Bristlecone Buddha
(This story is available in the collection Seven True Lies, which you can buy, either in trade paperback or as an Acrobat download, from my bookstore.)
Up here now, arrived finally, away from the deer and the fire and the competitive crowding of the busy lowlands, arrived: on near enough the roof of the world, to think things over. He has been a while at climbing this mountain, say many millennia, now arrived at last as seed, carried by wind, buried by rain, burrowed now into the cold, damp, soon to be dry again, earth, under crisp, oxygen-poor air. Burrowed and listening to the slow rumble of planet, for the heart of the Earth is audible to his kind. And what he hears is anguish. A tendril now, not much thicker than thought, ruptures the seed wall in search of fertile earth nearly two thousand years before the Siddhartha Gautama, soon to become the Buddha, will be born. Barely five centimeters into hard and rocky earth where the seed now rests, it encounters a small stone, stops, thinks things over, veers left and past it, soon to find another stone, this one a little larger, stops, thinks things over, then veers down, and past it, and down, and down. A second tendril cracks the opposite seed wall and sets out on its long journey into earth, less stony here, yet instinct tells it: down, down, down. Nearly two thousand years go by before eyes open and see, before they see anything else, a cloud in a sky warm with rain to come; veering left then, they stray into a patch of blue, but that too is soon covered by warm cloud: so they veer again, down this time, and down some more, alighting at last on eyes and the smile hovering so close to him, his mother. Little fingers rise into earthy air, weight and moisture, brown and skin, nay golden, and all his. While tendrils have aged now and ripened into root and settled and launched hairs of curious thirst into rocky, sandy earth, and deeper still; while trunk and branch and pine have risen into air to drink its elements, his arms now grow stronger, biceps grow bejeweled, hair grows long and dark. Conscience grows restless and he leaves the palace, if you can call a hut like this a palace, to seek a bodhi tree to reflect beneath. But for his distant self there is no such leaving. Perched now perhaps eight feet from the precipice of the world and young still, there is only hearing. The Buddha soon dies, painlessly, touched only, and not gravely, by the loss of arms and hands. But he is not branchless and not without his sapwood heart, death still distant, beating slower than any other living heart. Two thousand six hundred years later he still stands: alone, on near enough the roof of the world, carved from air, mourning the blind Earth below, death still distant. And what does the Earth sing to him, to his roots, to his patient hearing? It sings the same anguish, only deeper still. He sighs a long bristlecone sigh and draws another long earthy breath. :: Copyright © 2007 by Wolfstuff This story is available in the collection Seven True Lies, which you can buy, either in trade paperback or as an Acrobat download, from my bookstore.
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