So he smiled at their unfounded equanimity, and said, 'But all right, we admit that catastrophe, and the people who live go on. Go on! They knit things together as best they can. So, what Zhu Isao used to say, what my old comrade Kung Jianguo used to say, was that each time a generation pulls itself together, and revolts against the established order of things in an attempt to make them more just, it is doomed to fail in some respects; but it succeeds in others; and in any case it gives something to posterity, even if it be only knowledge of how hard things are. Which makes it retroactively a kind of success. And so people go on.'
A young Aozhani woman, come here like so many others did from all around the world, to study agriculture with the old adepts at the college, said, 'But since we are all reincarnated anyway, is death really such a catastrophe?'
Bao felt himself take a long breath. Like most scientifically educated people, he did not believe in reincarnation. It was clearly just a story, something out of the old religions. But still how to account for his feeling of cosmic solitude, the feeling that he had lost his eternal companions? How to account for that experience at the Gold Gate, holding his granddaughter aloft?
He thought about it for so long that the students began to look at each other. Then he said carefully to the young woman, 'Well, let us try something. Think that there might be no bardo. No heavens or hells, no afterlife at all. No continuation of your consciousness, or even your soul. Imagine all you are is an expression of your body, and when it finally succumbs to some disorder and dies, you are gone for good. Gone utterly.'
The girl and the others stared at him.
He nodded. 'Then indeed you have to think again what reincarnation might mean. For we need it. We all need it. And there might be some, way to reconceptualize it so it still has meaning, even if you admit that the death of the self is real.'
'But how?' the young woman said.
'Well, first, of course, there are the children. We are literally reincarnated in new beings, though they are the mix of two previous beings – two beings who will live on in the twistingladders that detach and recombine, passed on to subsequent generations.'
'But that's not our consciousness.'
'No. But consciousness gets reincarnated another way, when the people of the future remember us, and use our language, and unconsciously model their lives on ours, living out some recombination of our values and habits. We live on in the way future people think and talk. Even if things change so much that only the biological habits are the same, they are real for all that – perhaps more real than consciousness, more rooted in reality. Remember, reincarnation means return to a new body.'
'Some of our atoms may do that literally,' one young man offered.
'Indeed. In the endlessness of eternity, the atoms that were part of our bodies for a time will move on, and be incorporated in other life on this earth, and perhaps on other planets in subsequent galaxies. SO we are diffusely reincarnate through the universe.'
'But that's not our consciousness,' the young woman said stubbornly.
'Not consciousness, nor the self. The ego, the string of thoughts, the flow of consciousness, which no text or image has ever managed to convey – no.'
'But I don't want that to end,' she said.
'No. And yet it does. This is the reality we were born into. We can't change it by desire.'
The young man said, 'The Buddha says we should give up our desires.'
'But that too is a desire!' the young woman exclaimed.
'So we never really give it up,' Bao agreed. 'What the Buddha was suggesting is impossible. Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire, bacteria feel desire. Life is wanting.'
The young students thought it over. There is an age, Bao thought, remembering, there is that time in your life, when you are young and everything seems possible, and you want it all; you are simply bursting with desire. You make love all night because you want things so much.
He said, 'Another way of rescuing the concept of reincarnation is simply to think of the species as the organism. The organism survives, and has a collective consciousness of itself – that's history, or language, or the twistingladder structuring our brains and it doesn't really matter what happens to any one cell of this body. In fact their deaths are neces sary for the body to stay healthy and go on, it's a matter of making room for new cells. And if we think of it that way, then it might increase feelings of solidarity and obligation to others. It makes it clearer that if there is part of the body that is suffering, and if at the same time another part commandeers the mouth and laughs and proclaims that everything is really fine, dancing a jig like the lost Christians as their flesh fell off – then we understand more clearly that this creature species or speciescreature is insane, and cannot face its own sickness unto death. Seen in that sense, more people might understand that the organism must try to keep itself healthy throughout its whole body.'
The young woman was shaking her head. 'But that's not reincarnation either. That's not what it means.'
Bao shrugged, gave up. 'I know. I know what you mean, I think; it seems there should be something that endures of us. And I myself have sometimes felt things. Once, down at Gold Gate…' He shook his head. 'But there is no way to know. Reincarnation is a story we tell; then in the end it's the story itself that is the reincarnation.'
Over time Bao came to understand that teaching too was a kind of reincarnation, in that years passed, and students came and went, new young people all the time, but always the same age, taking the same class; the class under the oak trees, reincarnated. He began to enjoy that aspect of it. He would start the first class by saying, 'Look, here we are again.' They never knew what to make of it; same response, every time.
He learned, among other things, that teaching was the most rigorous form of learning. He learned to learn more from his students than they did from him; like so many other things, it was the reverse of what it seemed to be, and colleges existed to bring together groups of young people to teach some chosen few of their elders the things that they knew about life, that the old teachers had been in danger of forgetting. So Bao loved his students, and studied them assiduously. Most of them, he found, believed in reincarnation; it was what they had been taught at home, even when they hadn't been given explicit religious instruction. It was part of the culture, an idea that kept coming back. So they brought it up, and he talked about it with them, in a conversation reincarnated many times. Over time the students added to his growing internal list of ways reincarnation was true: that you might really come back as another life; that the various periods of one's life were karmic reincarnations; that every morning you reawakened to consciousness newly, and thus are reincarnated every day to a new life.
Bao liked all of these. The last one he tried to live in his daily existence, paying attention to his morning garden as if he had never seen it before, marvelling at the strangeness and beauty of it. In his classes he tried to talk about history newly, thinking things through yet again, not allowing himself to say anything that he had ever said before; this was hard, but interesting. One day in one of the ordinary classrooms (it was winter, and raining), he said, 'What's hardest to catch is daily life. This is what I think rarely gets written down, or even remembered by those who did it – what you did on the days when you did the ordinary things, how it felt doing it, the small variations time and again, until years have passed. A matter of repetitions, or almost repetitions. Nothing, in other words, that could be easily encoded into the usual forms of emplotment, not dharma or chaos, or even tragedy or comedy. just… habit.'