Some days before the mass, two scabby monks had appeared in the streets of Chang'an offering a cassock for sale at five thousand taels of silver, plus two thousand for the staff that went with it.
The prices were not haggling prices. They were insult prices, the prices of a beggar mocking commerce, and a rich fool in the crowd treated them accordingly, and got, for his trouble, a public assessment of his character so precise that the crowd remembered it for years. The pair were eventually brought before the emperor, prices and all, because everything unusual in a capital is eventually brought before the emperor.
Taizong asked what made a robe worth five thousand taels.
said the older monk, and here the scabby monk looked around the court, unhurried,
And if the wearer is worthy?
The court absorbed the pricing model. The emperor said that as it happened he had a chief priest of perfect conduct presiding over the Grand Mass, and the monk said that as it happened this was exactly the sort of customer the garment had in mind, and handed over, for nothing, an object that glowed.
The text spends a page on the cassock and the page is deserved: a thing of woven ice-silk and pearl, that shone in sunlight and shone worse in the dark. Xuanzang put it on, took the nine-ringed staff, and walked through Chang'an to the mass, and the whole city turned out, and the crowd's verdict was unanimous: a living arhat, a golden cicada, a Buddha's son walking. He thanked them and kept his eyes down. This is his gift, and the book will spend eighty chapters pricing it: he looks like the holiest thing anyone has ever seen, and every demon between here and India is going to draw the same conclusion the crowd drew, with different intentions.
The Interruption
On the thirty-fifth day of the mass, the older of the scabby monks pushed to the platform and asked her question — whether the Little Vehicle he was preaching could actually carry the dead — and Xuanzang did something that told everyone watching exactly who he was.
He came down off the platform.
Off the imperial platform, in front of the emperor, mid-rite. He came down and bowed to a scabby beggar-monk and said:
Teacher, forgive your disciple. I know only the Little Vehicle. If there is more, I have not been taught it.
she said, kindly enough, to the empire's chief priest, in front of the empire.
The emperor, to his considerable credit, did not have her arrested. He asked her to teach the Great Vehicle here and now, and in answer the two scabby monks stepped into the air.
The rags went. Guanyin stood on the clouds over Chang'an in her own form, willow and vase, with her disciple beside her, and the whole city went down on its knees, emperor first; and the court painter Wu Daozi — the text names him, a real man, you can look at his lines today — was ordered on the spot to sketch what everyone was seeing, and did, which is why she looks the way she looks in ten thousand temples.
She left no instructions. She left an itinerary: the scriptures exist; they are West; they are far. Then the sky closed.
The Volunteer
Taizong turned to the assembly, and asked the question she had left lying on the ground: who will go to the Western Heaven and fetch them?
Understand what was being asked. Not a mission with an army, not an embassy with gold and papers. One traveller, on foot, out past the edge of the maps, through territory that this very book has just spent four chapters populating with things that eat people, for a distance the reader already knows by heart: one hundred and eight thousand li — the exact length, though nobody present knew it, of one somersault of a caged monkey.
The hall was full of the holiest men in the empire, and it was extremely quiet.
Then Xuanzang came down the platform a second time and bowed to the throne.
Your poor monk has no talents, he said, but he will go, and do his dog's and horse's best, and bring the scriptures back, and pray the emperor's empire secure.
Taizong lifted him up with his own hands. And then he did the thing emperors do when they are genuinely moved, which is to give away something that costs them nothing and means everything: he took Xuanzang as his sworn brother, there in front of the mass — a monk from nowhere, brother to the Son of Heaven — and the title he set on him was the name of the cargo: Tripitaka. Three Baskets. He would be called by the freight he was sent for, the way a ship is.
Before the western gate, days later, with the horse loaded and two attendants waiting, the emperor poured the parting wine, and then stooped, took a pinch of dust from the road, and flicked it into the cup.
Drink, he said. And remember: a pinch of your own country's dust is worth more than ten thousand taels of another land's gold.
drank the dust. Then this mild man, who had never in the record raised his voice, made the only oath of his life, and made it like a man signing without reading, because his mind was already on the road:
If I do not reach the Western Heaven, if I do not obtain the scriptures, may I not return to this land, and may I fall into eternal perdition.
has just made its largest bet.
The stake is his soul. The collateral is his soul.
He mounts, and does not look back, because looking back is in the penalty clause.
He rode out of the western gate with two servants and a thin horse, in the direction of everything this book contains.