The Year of Rice and Salt

Bai shook his head at this geomorphic fancy, not wanting to think of the ground as moving like big ships, wanting to understand the ground as solid, because he was trying to convince himself now that Kuo had been wrong and that he was still alive and not in the bardo, where of course lands could slip about like the stage sets they were. Kuo had probably been disoriented by his own abrupt death, and confused as to his own whereabouts; not a good sign concerning his reappearance in his next incarnation. Or perhaps he had just been playing a joke on Bai, Kuo would mock you harder than anyone, though he seldom played jokes. Perhaps he had even been doing Bai a favour, getting him through the worst part of the war by convincing him that he was already dead and had nothing to lose indeed, was fighting the war on a level where it might actually mean something, might have some use, might be a matter of changing people's souls in their pure existence outside the world, where they might be capable of change, where they might learn what was important and return to life next time with new capacities in their hearts, with new goals in mind.

What might those be? What were they fighting for? It was clear what they were fighting against – against fanatical slaveholding reactionaries, who wanted the world to stand still in the equivalent of the Tang or Sung dynasties – absurdly backward and bloody religious zealots assassins with no scruples, who fought crazed on opium and ancient blind beliefs. Against all that, certainly, but for what? What the Chinese were fighting for, Bai decided, was… clarity, or whatever else it was that was the opposite of religion. For humanity. For compassion. For Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism, the triple strand that did so well in describing a relationship to the world: the religion with no God, with only this world, also several other potential realms of reality, mental realms, and the void itself, but no God, no shepherd ruling with the drooling strictures of a demented old patriarch, but rather innumerable immortal spirits in a vast panoply of realms and being, including humans and many other sentient beings besides, everything living, everything holy, sacred, part of the Godhead – for yes, there was a God if by that you meant only a transcendent universal selfaware entity that was reality itself, the cosmos, including everything, including human ideas and mathematical forms and relationships. That idea itself was God, and evoked a kind of worship that was attention to the real world, a kind of natural study. Chinese Buddhism was the natural study of reality, and led to feelings of devotion just from noting the daily leaves, the colours of the sky, the animals seen from the corner of the eye. The movements of chopping wood and carrying water. This initial study of devotion led to deeper understanding as they pursued the mathematical underpinnings of the ways of things, just out of curiosity and because it seemed to help them see even more clearly, and so they made instruments to see farther in and farther out, higher yang, deeper yin.

What followed was a kind of understanding of human reality that placed the greatest value on compassion, created by enlightened understanding, created by study of what was there in the world. This was what Iwa was always saying, while Bai preferred to think of the emotions created by all that proper attention and focused effort: the peace, the sharp curiosity and enraptured interest, the compassion.

But now: all a nightmare. A nightmare speeding up, however, breaking apart and full of non sequiturs, as if the dreamer felt the rapid eyed stirrings of the end of sleep and the waking of a new day. Every day we wake up into a new world, each sleep causes yet another reincarnation. Some of the local gurus spoke of it as happening with every breath.

They took off out of the bardo into the real world, into battle, with their left wing made up of India's crack regiments, little bearded black men, taller hooknosed white men, bearded turbanned Sikhs, deepchested women, Gurkhas come out of the mountains, a banner of Nepali women each of whom was the beauty of her district, or so it appeared; all of them together like a circus crew, but so fast, so well armed, in train and truck divisions, the Chinese could not keep up with them, but got more train lines established and tried to catch up, running vast numbers of men forwards with all their supplies. Beyond the forward ends of the train lines the Indians continued to race forwards on foot, and in engined cars on rubber wheels, hundreds of them that ran freely over the villages paths in this dry season, throwing dust everywhere, and also over a more limited network of asphalted roads, the only ones that would still be passable when the monsoon hit.