Chương 102: “Sir Ozy (3)”

The gods here were different from the ones in the streets. They had no fur on their heads; their scalps were bare and smooth, and they wore robes the color of dried earth. They moved slowly, as if hurrying was something they had all agreed not to do. In the first days, several of the younger ones stopped to look at it. They would crouch and study its face. But the older gods assured the younger ones that the creature was harmless. No core, they said. Merely a dog-like animal with a deformed face and body.

In the mornings, the gods gathered in a large open hall and sat on the stone floor in rows. They folded their legs beneath them, closed their eyes, and began to speak. The words were strange. The creature could understand each one on its own, but these words were not used the way words were normally used. They were repeated. The same phrase, chanted in unison by dozens of bare-headed gods who sat perfectly still while doing it. For hours. The creature sat among them, not because it understood what they were doing.

It sat because it thought that it was meant to. And it was good at waiting. It tried to sit the way they sat. Its hind legs stretched awkwardly beneath its round body, and its front paws rested flat on the floor between its knees. Its flat face pointed forward, jaw slightly open, breathing heavy and audible in the silence between chants. Several of the younger monks opened one eye during these sessions, more than once. It was, by their later admission, quite unnerving.

A squat, flat-faced creature sitting almost like a man in their meditation hall, staring at all of them and breathing like a bellows. But in the weeks that followed, the younger monks stopped looking away when they passed it. The creature was too peculiar to remain frightening for long. For some reason, it followed routines. It appeared at the same hour each morning and sat in the same spot. When chanting began, it went still.

When chanting ended, it stood on all fours and walked out with the rest of them, its stubby legs carrying it in an unhurried waddle that they found quite endearing. It displayed intelligence that no common beast they had ever seen before achieved; it learned the layout of the pavilion within days; it sat outside the scripture room during lessons and appeared to listen. Even when no one taught it, when someone dropped a scroll, the creature picked it up in its mouth and carried it back.

They were unable to help themselves grow fond of it. In the evenings, one of the older gods would come for it. This one moved more slowly than the others, and when he picked the creature up, his hands were careful like how the young boy's hands were. He carried it to a small room and set it on a cloth bed near his own. Then, the old god would talk. He spoke about suffering and the path through it. He spoke about patience and how it related to time.

He said the body was a temporary house for something that would outlast it. He said these things quietly, as though speaking to himself, though he would sometimes look at the creature on its bed. The creature did not completely understand everything it was saying, but it was relaxing to hear the old god's low voice. The creature's eyes grew heavy listening to it. Before the old god finished speaking, the creature was always asleep. The days repeated simply like this. Then, one morning, the monks were in their rows.

Chanting had been going for some time. The creature was in its usual spot, legs stretched, flat face forward, breathing in that heavy way it always breathed; happy and satisfied just to be with its gods. Light erupted from the creature's body, a column of white that shot through the timber ceiling and kept going, filling the hall with a brightness that forced every monk to shield their eyes with their sleeves. Then as quickly as it came, it disappeared. The creature sat where it had been. Blinking.

"Amitabha!" One voice first. Then another.

"Amitabha!"

"Amitabha! A heavenly beast!" Voices stacked on top of each other—exclamations, prayers, a few that sounded closer to disbelief than reverence. Even several of the senior monks who had sworn vows of silence could not keep their mouths shut. A common beast… a deformed animal pulled half-dead from a riverbank had managed to achieve enlightenment?! What had occurred should not have been possible. After all, common beasts lacked the spiritual shape for such a thing.

Enlightenment meant completely removing oneself from worldly desires; with a missing hand, one could count how many times such a thing could be achieved by an unintelligent beast. Yet the light had come, and every person here had seen it. As one of them had said aloud before he could stop himself, it seems that the Heavens had blessed their pavilion. Every senior monk in the room understood what it meant. A pavilion that managed to support the cultivation of a minor deity would rise among the sects.

Pilgrimages would come; and offerings and recognition from temples. The creature, at the center of all of this, tilted its head to the left and right. It did not understand what had happened. There were many gods speaking at once now, which made it hard to hear any single one of them. But it knew something had changed. So, it opened its mouth. The sound that came out was rough and small, barely shaped by its flat mouth.

"H-hungry." The younger monks crowded it within minutes. They crouched around it in a half-circle, their composure abandoned the moment it had spoken.

"It spoke!"

"Say something else!" The creature looked at them, and opened its mouth again.

"Hungry," it said again. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement. The senior monks were baffled. Elder Jie stood at the back of the hall with his hands in his sleeves. His face had lost its color. Beside him, two other elders wore expressions that had nothing to do with delight. They understood what the younger monks did not. A beast with a core needed at least a hundred years before it developed the intelligence to imitate human speech.

And then a hundred more before those words carried meaning, before they understood the reason behind its own speech. Beasts were governed by instinct. Their intelligence, however sharp, were focused on innate desires and survival. Language, however, required something else. It required the ability to place reason above impulse, to separate what you wanted from what you thought. That separation was what made enlightenment possible for humans. Demonic beasts could reach it.

But only after centuries of slow accumulation, their cores maturing from consuming Qi. But, what about this creature? It had no core and was barely a few months old. It had arrived at the pavilion half-dead and barely weaned. Elder Jie looked at it as it sat at the center of the crowd, its flat face turning from monk to monk. Only the Heavens could account for this. He did not question it. Rather than the deformed animal they had pulled from the water, this creature was a blessing.

In the weeks that followed, the monks quickly adjusted for one that deserved respect for reaching enlightenment. Though theirs was a sect that did not eat meat, the elders made a concession. The creature was not human. Whatever path the Heavens had set for it, that path did not require forcing a human diet. A young monk was sent to the nearest village for dried fish and salted pork, and the creature ate these as if it was starved the whole time it was here, only eating greens this whole time.

The monks began teaching it: scripture readings where it memorized passages by listening, and repeated them back in a voice that was curious and earnest. Months passed. The rough sounds smoothened. Single words became phrases, then sentences. The creature's speech remained simple, each sentence short and direct, but it spoke clearly enough that no monk in the pavilion could mistake what it said. It read by having someone turn pages for it.

It asked questions, and sometimes asked the same question on different days, as if checking whether the answer might have changed. The monks had started calling it Little Friend.

"Little Friend, have you been studying properly?" The creature looked up from the scroll on the floor in front of it. One paw rested on the open page.

"Yes. But this part does not make sense." It tapped the page with its paw.

"It says to let go of desire. But I desire to eat. If I stop desiring that, I die." The monk stared at it.

"... I will ask Elder Jie," he said. On another afternoon, a younger monk appeared at the scripture room, slightly out of breath.

"Little Friend! My friend's cousin's little brother's sister is visiting the sect later to receive blessings for her wedding. Would you bless them?" The creature tilted its head.

"What is a wedding?"

"It is when two people decide to stay together forever."

"Forever?"

"They would appreciate a few words of encouragement from you, Little Friend."

"I can," it said. In the evenings, when the pavilion grew quiet, his room would be the most visited one by the members of the sect.

"Amitabha, Little Friend. I secretly brought some snacks from the village nearby. Would you like some?" The creature's ears moved forward.

"Village? There is one nearby?"

"There is one 10 li from here." The creature did not respond right away. It had never left the pavilion grounds ever since it came here. He had been thinking about it for some time now. The first god… no, not a god. He understood that now. The boy was a small and starving human, with scars on his face and ribs that showed through his skin. Where was the boy now? Was he still sleeping in the gap between those two buildings? Was he still being beaten?

"Can I visit the village?" he asked. The young monk who brought him snacks looked up from his sweeping.

"Huh? Oh... that is something you would have to ask the elders." So he did. The elders did not refuse him. What surprised Little Friend was that there had been nothing to refuse. He could have left at any time, they told him. He was not bound here. If he wished to go, he could go. If he wished to return, there would always be a place for him.

"Fate has brought you here to become our friend, if you will it, we will not keep you from moving to your next destiny," Elder Jie said simply. He did insist, however, that Little Friend take escorts. The world outside the pavilion was dangerous, and until he learned how to survive beyond its walls, two senior monks would walk with him. Little Friend agreed; it made sense. The next morning, two monks walked with him down the mountain path.

Within the first hour, Little Friend understood why the elder had insisted on escorts. He had spent his months at the sect reading and meditating. He had not climbed or descended a rough slope or crossed a stream. His body was round, his legs were short, and the mountain path had been built for neither. Mud quickly clung to his paws, his belly fur grazed the ground whenever the path dipped, picking up dirt and dead leaves, and he had to hop over roots and stones that a human would step across without thinking.

"Little Friend," one of the monks said, crouching beside him.

"Would you like me to carry you? You can rest in my arms."

"No." He shook his head.

"I want to walk." He walked. Slowly. A beetle crossing the path made him crouch to look at it. Further on, he pressed his nose into a cluster of white flowers growing from a crack in a rock. A bird watched him from a low branch, and he watched it back until it flew off. What should have taken one hour took three. The monks walked behind him at his pace, and when Little Friend looked over his shoulder, he could see them smiling.

When the trees thinned and the trail opened onto flat ground, a smell reached him that stopped his legs. He knew this place. The scent of wet mud and cook-smoke, the sour edge of gutter water drying in the sun. He had spent the first months of his life here, living within a gap between two walls, waiting in the shadows for the boy to come back in the late afternoons. It had been hard, but he had been happy. The village was larger than he remembered. Or perhaps he had been too small to see much of it.

The buildings stood in uneven rows along a dirt road, and people moved between them. Several turned to look as the two monks and the creature walked in. Word had already spread. The villagers had heard about the beast at the pavilion that achieved enlightenment. But hearing about it and seeing it were different things. A few of them gasped. Others stared openly at his face—the flat wrinkled snout, the bulging eyes. He was uglier up close than the stories had prepared them for.

Nobody dared to bother him or stand in his path. The two monks behind him were reason enough for that. Little Friend walked until he found it. The gap between two buildings. It was narrow and dirty, and had the same stain on the wall. The same broken piece of cloth stretched over the top. He could bring the boy back to the pavilion. There was food there, and a bed, and monks who were kind. The boy would not have to beg anymore, it was a place where neither of them would go hungry again. He ran.

His stubby legs carried him in a clumsy waddle-run, and he pushed into the gap with his nose down and his ears forward. No one was there. The cloth was still overhead. The ground was still damp. But the space where the boy used to sleep was empty. Little Friend tilted his head. The boy must be out. He used to leave during the day to beg for food and scrounge for coins. He always came back in the late afternoons. So, Little Friend sat down in the gap and waited. The two monks watched from the road.

They had seen the way their Little Friend had run, it was the way a child ran to meet his father.

"Amitabha, Little Friend," one of them called softly.

"We will wait for you, a short distance away."

"Amitabha," said the other.

"Thank you," Little Friend said as he sat down. He waited. The sun moved across the sky above the narrow gap. The boy would come back soon. He was just late. Little Friend settled lower and tucked his front paws beneath him. The sun touched the rooftops, then it dropped behind them. Darkness slowly enveloped the gap. And the boy never came.