Chapter 44 — The Heavenly Book

Therefore Heaven and Earth accord with nature, acting not and making not.

Therefore if things do not all exist together, they are not sufficient to be complete!

...(Note 1)

Bili gave a humph. She had meant to be angry, but on second thought said nothing, and looked up at the wall as well. After only a few lines her head began to swim, and she felt a certain admiration for Zhang Qingyue—that he could actually read his way through such dry stuff.

But when she turned to look at him she was slightly startled: his face was full of pain and bewilderment, his whole body trembling faintly, an indescribable strangeness about him.

In truth, there was perhaps no one in the world whose heart was as stirred as Zhang Qingyue's at that moment. This "Heavenly Book," hailed as the scripture of the Demon Cult, this passage called its general outline, seemed to his eyes like so many knives, piercing straight into the depths of his heart—a shock a hundred times greater even than what he had felt as a child, when the Daoist cultivation methods of the Canglan Sect were revealed to him as utterly opposed to the Buddhist "Great Brahma Prajna" that Puzhao had transmitted to him.

From this passage he was struck to discover that the Daoist and Buddhist methods of cultivation, which he had secretly believed since childhood to be fundamentally different, here seemed faintly to converge upon the same destination by different roads. Even so, startled as he was, he could still have accepted it—but as he read on, his face grew slowly paler, for in this "Heavenly Book," hailed as the scripture of the Demon Cult, he had discovered a great secret.

The many divine powers and strange arts of the Demon Cult were extreme and peculiar, yet at their root lay this: the Heavenly Book stresses mastery of nature's fashioning, the Buddhist gate attends to realizing one's own nature—and within the Heavenly Book, it seemed, all was encompassed: it held Daoist thought, and it touched upon the Buddhist as well.

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

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

What, in the end, was right?

He could not help reading on, his face pale, his heart surging, possessed by a feverish and wondrous hunger of curiosity; dimly he felt that a great secret lay right before his eyes, yet he could never quite grasp it or see it, and all the more it drew him on, rushing toward that goal.

Only, in his heart there was also a measure of fear: 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, seeming utterly to have forgotten that she stood beside him, she felt a surge of unreasonable irritation and gave a cold humph. To her surprise, Zhang Qingyue paid no heed at all—there was no reaction whatsoever.

Bili pressed her lips together, greatly provoked, yet for some reason she simply did not want to raise a hand against this man. She turned and stalked out in resentment, stamping her feet loudly as she went—but alas, the foolish boy still showed no response at all.

Bili stormed out of the stone chamber and back into the stalactite cavern, where she sulked at the skeleton. At first she told herself there was nothing to it, but the more she looked at that boy the less she could bear the sight of him, and the angrier she grew. Then she glanced at the flower in her hand—the once-beautiful "Heartbreak Flower," now black as soot—and at once redirected her wrath at the Blackheart Old Man.

She pointed at the skeleton and cried furiously, "You dead old devil! Eight hundred years dead and still you bring harm—to yourself and to me, ruining my jade flower till it's become... become..."

The words would not come. Bili's fury mounted, and without another word she swept her sleeve; the "Heartbreak Flower" flew out, circled once about the skeleton, and returned. A moment later came a grating sound of splintering bone—crack, crack—and the skeleton collapsed, falling apart in pieces.

Only after striking did Bili's anger ease a little, and she felt some regret, not knowing whence such fury had come. But a glance aside startled her: on the stone wall that the skeleton had been concealing, several lines of characters had all along been there. She hurried over to look closely, and saw four lines written on the wall.

The bell chokes, the 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.