The deep sense of solitude that had afflicted Bao since Pan’s death began to slip away. Although the people he lived among now were not Kung, nor Pan, nor Zhu Isao — not the companions of his fate — just people he had fallen in with by accident — nevertheless, they were now his community. Maybe this was the way it had always happened, with no fate ever involved; you simply fell in with the people around you, and no matter what else happened in history or the great world, for the individual it was always a matter of local acquaintances — the village, the platoon, the work unit, the monastery or madressa, the zawiyya or farm or apartment block, or ship, or neighbourhood — these formed the true circumference of one’s world, some twenty or so speaking parts, as if they were in a play together. And no doubt each cast included the same character types, as in Noh drama or a puppet play. And so now he was the old widower, the babysitter, the broken-down old bureaucrat-poet, drinking wine by the stream and singing nostalgically at the moon, scratching with a hoe in his unproductive garden. It made him smile; it gave him pleasure. He liked having neighbours, and he liked his role among them.
Time passed. He continued to teach a few classes, arranging for his seminars to meet out under the valley oaks.
“History!” he would say to them. “It’s a hard thing to get at. There is no easy way to imagine it. The Earth rolls around the sun, three hundred and sixty-five and a quarter days a year, for year after year. Thousands of these years have passed. Meanwhile a kind of monkey kept on doing more things, increasing in number, taking over the planet by means of meanings. Eventually much of the matter and life on the planet was entrained to their use, and then they had to work out what they wanted to do, beyond merely staying alive. Then they told each other stories of how they had got where they were, what had happened, and what it meant.”
Bao sighed. His students watched him.
“The way Zhu told the story, it is a matter of tragedy for the individual, comedy for the society. Over the long pulses of historical time, reconciliations can be achieved, that’s the comedy; but every individual meets a tragic end. We have to admit here that no matter what else we say, for the individual death is always an end and a catastrophe.”
His students regarded him steadily, perfectly willing to admit this, for they were all about twenty-five years old, while he was near seventy, and so they felt immortal. This was perhaps the evolutionary usefulness of the elderly, Bao had concluded: to give the young some kind of psychic shield from reality, putting them under a description which allowed them to ignore the fact that age and death would come to them too, and could come early and out of sequence. A very useful function! And it gave the old some amusement as well, as well as an extra pinch from their own mortality to remind them to appreciate life.
So he smiled at their unfounded equanimity, and said, “But all right, we admit that catastrophe, and the people who live go on. Go on! They knit things together as best they can. So, what Zhu Isao used to say, what my old comrade Kung Jianguo used to say, was that each time a generation pulls itself together, and revolts against the established order of things in an attempt to make them more just, it is doomed to fail in some respects; but it succeeds in others; and in any case it gives something to posterity, even if it be only knowledge of how hard things are. Which makes it retroactively a kind of success. And so people go on.”
• • •
A young Aozhani woman, come here like so many others did from all around the world, to study agriculture with the old adepts at the college, said, “But since we are all reincarnated anyway, is death really such a catastrophe?”
Bao felt himself take a long breath. Like most scientifically educated people, he did not believe in reincarnation. It was clearly just a story, something out of the old religions. But still — how to account for his feeling of cosmic solitude, the feeling that he had lost his eternal companions? How to account for that experience at the Gold Gate, holding his granddaughter aloft?
He thought about it for so long that the students began to look at each other. Then he said carefully to the young woman, “Well, let us try something. Think that there might be no bardo. No heavens or hells, no afterlife at all. No continuation of your consciousness, or even your soul. Imagine all you are is an expression of your body, and when it finally succumbs to some disorder and dies, you are gone for good. Gone utterly.”
The girl and the others stared at him.
He nodded. “Then indeed you have to think again what reincarnation might mean. For we need it. We all need it. And there might be some, way to reconceptualize it so it still has meaning, even if you admit that the death of the self is real.”
“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 twisting-ladders 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 twisting-ladder structuring our brains — and it doesn’t really matter what happens to any one cell of this body. In fact their deaths are necessary 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 species-creature 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 own, 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.
He came to the gathering place and sat to watch the children race about in their egghunt, shouting and squealing. He thought, if you can see that all the kids are happy, then maybe things are going to be all right after all.
In any case, this hour of pleasure. The adults stood around drinking green tea and coffee, eating cakes and hard-boiled eggs, shaking hands or embracing. “Happy new year! Happy new year!” Bao sat down in a low chair to watch their faces.
One of the three-year-olds he sometimes babysat came wandering by, distracted by the contents of her wicker basket. “Look!” she said when she saw him. “Egg!”
She plucked a red egg from her basket and shoved it in his face. He pulled back his head warily; like many of the children in the neighbourhood, this one had come into the world in the avatar of a complete maniac, and it would not be unlike her to whack him on the forehead with the egg just to see what would happen.
But this morning she was serene; she merely held the egg out between them for their mutual inspection, both rapt in contemplation of it. It had been steeped in the vinegar and dye solution for a long time, and was as vividly red as the sky was blue. Red curve in a blue curve, red and blue together
“Very nice!” Bao said, pulling his head back to see it better. “A red egg, that means happiness.”
“Egg!”
“Yes, that too. Red egg!”
“You can have it,” she said to him, and put the egg in his hand.
“Thank you!”
She wandered on. Bao looked at the egg; it was redder than he could remember the dye being, mottled in the way eggshells got when dyed, but everywhere deeply red.
The breakfast party was coming to a close, the kids sitting around busily chewing some of their treasure, the adults taking the paper plates inside. All at peace. Bao wished for a second that Kung had lived to see this scene. He had fought for something like this little age of peace, fought so full of anger and hilarity; it seemed only fair that he should have got to see it. But — fair. No. No, there would be another Kung in the village someday, perhaps that little girl, suddenly so intent and serious. Certainly they were all repeated again and again, the whole cast: in every group a Ka and a Ba, as in Old Red Ink’s anthology, Ka always complaining with the caw of the crow, the cough of the cat, the cry of coyote, caw, caw, that fundamental protest; and then Ba always Ba, the banal baa of the water buffalo, the sound of the plough bound to the earth, the bleat of hope and fear, the bone inside. The one who missed the missing Ka, and felt the loss keenly, if intermittently, distracted by life; but also the one who had to do whatever possible to keep things going in that absence. Go on! The world was changed by the Kungs, but then the Baos had to try to hold it together, baaing their way along. All of them together playing their parts, performing their tasks in some dharma they never quite understood.
Right now his task was to teach. Third meeting of this particular class, when they began to get into things. He was looking forward to it.
He took the red egg back with him to his cottage, put it on his desk. He put his papers in his shoulder bag, said goodbye to Gao, got on his old bike and pedalled down the path to the college. The bike path followed Puta Creek, and the new leaves on the trees shaded the path, so that its asphalt was still wet with dew. The flowers in the grass looked like coloured eggs and sweets wrappers, everything stuffed with its own colour, the sky overhead unusually clear and dark for the valley, almost cobalt. The opaque water in the stream was the colo
ur of apple jade. Valley oaks as big as villages overhung its banks.
He parked his bike, and seeing a gang of snow monkeys in the tree overhead, locked it to a stand. These monkeys enjoyed rolling bikes down the bank into the stream, two or three cooperating to launch them upright on their course. It had happened to Bao’s bike more than once, before he purchased a lock and chain.
He walked on, downstream to the round picnic table where he always instructed his spring classes to meet him. Never had the greens of grass and leaf been so green before, they made him a bit unsteady on his feet. He recalled the little girl and her egg, the peace of the little celebration, everyone doing what they always did on this first day. His class would be the same as well. It always came down to this. There they were under the giant oak tree, gathering around the round table, and he would sit down with them and tell them as much as he could of what he had learned, trying to get it across to them, giving them what little portion of his experience he could. He would say to them, “Come here, sit down, I have some stories to tell, about how people go on.”
But he was there to learn too. And this time, under the jade and emerald leaves, he saw that there was a beautiful young woman who had joined them, a Travancori student he had not seen before, dark-skinned, black-haired, thick-eyebrowed, eyes flashing as she glanced briefly up at him from across the picnic table. A sharp glance, suffused with a profound scepticism; by that look alone he could tell that she did not believe in teachers, that she did not trust them, that she was not prepared to believe a single thing he said. He would have a lot to learn from her.
He smiled and sat down, waited for them to grow still. “I see we have someone new joining us,” he said, indicating the young woman with a polite nod. The other students looked at her curiously. “Why don’t you introduce yourself?”
The Years of Rice and Salt Page 73