The five of them knelt before the at the top of the world, and he accounted for each in turn, and the accounting is the book's final judgment on its own characters, delivered by the one being who had read all of them all the way down, and it is precise, and it is fair, and it is not entirely kind, because fairness at this altitude rarely is.
To first, the master, and the Buddha told him what he had not known: that he had not begun as a man at all. He had been, in a former life, the Buddha's own second disciple, the Golden Cicada, who had been careless during a teaching — had let his attention drift while the Buddha preached — and had been cast down into the mortal world to be reborn and to walk his way back up through ten incarnations and one long errand, and that the whole pilgrimage had been the Golden Cicada earning his way home. The beautiful monk had been walking back toward a seat he had fallen from before the world was old, and now he had reached it, and the Buddha named him the Buddha of Sandalwood Merit, and raised him from a disciple to a buddha, restored and elevated, the fall of an age undone by the walk of a lifetime.
Chapters 13–78 are for readers
Chapters 1–12 are free. Unlock the rest of the journey—every chapter now, and every new one as it is written—for a single payment.