The Year of Rice and Salt

She read from the Chinese notations by the drawing: 'They say, "It has a name but no shape. It combines the effects of the organs that regulate water, as a fire must control water. The upper burner is a mist, the middle burner a foam, the lower burner a swamp. Thus top to bottom, corresponding to head and upper body, middle from nipples to navel, lower the abdomen below the navel. – Ismail shook his head. 'Do they find it in dissections?'

'Like us, they rarely do dissections. There are similar religious barriers. Once in their Sung dynasty, about year 390 in Islam, they dissected forty six rebels.'

'I doubt that would have helped. You have to see a lot of dissections, and vivisections, with no preconceptions in mind, before it begins to come clear.'

Now the monks and nuns were staring at him with an odd expression, but he forged on as he examined the drawings. 'This flow through the body and all its parts, do they not mean blood?'

'A harmonious balance of fluids, some material, like blood, some spiritual, like jing and shen and qi, the so called three treasures 'What are they, please?'

'ling is the source of change,' one nun said hesitantly, 'supportive and nutritive, like a fluid. Essence is another Persian word we could use to translate it. In Sanskrit, semen, or the generative possibility.'

'And shen?'

'Shen is awareness, consciousness. Like our spirit, but a part of the body, too.'

Ismail was interested in this. 'Have they weighed it?'

Bhakta led the laughter. 'Their doctors do not weigh things. With them it is not things, but forces and relationships.'

'Well, I am just an anatomist. What animates the parts is beyond me. Three treasures, one, a myriad – I cannot tell. It does seem there is some animating vitality, that comes and goes, waxes and wanes. Dissection cannot find it. Our souls, perhaps. You believe that the soul returns, do you not?'

'We do.'

'The Chinese also?'

'Yes, for the most part. For their Daoists there is no'pure spirit, it is always mixed with material things. So their immortality requires movement from one body to another. And all Chinese medicine is strongly influenced by Daoism. Their Buddhism is mostly like ours, although again, more materialist. It is chiefly what the women do in their older years, to help the community, and prepare for their next life. The official Confucian culture does not speak much of the soul, even though they acknowledge its existence. In most Chinese writing the line drawn between spirit and matter is vague, sometimes nonexistent.'

'Evidently,' Ismail said, looking at the meridian line drawing again. He sighed. 'Well. They have studied long, and helped living people, while I have only drawn dissections.'

They continued. The questions came from more and more of them, with comments and observations. Ismail answered every question as best he could. The movement of the blood in the chambers of the heart; the function of the spleen, if there was one; location of the ovaries; shock reactions to amputation of the legs; flooding of punctured lungs; movement of the various limbs when parts of the exposed brain were prodded with needles: he described what he had seen in each case, and as the day wore on, the crowd sitting on the floor looked up at him with expressions more and more guarded, or odd. A pair of nuns left quietly. As Ismail was describing the coagulation of the blood after extraction of teeth, the room went completely silent. Few of them met his eye, and noticing that, he faltered. 'As I said, I am a mere anatomist… We will have to see if we can reconcile what I have seen with your theoretical texts…' He looked hot, as if he had a fever, but only in his face.

Finally the Abbess Bhakta rose to her feet, stepped stiffly to him, and held his shaking hands in hers. 'No more,' she said gently. All the monks and nuns rose to their feet, their hands placed together before them, as in prayer, and bowed towards him. 'You have made good from bad,' Bhakta said. 'Rest now, and let us take care of you.'

So Ismail settled into a small room in the monastery provided for him, and studied Chinese texts freshly translated into the Persian by the monks and nuns, and taught anatomy.

One afternoon he and Bhakta walked from the hospital to the dining hall, through hot and muggy air, the pre monsoon air, like a warm wet blanket. The abbess pointed to a little girl running through the rows of melons in the big garden. 'There is the new incarnation of the previous lama. She just came to us last year, but she was born the very hour the old lama died, which is very unusual. It took a while for us to find her, of course. We did not start the search until last year, and immediately she turned up.'

'His soul moved from man to woman?'