Читать книгу Dukkha the Suffering - Loren W. Christensen - Страница 5

PROLOGUE

Old Gravedigger Quang had never seen anything quite so extraordinary in all his seventy-five years living in Saigon, now Hồ Chí Minh City, and he had seen some strange occurrences working in the graveyard for the past forty years, unworldly sights that made his body shiver and his heart pound. He would never tell anyone about those things and he certainly would never tell anyone about what he saw this afternoon, especially his drinking buddies, the other old soldiers at the noodle stand where they drank themselves to oblivion each night. No, they would just laugh and say that his war memories had finally driven him điên cái đầu.

Yes, the war did make him a little crazy; no one could experience those years of horror and not be. In the gravedigger’s mind, a little crazy was a good thing. It gave him courage to face the Việt cộng every night in his dreams and defy the ghosts that visited him in the graveyard. Yes, his head might not be right but he knows that what he saw today was real, and it nearly stopped his old heart.

Over the years, Old Gravedigger Quang had watched the Chinese master, Shen Lang Rui, a white-goateed man in his late seventies, whenever he came to teach his student, the one named Le.

The gravedigger had his doubts that that was really the man’s name, one so common to his people. There were villagers who thought he might be Vietnamese with Caucasian features, or perhaps half Vietnamese, half French. He looked American to the gravedigger who fought alongside them so many years ago. Still, the man’s mannerisms and his demeanor were Vietnamese, and his mastery of the language was flawless.

The gravedigger guessed that Shen Lang Rui and Le had been master and student for at least twenty years, which is how long they had been training their kung fu in his graveyard, over at the north end where there is cool shade beneath the fruit trees. He never tired of watching the two, their fluidity, their power, and especially their unbelievable speed.

As a boy, Old Gravedigger Quang had trained in the martial art style of Vovinam with a master whose prowess was renowned. As skilled as his teacher was, it paled in comparison to Shen Lang Rui and the man named Le.

The two did not mind that he watched; they would often smile at him and wave a greeting. The master moved slowly when he demonstrated movements to Le, but the few times the old man did move fast, the gravedigger could hardly catch his breath. Le’s skill was amazing, too, and though it was not yet at the level of the master, it was clear that it would be soon.

As often as the two men had dazzled the old gravedigger, what he saw today was beyond his comprehension. It sent him straight to the roadside noodle stand earlier than usual to buy his first of many cups of rice wine.

His nightly routine was to drink until the decades-old sounds of the bombs and the screams of men muffled in his skull. Then he would struggle to his feet and stagger home. Not tonight, though. Tonight he would drink until he became unconscious and fell off his stool. Tomorrow? He might not go to the graveyard to dig tomorrow, or the next day, either.

The incredible thing he witnessed happened late this afternoon. If he did tell anyone, they would argue that shadows and the late sun streaking through the trees played tricks on his eyes. They would be wrong. There was no question about what he saw, a sight more soul shaking than those incoming Communist rockets so many years ago. He could explain the rockets; what he saw today, he could not.

Shen Lang Rui and Le had been meeting under the trees all week. This afternoon, it appeared that the master, in accented Vietnamese, was pushing Le to move faster and faster. To Old Gravedigger Quang, Le was moving extraordinarily fast already. His quick hands would snap out and back like the crack of a whip; still the old master looked dissatisfied.

From fifteen meters away, the gravedigger could only hear bits and pieces of their conversation, words like, “too slow,” “engage your thoughts,” and something about “the fourth level,” whatever that meant.

Then Shen Lang Rui walked over to an old urn, a black and crudely ornate piece of no religious significance that sat beside what was left of a broken down cinderblock wall that used to border this part of the graveyard. A communist rocket destroyed a big section of it early in the war and, because the adjacent property had been purchased to accommodate the growing number of war dead, it was left to crumble into the ground with the passing years. About a year ago, Old Gravedigger Quang and two other much larger men chipped the decaying mortar away from under the urn’s base and nearly broke their backs lowering the thing to the ground.

Weathered and coated with three decades of grime, the urn stood about one-meter high, the bowl about a meter across and deep enough to hold ten liters of rainwater, or so. It was full today because it had rained for the last several nights.

Shen Lang Rui positioned himself slightly behind the urn, close enough to touch the water. At first, Old Gravedigger Quang thought the master was going to plunge his fist into it, an exercise he himself had done as a boy during his Vovinam lessons. He and the other students would punch to the bottom of a barrel and then retract their fist as fast as they could. The smaller the splatter, the better the technique. Given what he had seen of the Chinese master’s great speed and purity of movement, the gravedigger guessed that the water disturbance would be minimal.

Shen Lang Rui stood motionless over the urn, his palms pressed together under his chin as if in prayer to the Buddha. There was something odd about how he stood so very still. It was as if the old man were a photograph. Yes, that was it: as if the master and everything in his immediate aura were a photograph.

Le stood two strides off to the side, his hands clasped in front of him, his expression one of deep respect for his teacher. The way he stood motionless was not the same as Shen Lang Rui. Le’s hair moved in the afternoon breeze, as did his loose, white shirt, the tree leaves above him, and the long weeds at his feet.

Just as the gravedigger was thinking that all of this was more than strange, just as he was wondering how the master would thrust his fists into the bowl given his odd position, the water exploded upward out of the urn like a geyser. His first startled thought was that someone had thrown something into it, such as one of the many broken bricks that lay scattered about. No, he had been watching; there was no brick.

The splash shot up nearly as high as the master’s face, not once, but twice. The second time it erupted, which followed the first in about the time it would take to blink three times, the heavy urn cracked loud enough that Old Gravedigger Quang heard it from way over where he had just dropped his shovel. Then it shattered, all of it, spraying pieces of pottery and rainwater over the ground.

Old Gravedigger Quang’s heart nearly stopped right then. From where he had watched, it looked as if, and this is hard to fathom, that the force that broke the urn came from… inside of it. How could this be? But, as frightening and confusing as that was to ponder, there was something even more startling. What nearly stopped his heart was not what he saw the master do, but rather what the master did not do.

As God is his witness and as Buddha surely saw with his holy eyes, and what is driving the gravedigger to drink earlier than usual, is this: When that rainwater exploded upward out of the urn, not once, but twice, and the vessel shattered into pieces, Master Shen Lang Rui remained as still as a photograph, his palms ever pressed together.