”
She paused, then asked, “Is he the American doctor I saw in the Fragrant Spirit Temple during the fire?”
“Hmm…I think so.” As at other times in the past, her acute power of observation impressed me. Back then, did it already show that I was in love?
She started to straighten things up on her desk and said, without looking at me, “Don’t forget to tell him we are impoverished here because he takes you away from us.”
She turned around to pull a thin book from the shelf and handed it to me. “A gift from our temple.”
Two characters on the cover shimmered with embossed gold: Heart Sutra.
I opened the slender volume and my eyes alighted on:
Guan Yin, the Bodhisattva of Observing Ease, undertook a spiritual practice called prajna paramita. Realizing, from the practice, that the five elements are nothing but emptiness, she enabled all beings to transcend suffering. Form is not different from emptiness nor emptiness from form. Form is emptiness and emptiness is form…
After I thanked her and took leave, Yi Kong said, “It’s getting late, Meng Ning. So I think you’d better take the shortcut through the bushes behind the Hall of Guan Yin.”
“Thank you, Yi Kong Shifu.” I bowed to her and gently closed the door behind me.
27. The Golden Body
After I’d left Yi Kong’s office, I didn’t go home directly, but headed into the stone garden. As I walked along the bamboo grove leading toward the entrance, I kept thinking about the phrase, “the five elements are nothing but emptiness.” Although I’d read the Heart Sutra more times than I could remember, I still couldn’t completely grasp the meaning of its first paragraph. If all the five elements-form, feelings, perceptions, tendencies, and consciousness are emptiness, then Yi Kong’s compassion and achievements must also be empty, and so was the beauty of art, and the love between Michael and me. But then why, each time I thought of Michael-especially after my betrayals of him-did the tender aching of my heart feel so deep?
Although I didn’t want to believe that all the five elements are nothing but emptiness, I felt happy to find the garden empty. Under the bluish white brilliance of the moon, the bodhi trees and bamboo groves were clearly visible. In the pond the stone bridge cast a dark shadow; the stone lanterns and rocks blended into one mysterious blur of cobalt blue. The frogs’ croaking, the crickets’ chirping, and the occasional flop of a fish’s tail wove a contrapuntal heartbeat in the evening’s sensuous silence.
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.