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An intricate mind unwinds by wongkk
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An intricate mind unwinds

A small frown had made its own mark under the chakra, a narrow cleavage in which his weariness and effort lay combined.

His eyes were sore and he was too tired to think. He had run out of mind miles, his wheels of thought churning uselessly in the sand of anomalies and confusion which filled the desert of his brain. Gone were the old flowerings of imagination and reason; the garden of his intelligence, that secret oasis which had been his private cultivation and pleasure, was withered and arid and unyielding. Paradise had died.

He was way too tired to think. Perhaps if there had been someone else at hand to respond to his questions, to offer illumination and discussion, to combine in progress, then perhaps he might recover the energy to think; but there was no one he could talk to on that level, not now.

That was one of the difficulties of being at the top of the tree – how to go on learning? How to find pointers for improvement beyond your own thoughts, your own education, your own experience?

Their constant journeying meant that he never had the time to meet the right people, or not for long enough to learn anything. When had he last met someone whose opinions he could respect? He couldn’t remember.

When had he last found access to a library which might stimulate and expand his own thinking? He was never without a newspaper, true enough, but the value of what he read in the provincial press was little better than a conversation with the provincial people in the streets where he had to walk or in the inns where he had to stay.

Really, all he had to draw on these days was himself, and the “wisdom” of his three fellow travellers, his three dependants, servants, retainers. So, with a problem like this, there was not much likelihood of a profitable discussion.

The monkey would have no idea!

And it was no use talking about it to the kappa, that immense gland……………

Or to Hakkai, who was, certainly, academically capable but, oh, so spiritually equivocal. Chi was fine as a power you found in yourself, but rather different from the power outside yourself which had made the world and all of them. Hakkai’s mind and emotional spectrum was essentially domestic, concerned with hygiene and laundry and nutrition, which was all meaningful stuff on a physical level but not anything to feed Sanzo’s own hunger.

Although it was, of course, exactly what would make Hakkai a good parent. He knew that Hakkai desperately wanted to have children of his own, had chosen to be a school-teacher because he genuinely found that being with and caring for children made him happy.

Sanzo pulled a wry face. His own view of children was that they were a species of large insect, a pointless class of irritant regrettably necessary for their maturity, in the same way that hard, inedible, raw rice was necessary if you wanted to enjoy a nice donburi!

Meanwhile, Sanzo had found himself living with that half-child, half-animal Goku. Except that dealing with Goku was not really like bringing up a child, whom you might expect to develop into something more and, therefore, in whom it was worth investing guidance, philosophy, wisdom.

In many ways, dealing with Goku was far more difficult because you had no right to expect him to be other than as he was, no right to complain about his limitations or his presence, which was neither your choice nor his. In many ways, dealing with Goku was more like helping him to come to terms with a tragedy – a tragedy of not being human, of not being able to die, of his permanent need for the limiter, of the fear of his demon self and more punishment, even the tragedy of his funny short body and his delinquent appetite and his honest, shallow, transparent, loyal and tiny mind.

In many ways, also, didn’t Goku represent their collective self, like a mascot? No-one would ever drag out of Sanzo that the four of them had any collective identity at all (he needed to stay up a level) but, if they had to have a brand figure, it would be the vilified, scapegoat monkey with his energy and enthusiasm and instinctive adherence to a decent morality, going on for ever unchanged and halfway to heaven………

Sanzo lit another cigarette and flicked the match over the edge of the roof into the deserted street below.

He leaned back and looked out into the darkness where he knew the mountains would be, silent and ancient and knowing. He would prefer to be alone on the top of a mountain, feeling its cold wisdom pass upwards into his feet and bones. However, they were staying in a town - so that Gojyo could find company and Hakkai could get the washing done and that monkey could fill his limitless belly – so the roof was as high as he was going to get tonight. In his own way, Sanzo could be generous, but his generosity was chilly and invisible so, without the explanations which he would never make, he knew the others perceived him as aloof and self-centred.

It didn’t matter. He didn’t have the spare capacity to care what anyone else thought about him.

He was stretched, almost to the edge of integrity it felt, with holding together all the knowledge and experience which had brought them this far and, then, with finding the capacity and discipline to open the channel for prayer. Only in prayer could he rise above his earthly body and its sensations and become a vessel for the white noise of the great eternal spiritual presence, out of which bewildering symphony might come, somewhere within the near-blind scope of his groping faculties, a small grain of direction or understanding or enlightenment.

He no longer had any spare capacity to expend on the things that exercised, for example, Gojyo. Oh, he had the same anatomical equipment as other men but he didn’t hold himself free to use it. For one thing, there wasn’t anyone he liked that much, not enough to touch anyway, and certainly not enough to want to receive anything from them in return. For another thing, he couldn’t give what was required of mind and heart – the responsibilities he already carried were too greedy, too consuming. They fed on him like carrion birds, except that he wasn’t dead, pulling at the strong muscles of his vitality and tearing the soft, internal organs of his sensibilities.

He no longer had any spare capacity left for his own enjoyment; if he shouted at the others for noise when he was trying to think, it was partly out of anguish for his own lost pleasures. It was too painful to think of poetry or painting or music, or the love he had felt for swimming, little Kouryuu of the river, little dolphin, bending with the water and sliding like silk through the strength of current with the tiny silver fish that shone as brightly as coins in the sunshine of his childhood…………….

His capacity now was only for the stuff of their journey, and for the hard training of his soul, which would keep his prayers as lethal to their supernatural enemies as was the gun to the robbers of flesh and blood who attacked them on the road. He needed to practise with both armaments, to be confident of his precision and speed, so that each weapon felt as immediately comfortable to him as the black leather top of his vestments.

None of the others understood the need for practice. They seemed to think that invoking the power of the maten sutra was just a matter of reading - that, somehow, the sounds and words would work of themselves, like a recipe for ginger beer! Was a sanzo then, to them, just a cupboard, somewhere you kept a sutra – to be tidy? He grinned without humour. Probably just that.

The cupboard inhaled slowly, feeling the smoke fusing with his bloodstream in the chamber of his lungs. It gave him a sense of preliminary dedication, like the burning of incense. It sent up a signal that he wanted to communicate, wanted to empty himself of everything other than a consuming devotion to whatever lay at the end of his priestly vocation.

Probably, there would never be an end, for, if his vocation came from a root, how then could he move away from it, up a trunk and along branches to leaves, to find the source of his calling? Probably, the answer was as round and as circular as a seed: entire of itself and both to give the birth of a plant and to express the death of a flower, one backward-facing whole containing the promise of multiplication into many.

Sanzo pinched out the glowing end of his cigarette and absently put the butt between two coping stones. Above him, specks of starlight patterned the darkness, a spoonful of white sugar thrown against the sticky surface of the night.

Hold nothing then. Hold nothing so that your hands are free to catch the seed of heaven and to sow it where the harvest is wanted.

With this thought on the point of bursting like a bubble in his consciousness, the 31st of China, Genjyo Sanzo, closed his eyes and gave himself up to prayer.

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