He checked-in and came out for dinner.
A modest, navigable plan
of a man who has just arrived
and knows that arriving requires eating
and eating requires a door
and behind the door, a table
and on the table
something that can be pointed at, and received
without language.
Simple. Manageable. Already failing.
The street does not explain itself. The characters shimmer
across the storefronts in their neon strokes —
not illegible, not to the street, not to the birds
moving above the transformers in the red-stained dark —
addressed to someone else,
written in the grammar of a world
that preceded his arrival
by several thousand years
and did not pause to prepare a translation.
He stands in the middle of it
the way you stand in a river
you did not mean to enter —
already in, already wet,
the current already making its opinion
known through his feet.
The lanterns hang overhead
like low burning moons, bleeding their crimson
into the damp asphalt, and the voices rise and fall
in the dialect of the mountains —
ancient, heavy, slicked with the grease
of modern commerce —
and he cannot parse a single syllable
and this is, he is beginning to understand,
not the problem.
Once, in China, the sparrows were the problem.
The sky was organized against them —
every drum beaten, every pot struck,
every child's arm raised to keep the birds
from landing, until they fell from exhaustion,
ten thousand at a time, out of a sky
that had decided they were the enemy
of the harvest, the thief of the grain,
the small feathered obstacle between the people
and the future that had been
planned for them.
The sky was emptied. The plan proceeded.
The insects came in the absence of the birds
and the harvest failed in ways
the plan had not planned for, because plans
that empty the sky, of sparrows
are not really plans
about sparrows.
Now the birds are back —
wild and unbothered by the intervening century,
navigating the neon streets with a precision
that requires no signage,
no translation, no invoice of certainty —
the ultimate practitioners of wu wei,
the effortless action of the creature
that does not need to understand the city
in order to live perfectly
within it.
He looks up. He cannot see them
but he can hear the small adjustments
of wings
above the transformers —
the sound of something that has never required
the city's permission
to be at home in it.
The Buddha discouraged speculation about origins.
Not because origins don't matter
but because the man, with the arrow in his chest
should not spend his remaining time
inquiring about the species of wood
the shaft was carved from.
There is the arrow. There is the chest.
There is the present moment
in which these are facts.
What the young man cannot name —
the character above the door, the dialect rising
from the table beside the window,
the specific red of the lantern light
on the damp street —
cannot be filed into neat folders
of the tourist's itinerary,
cannot be made comfortable
by knowing its name
in another language —
and this is not a deficit of intelligence.
This is intelligence in its highest posture —
of the Tathāgata, the Buddha-nature
found when the labels are finally stripped away
and the world arrives unmediated,
as it actually is, which is always
more than the name we have been given
for it.
He does not know the word for lantern
in this language.
The lantern does not care.
The lantern is entirely itself
regardless.
Lao Tzu knew the street before the street was paved.
He knew it as ziran —
the self-so-ness, the thing that is
simply what it is without requiring
your approval, or your comprehension
or your confident stride towards a door
you have pre-selected for its legibility.
The compulsion to master,
to name, to categorize —
this is the beginning of the ten thousand things
that separate the traveler from the road.
And then the compulsion softens.
Maybe because you are hungry, and hunger
is a great simplifier,
maybe because the street is so beautiful
in its indifference, that beauty finally
wins the argument
with anxiety —
and the folders close, and the itinerary
releases its grip,
and you are just here, in Yunnan,
in the evening, in the smell
of Sichuan peppercorns and damp concrete
and something frying in oil so hot
it is singing —
and the city is not comprehensible
and is not required to be.
PROFIT.
He stops. He reads this. He reads it again.
The sign is bright, definitive, committed to its declaration
with a confidence the evening
does not quite support.
Is it absurd? Is it profound?
Is it the most honest name a restaurant
has ever chosen —
the bare transaction named without apology,
the commercial fact
stripped of its decorative language?
Or is it merely what happens
when a word crosses between
two ways of understanding the world
and arrives slightly altered,
carrying on its back the ghost of a meaning
that does not travel well?
He smiles. He does not know why.
That is the correct response.
The Buddha's arrow is in the chest.
The sparrows are back in the sky.
Lao Tzu's river is finding the valley
it was always going to find.
And somewhere above the transformers,
in the space between one breath
and the next,
a night bird cries —
sharp, sudden, addressed to no one
and therefore to everyone,
the sound of a creature that has never needed
to read the signs, to know which direction
is home —
and he chooses a door.
Not this door for a reason.
Not that door for a reason.
This door because the bird cried, and his hand moved
and the distance between the cry
and the movement contained nothing —
no deliberation, no invoice of certainty,
no demand that the world justify itself
before he agrees to enter it.
Inside:
a table by the window. A woman who gestures
at the menu and then at him
and then at the kitchen in a way that needs
no translation, because hospitality
is the oldest grammar, and he is
suddenly fluent.
Something arrives. He does not know its name.
He eats it. It is extraordinary.
Outside the window the neon characters
go on shimmering their untranslated declarations
into the wet street —
and the birds, move above the transformers
in the dark, that is not dark
but crimson, lantern-washed,
the color of a sky that has remembered
how to hold everything
that was taken from it
and held it without explanation, without apology,
the way the world holds everything —
not because we have finally
understood it
but because astonishment
is the only accurate
response
to a city
this vast,
and we are,
when we remember to be,
equal to it.
