laughed and stood up.
“It seems I have no choice but to go through the motions,” he said. “I assume I'm supposed to make sure that my abominable ancestor is safely tucked in, with the famous Master Li as witness?”
“That's all for now,” Master Li said.
The prince took a key from a cabinet and led the way outside and through a gate and down a winding path toward the face of a cliff. As we came closer I saw an iron door set in the rock, almost covered by tall weeds and thistles. The door was old but the lock was new, and the prince's fingers were trembling as he inserted the key.
“Nightmares of childhood,” he said wryly. “You see, the Laughing Prince's successor decided to keep the famous grotto precisely as he found it, and place the family tablets inside. Every succeeding prince has been forced to pray and sacrifice inside a monument to the abuse of power. Makes it rather difficult for us to pull wings off butterflies, if our instincts run to that kind of thing.”
I expected blackness, but there were fissures in the stone that let in a greenish-yellow light. The famous
Medical
Research
Center
should, I think, be part of the early education of emperors. It is hard to forget.
A long row of iron racks against one wall held the essential instruments for scientific research, such as thumbscrews and iron whips and testicle crushers and pinchers and various things for slicing and gouging. Ancient operating tables still stood in the center of the floor, and gutters beneath them ran to stone troughs for the blood. Grim-looking machines whose purpose I didn't understand lined another wall, and a third wall was lined with something I did understand: iron cages where peasants were held. They allowed the peasants a good view of what was happening to members of their families. The worst thing was the back wall.
It was naturally smooth stone, almost like a huge board of slate, and it was covered with annotated experiments, drawn with painstaking accuracy. Mysterious mathematical formulas and ancient script alternated as annotations, and Master Li was quite puzzled as he translated the script for my benefit.
“True path of the stone . . . False path of the stone . . . Stone strongest here . . . Total failure of stone . . . Stone branches three ways . . . No reaction from stone . . .”
It made no sense at all, nor did the jumble of arrows pointing to various gruesome aspects of the experiments.
“What on earth did he mean by all these references to a stone?” Master Li asked.
“Nobody knows, but his obsession appears to have been overpowering,” the prince said.
He took a torch from a bracket and lit it, and led the way toward a shadowed corner. There I saw the family tablets, and I shuddered to think of small boys being led in here to pray, with grim lectures about the curse the family carried. The tablets were lined up in front of an ancient sacristy, which was empty. On the wall above it an inscription had been chiseled, and again Master Li translated for my benefit.
In darkness languishes the precious stone.
When will its excellence enchant the world?
When seeming is taken for being, being becomes seeming.
When nothing is taken for something, something becomes nothing.
The stone dispels seeming and nothing,
And climbs to the Gates of the Great Void.
The prince smiled at my bewilderment. “I agree,” he said. “It has the same quality of apparently leading somewhere and then disappearing that distinguishes the very finest Taoist mumbo jumbo.”
Master Li scratched his head. “Lao Tzu?” he wondered. “His third step toward Heaven was to hear the sound of stone growing in a cliff, but he didn't climb to the Gates of the Great Void on the screams of his victims.” He winked at me. “He rode an ox,” he said.
In the shadows of the alcove was a darker shadow that resolved itself into a narrow tunnel as the prince again led the way with the torch. At
“It seems I have no choice but to go through the motions,” he said. “I assume I'm supposed to make sure that my abominable ancestor is safely tucked in, with the famous Master Li as witness?”
“That's all for now,” Master Li said.
The prince took a key from a cabinet and led the way outside and through a gate and down a winding path toward the face of a cliff. As we came closer I saw an iron door set in the rock, almost covered by tall weeds and thistles. The door was old but the lock was new, and the prince's fingers were trembling as he inserted the key.
“Nightmares of childhood,” he said wryly. “You see, the Laughing Prince's successor decided to keep the famous grotto precisely as he found it, and place the family tablets inside. Every succeeding prince has been forced to pray and sacrifice inside a monument to the abuse of power. Makes it rather difficult for us to pull wings off butterflies, if our instincts run to that kind of thing.”
I expected blackness, but there were fissures in the stone that let in a greenish-yellow light. The famous
Medical
Research
Center
should, I think, be part of the early education of emperors. It is hard to forget.
A long row of iron racks against one wall held the essential instruments for scientific research, such as thumbscrews and iron whips and testicle crushers and pinchers and various things for slicing and gouging. Ancient operating tables still stood in the center of the floor, and gutters beneath them ran to stone troughs for the blood. Grim-looking machines whose purpose I didn't understand lined another wall, and a third wall was lined with something I did understand: iron cages where peasants were held. They allowed the peasants a good view of what was happening to members of their families. The worst thing was the back wall.
It was naturally smooth stone, almost like a huge board of slate, and it was covered with annotated experiments, drawn with painstaking accuracy. Mysterious mathematical formulas and ancient script alternated as annotations, and Master Li was quite puzzled as he translated the script for my benefit.
“True path of the stone . . . False path of the stone . . . Stone strongest here . . . Total failure of stone . . . Stone branches three ways . . . No reaction from stone . . .”
It made no sense at all, nor did the jumble of arrows pointing to various gruesome aspects of the experiments.
“What on earth did he mean by all these references to a stone?” Master Li asked.
“Nobody knows, but his obsession appears to have been overpowering,” the prince said.
He took a torch from a bracket and lit it, and led the way toward a shadowed corner. There I saw the family tablets, and I shuddered to think of small boys being led in here to pray, with grim lectures about the curse the family carried. The tablets were lined up in front of an ancient sacristy, which was empty. On the wall above it an inscription had been chiseled, and again Master Li translated for my benefit.
In darkness languishes the precious stone.
When will its excellence enchant the world?
When seeming is taken for being, being becomes seeming.
When nothing is taken for something, something becomes nothing.
The stone dispels seeming and nothing,
And climbs to the Gates of the Great Void.
The prince smiled at my bewilderment. “I agree,” he said. “It has the same quality of apparently leading somewhere and then disappearing that distinguishes the very finest Taoist mumbo jumbo.”
Master Li scratched his head. “Lao Tzu?” he wondered. “His third step toward Heaven was to hear the sound of stone growing in a cliff, but he didn't climb to the Gates of the Great Void on the screams of his victims.” He winked at me. “He rode an ox,” he said.
In the shadows of the alcove was a darker shadow that resolved itself into a narrow tunnel as the prince again led the way with the torch. At
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