The Golden Takin

When Han-shan returned to this world, the first thing that he recalled was that today was water day. That was why he was lying on the ground halfway down the mountain with his water barrel beside him.

On water day, it usually took Han-shan most of the morning, after his dawn devotions, to scramble down from the hermitage to the spring with his small barrel – sometimes lugging it, sometimes chasing it as it careened out of control, sometimes hunting for it in a bamboo grove into which it had cannoned.

The return journey was considerably more strenuous – scrabbling over rough terrain, practically vertical in places, pushing or carrying, grappling the heavy container in incremental steps uphill. The effort left him quaking with exhaustion but he needed water and his little stone hermitage was not near a water source.

Han-shan had been just beginning his laboured ascent. The rising Sun painted the landscape. He paused. All was silent and still, the matutinal calm draped softly over everything. The dew shone like jewels on the bamboo.

A range of animals shared the mountain with him, unafraid of his quiet presence among them. Sometimes herds of golden takin would move with surprising silence around his hermitage. They were large and muscular goat-antelopes with shaggy coats of long fine golden hair and with long smiling faces topped with a crown of horns. It made him smile to see them.

Through the bamboo, Han-shan saw a single takin cross a rocky space above him. Its golden coat shone, its neat hoofs clicked on the rocks. At its side was its tiny child – a calf, tiny and dark brown, as takin children are, like a little wooly sheep by its dam’s side.

The takin paused and turned its patrician nose down to touch the calf with the infinite tenderness of bovine motherhood.

It was at that instant that Han-shan fell.

The Sun, the pelage of the takin, transformed into an overwhelming light, a tunnel of fire, light calling to light, expansion, speed, and space, space, it was not Earth it was a high place and it was beautiful, everythingness, totality, the absolute, nothingness, void, only the observer, doing nothing but everything was done, eternity’s child in the garden of infinity.

And then – silence, the takin moved on, the fallen barrel.

Han-shan righted the barrel and heaved it a little further up the slope.

The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on:
The long gorge choked with scree and boulders,
The wide creek, the mist blurred grass.
The moss is slippery, though there’s been no rain
The pine sings, but there’s no wind.
Who can leap the world’s ties
And sit with me among the white clouds?

Dhiraja