Chapter 44 — The Book of Heaven

Therefore if things do not all exist together, they cannot be complete.

...(Note One)

Bili gave a cold snort. She had meant to be angry, but on second thought said nothing, and turned her eyes to the wall. She had read only a few lines before her head began to swim, and she felt a certain admiration for Zhang Qingyue — that he could actually take in such dry stuff.

But when she turned to look at him, she was somewhat startled: his face was full of pain and bewilderment, and his whole body was trembling faintly — an indescribably strange sight.

In truth, had it been anyone else in the world, he would not have been so stirred as Zhang Qingyue was now. This "Book of Heaven," called the classic of the Demon Sect, this passage called its general outline, seemed to Zhang Qingyue's eyes almost every character a knife, piercing straight into the depths of his heart — a shock a hundred times greater even than what he had felt as a child, when he discovered that the Daoist cultivation methods of Canglan Mountain and the Buddhist "Great Brahma Prajna" that Puzhao had transmitted to him were utterly opposed.

In these words he was astonished to find that the Daoist and Buddhist methods of cultivation, which he had secretly believed since childhood to be fundamentally different, here faintly showed a tendency to converge by different roads to the same end. Even so, startled as he was, he could still accept it. But as he read on, his face grew gradually pale, for in this "Book of Heaven," called the classic of the Demon Sect, he discovered a great secret.

The various divine powers and strange arts of the Demon Sect were extreme and peculiar, yet at their root — the Book of Heaven holds that the body may command nature's fashioning, while the Buddhist gate attends to the realization of self-nature; yet the Book of Heaven seemed to cover every aspect, holding both Daoist thought and Buddhist essentials.

Anyone else — Bili, say — would read these words and think nothing of it, taking them simply for the great divine powers left by their own patriarch. But to Zhang Qingyue, the one man in the world versed in the true methods of both Daoism and Buddhism, the matter was truly terrifying.

A thought such as he had never had wound itself about him and would not let go.

What, in the end, was right?

He could not help reading on, his face pale, his heart in turmoil. With fervor and a strange, hungry curiosity, he vaguely felt that a great secret was right before his eyes, yet ever beyond his grasp, beyond his sight — and all the more did it draw him on, racing toward that goal.

Only, there was some fear in his heart as well. Ought this to be?

Bili watched Zhang Qingyue for a long while. Seeing him still wholly absorbed in the carvings on the wall, his expression strange, seemingly quite forgetful that she stood beside him, she felt a surge of irritation for no reason and gave a cold humph. Zhang Qingyue, however, was deaf to it all and gave no sign.

Bili pressed her lips together, greatly vexed, yet somehow she did not want to raise a hand against this man. She turned and stalked out, stamping her feet loudly as she went — but alas, the foolish boy still showed no reaction at all.

Bili stormed out of the stone chamber and back into the cavern of stalactites, where she nursed her sulks at the skeleton. At first she told herself there was nothing to it, but the more she looked at that fellow the less she could bear him; the more she thought, the angrier she grew. Then she saw the "Heartbreak Flower" at her side, once so lovely, now all black, and at once turned her anger upon the Blackheart Old Man.

Pointing at the skeleton, she cried furiously, "You dead old ghost! Eight hundred years dead and still you harm the living and harm me — you've made my jade flower turn... turn..."

The sentence would not finish. Bili's fury mounted; she said no more, but with a sweep of her sleeve sent the "Heartbreak Flower" flying. It circled once above the skeleton and returned. A moment later came a grating sound of cracking bone — crack, crack — and the skeleton fell apart, scattering in pieces.

Having struck, Bili's anger eased somewhat, and she felt a little regret, not knowing whence such fury had come. But a glance aside startled her: on the stone wall that the skeleton had been concealing there were actually several lines of writing. She hurried over to look closely, and saw four lines written on the wall.

The bell chokes, a hundred flowers wither,

The shadow thins; the temples turn to frost.

Deep feeling brings suffering, and all one's life is suffering;

yet fond infatuation suffers only because it meets with heartlessness.

Note 1: The general purport of this passage draws upon the De Jing, the Diamond Sutra, the Platform Sutra, the "Biography of Ji Zhan" in the Book of Jin, and commentaries on the Tuanzhuan of the Fu Hexagram in the Book of Changes, among other sources.