“Everything comes up in illusion,” Master Illusionless said solemnly, “and interpretation evokes illusions too, all of which make up our world.”
“So we are looking for the ox while we are riding on its very back,” Chen said, paraphrasing a Zen paradox he still remembered.
“You have something of a Buddha root, Chen. Try your hand here.” Master Illusionless nodded his approval and turned to a small monk. “Bring over a kasaya for him.”
The little monk returned and handed the kasaya to Chen with a bow. Master Illusionless said, “You may don the gown. I hope you won’t let me lose face.”
“No face is face, and face is no face.” Chen was getting warmed up with the practice of paradox. The kasaya was a patchwork gown worn by a Buddhist monk of enlightenment, which carried a halo of authenticity. And it really helped. Buddha needs his costume, and so did a monk or a would-be monk. Wrapped in the kasaya, Chen, too, felt like someone of sacred erudition. With so much unknowable in the world, a divine interpretation might be as good as any other help to a person. The chief inspector could use one himself.
But Chen did not have much time for metaphysical speculation. Pilgrims came over to the table, and he started practicing. It turned out to be not too difficult. In his college years, he had made a special study of Empson’s book on ambiguities, learning how to give different interpretations to one poem. In the temple, he saw no difference except for making his own interpretation as convincing as possible. Master Illusionless kept nodding beside him.
Presently he saw an old woman in a satin dress shuffling into the hall. Following her was a short man wearing a gray wool suit, sporting a crew cut, beady eyes, and a nose like crushed garlic. He was followed in turn by a tall man in a dark martial costume. Chen recognized the short man as Xing, and the tall one, possibly the triad bodyguard he had seen in Roland Height.
After kowtowing to the Buddha image with the incense in her hand, the old woman moved toward the table, leaning on a dragon-headed bamboo stick. She appeared to know Master Illusionless well.
“Is there another master reading with you today, Master Illusionless?”
“Yes, madam. This is Master Chen, a man of profound learning. I told him what a great benefactor you have been to the temple, so he came all the way to help. He may relieve the unnecessary worries of your mind.”
“That would be great. I am worried about so many things.”
Chen noticed Xing standing at a respectful distance, showing no impatience or curiosity, and the tall man standing with arms crossed and a fierce expression on his face, barring others to move close to the table.
“Can we try something different today, Master?”
“What do you mean, madam?”
“Instead of the bamboo strip divination you’ve performed, can you practice the reading of a Chinese character for me?”
“Well…” The master sounded hesitant. It was another form of divination through analyzing the component parts of a Chinese character. A sort of glyphomancy, even less Buddhist in its possible origin. Master Illusionless might have not practiced it.
“Sure, I’ll read it for you,” Chen responded with an air of utter confidence. “When Chuangjie first created the system of Chinese written characters, every archetypal stroke of a character came out of the cosmos in miraculous correspondence to the omnipresent qi, and that in turn, in correspondence to the microcosmos of an individual human being. So that’s called tianren heyi-heaven and human in one. For a virtuous woman like you, whatever character you may write in a moment of faith, there will be elements recognizable from the mysterious correspondence.”
It was too fabulous an opportunity to miss, Chen thought excitedly.
He had never learned the technique properly, but he had seen its practice in Fifteen Strings of Coppers, the Beijing opera seen at his mother’s side. In the opera, a disguised judge tricked a confession out of a criminal by performing the character divination. A Chinese character has multifarious meanings in itself, as well as in its combination with other characters. And a character can also be broken down into radicals or component parts. So the possible interpretations were unlimited. What’s more, a written character reading would involve a lot of interactivity. He could try to interpret in a way that she was going to believe and respond to, and if at all possible, he would get her to reveal some information in the process.
“Really, Master Chen!” she said. “I have never heard of such a profound theory before.”
No one had ever heard of it before. It was a hodgepodge of the moment, invented to impress. He had scrambled together all he had heard and read into this improvised mumbo jumbo, since few knew anything about the theory of the practice. Still, he told himself, he based most of it upon classics rather than superstitions.
“Everything comes out of your heart, madam.” He lit a stick of incense, closed his eyes, and breathed deeply, as if in meditation. “Write a character on the paper, and I’ll tell from it.”
As the monk ground the ink stick on the ink stone, the old woman picked up a brush pen, took a deep breath, and wrote the character xing on the paper.
“Xing…” Chen studied the character in deep concentration, as if lost in communication with it. “Is it about yourself?”
“No, not about myself.”
“I see. For this character, xing by itself means travel or movement. Some trip must be involved, pleasant or not pleasant.”
“You are absolutely right, Master Chen,” she said eagerly. “Can you tell me if it will be a smooth trip?”
The question was made in the future tense, and his performance proved to be smoother than expected. She swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. His comment about travel was but a guess, though it would not have been too off the mark, with Xing’s flight out of China not too long ago. But apparently it hit home. The old woman’s response showed that she was concerned about a future trip. Since Xing was standing right there, she must be worried about somebody else, about Ming, her son left behind. That meant An’s assumption was correct-Ming was still in Shanghai.
“Let’s move further. Judging from the left radical of the character, double person radical, it involves two. The right part of the character is unusual. For the top section, the horizontal stroke is yi, meaning one, and for the bottom section, it makes a partial character ding, meaning a boy. So you may be worried about your sons, or at least one of them.”
“Master Chen, you are divine. Now you have to tell what will happen to my sons.”
“Let me be frank with you, Madam. Ding with a horizontal stroke weighing above does not look so good, for ding may be associated with death or other tragedies, as in dingyou.. .”
Now he was stretching it way out of proportion, especially the connotations of ding. But the practice was not without its ironic precedent, he realized. Ezra Pound, an imagist poet, had played the same trick by deconstructing a Chinese character into component ideograms-except that Pound had done so for poetry.