The Year of Rice and Salt

'Anyway we missed all that for lack of a wind, and went on and discovered the ocean continents, and found you, and then we took you, and lost you, and saved you from the executioner god of the southern people; and that's when I felt it, coming back down the mountain after we had saved you. I aimed my pistol at people and pulled the trigger, and felt the power of life and death in my hands. I could kill them, and they deserved it, bloody cannibals that they were, killers of children. I could do it merely by pointing at them. And it seemed to me then that my so much greater power had a meaning to it. That our superiority in weapons came out of a general superiority of thought that included a superiority of morals. That we were better than they were. I strode back down to the ships and sailed west still feeling that we were superior beings, like gods to those horrid savages. And that's why Butterfly died.

You died to teach me that I was wrong – that though we had saved her we had killed her too, that that feeling we had had, striding through them as if through worthless dogs, was a poison that would never stop spreading in men who had guns. Until all the people like Butterfly, who lived in peace without guns, were dead, murdered by us. And then only men with guns would be left, and they would murder each other too, as fast as they could in the hope that it wouldn't happen to them, until the human world died, and we all fell into this preta realm and then to bell.

'So our little jati is stuck here with everyone else, no matter what you do, not that you have been notably effectual, I must say again, Bai, speaking of your tendency towards credulous simplicity, gullibility and general soft hearted namby pamby ineffectiveness '

'Hey,' Bai said. 'Not fair. I've been helping you. I've just been going along with you.'

'Well, all right. Granted. In any case we're all in the bardo together now, and headed for the lower realms again, at best the realm of the human, but possibly spinning down the death spiral into the hellworlds always underfoot, we may have done it and are in the spin you can't pull out of, humanity lost to us for a time even as a possibility, so much harm have we done. Stupid fucking bastards! Damn it, do you think I haven't been trying too?' Kuo popped to his feet, agitated. 'Do you think you're the only one who has tried to make some good in this world?' He shook his solitary fist at Bai, and then at the lowering grey clouds. 'But we failed! We killed reality itself, do you understand me! Do you understand me?'

'Yes,' Bai said, hugging his knees and shivering miserably. 'I understand.'

'So. Now we are in this lower realm. We must make do. Our dharma still commands right action, even here. In the hope of small advances upwards. Until reality itse If be re established, by many millions of lives of effort. The whole world will have to be rebuilt. That's where we are now,' and with a farewell tap to Bai's arm he walked away, sinking into the black mud deeper with every step, until he had disappeared.

'Hey,' Bai said. 'Kuo! Don't leave!'

After a while Iwa returned and stood before him, looked down quizzically at him.

'Well?' Bai said, lifting his head from his knees, collecting himself. 'What is it? Will they save the Bodhi Tree?'

'Don't worry about the tree,' Iwa said. 'They'll get a shoot from a daughter tree in Lanka. It's happened before. Best worry about the people.'

'More shoots there too. On to the next life. To a better time.' Bai shouted it after Kuo: 'To a better time!'

Iwa sighed. He sat down where Kuo had been sitting. Rain fell on them. A long time passed in exhausted silence.

'The thing is,' Iwa said, 'what if there is no next life? That's what I think. This is it. Fan Chen said the soul and body are just two aspects of the same thing. He speaks of sharpness and the knife, soul and body. Without knife, no sharpness.'

'Without sharpness, no knife.'

'Yes…'

'And sharpness goes on, sharpness never dies.'

'But look at those dead bodies over there. Who they were won't come back. When death comes, we don't come back.'

Bai thought of the Indian man, lying so still on the ground. He said, 'You're just distraught. Of course we come back. I was talking to Kuo this very minute.'

Iwa gazed at him. 'You shouldn't try to hold on, Bai. This is what the Buddha learned, right here. Don't try to stop time. No one can do it.'

'Sharpness remains. I tell you, he was cutting me up same as always!'

'We have to try to accept change. And change leads to death.'

'And then through death.' Bai said this as cheerfully as he could, but his voice was desolate. He missed Kuo.

Iwa considered what Bai had said, with a look that seemed to say he had been hoping that a Buddhist at the Bodhi Tree would perhaps have had something more helpful to say. But what could you say? The Buddha himself had said it: suffering is real. You have to face it, live with it. There is no escape.