Poetry Chants, Saber Howls – Chapter 22
by Little PandaA Youth Takes a Master as the Years Deepen; Adrift in Two Places, Each Longs for the Other (Part 3)
Master Jiuru’s late teacher, dharma name Huiguan, was a bhikkhuni of the Buddhist order, a renowned physician of the apricot grove1, and a master of the martial world besides. After years of wandering the jianghu and witnessing every form the world could take, she one day attained a sudden great awakening — and only then did she take the tonsure at Jingyi Nunnery.
Yet the three infant girls she had taken in — the eldest no more than three or four, the youngest newborn by the look of her — she couldn’t decide their lives for them. So she never pressed them to follow her into monastic life. She simply raised them within Jingyi Nunnery, took them as disciples, and poured everything she knew into them without reserve.
Of the three disciples, the one with the greatest gift for medicine was the youngest, Qu Lian. Huiguan favored her most of all; before entering parinirvana2 she not only passed the 《Bodhi Heart Method》 down to her, but specifically charged Duheng and Qin Jiao to look after their junior martial sister.
Over this, Duheng and Qin Jiao felt not a flicker of jealousy.
For no other reason than that Qu Lian deserved such favor. Gentle by nature, considerate toward all, kind and benevolent — no words of praise were wasted on her. If she had a flaw at all, it was that her passion for medicine ran too fierce: she would gladly have spent all twelve double-hours of the day on it, leaving herself no time for the martial arts. And so, despite Huiguan’s formidable skill and the no-less-remarkable prowess of Duheng and Qin Jiao, she had mastered only the barest rudiments.
Yet from childhood she harbored a grand ambition: to walk the length and breadth of the realm and heal all the living souls under heaven. It was fear that the jianghu would one day treat her harshly that made Huiguan leave those instructions with Duheng and Qin Jiao.
When Jiuru reached this point, her voice faltered. She fixed her gaze on the flowering branch in the vase upon the table and fell silent for a long while. Xie Miao’s curiosity swelled until she couldn’t help pressing her, and only then did Jiuru go on:
“After Master passed on, she meant to go out into the world to practice medicine, and since I had resolved to become a physician myself, I naturally went with her. Our second martial sister was a free, loose-spirited sort. She had learned a great deal of Master’s art, but she had never settled on whether to make it her life’s calling — she came along purely because she couldn’t bear to be parted from us, and so she roamed south and north at our sides. In that time we met many patients gravely ill whom Junior Martial Sister’s devoted care restored to health — yet they treated her with anything but gratitude. Some even heaped abuse on her. Junior Martial Sister was mild by nature and could bear it. But Second Martial Sister absolutely couldn’t — what is it you want to say?”
That last question was Jiuru asking Xie Miao. Partway through her account, she had noticed Xie Miao’s lips parting and closing, parting and closing — words that wanted out yet found it awkward to interrupt. And indeed something puzzled Xie Miao deeply: “If Doctor Qu cured their illnesses, shouldn’t they have been grateful to her?”
In all the years of Xie Miao’s illness, the physicians who had attended her were past counting. Not one had ever cured her stubborn affliction, yet whenever one of them eased her suffering even a little, she had always held them in gratitude. She simply couldn’t fathom how the patients Jiuru described could behave so inexplicably.
Jiuru gave a faint smile and didn’t answer the question, only resumed where she had left off. “That half year and more of experience extinguished Second Martial Sister’s every thought of becoming a physician. She urged me and Junior Martial Sister to stop suffering such treatment too. But to heal the dying and mend the wounded was Junior Martial Sister’s lifelong aspiration — not something a few words could shake. So Second Martial Sister, in a burst of anger, took herself off. Before we parted, though, she charged me to go on protecting Junior Martial Sister.”
“And after that…” Xie Miao’s voice was low, unsure whether she ought to ask at all.
“Later, Junior Martial Sister was murdered. At the time I was treating another patient — I wasn’t at her side.” Jiuru’s coldness had returned; her face, like frost, like snow, betrayed not a trace of feeling.
Xie Miao flared. “Who killed her?”
Jiuru had just been praising Qu Lian to the skies, and Xie Miao’s impression of this Doctor Qu, whom she had never met, was naturally a fond one. To hear that she had indeed been killed — how could she remain unmoved, unangered? But the moment anger rose, her chest seized with pang after pang, and she bowed her head, expression strained.
“Her patient,” Jiuru said evenly.
“What?” All of Xie Miao’s indignation turned to shock in an instant. “Why?”
Jiuru said nothing. She turned her head away and was silent a long time, as if unwilling to revisit how the whole affair had unfolded.
Xie Miao knew her heart was aching at this moment and dared not press her to recount the past in detail. She thought for a while, then ventured, with the greatest care, a guess: “Was it because… his illness was never—”
“No. His illness had, by and large, been cured.”
Xie Miao’s bewilderment only deepened. She frowned. “Then why would the man be so unreasonable?”
“There are many things in this world that were never governed by reason to begin with.”
Jiuru said it as evenly as ever, yet it was a pebble dropped into the lake of Xie Miao’s heart. Ripples spread at once; a blankness crossed her face, and she sat dazed a long moment. Then her body began to ache worse than before, and again, unbidden, she clutched her chest, gasping for breath. Jiuru took up silver needles at once and pierced seven vital acupoints, then handed her the book held in her left hand.
Xie Miao took the book, puzzled. Embroidered on its cover, in seal script3, were four characters: “Bodhi Heart Method.”
“Is this… a martial arts secret manual?”
“What it contains is indeed an internal cultivation heart method,” Jiuru said with a nod. “But it differs from other internal arts. Beyond refining one’s internal cultivation, its greatest virtue is that it extends the years of one’s life and purges illness and poison. If you master it, your affliction may be eased and your lifespan lengthened. But…”
Xie Miao was still very young, and Jiuru had feared she couldn’t withstand the blow; in all these days she had never told her that her illness could no longer be cured. But Xie Miao knew her own body, and vague suspicions had long since taken shape in her. And now, recalling the exchange she had just witnessed between Jiuru and Qin Jiao, watching Jiuru hesitate over her words, she lowered her eyes, mastered every fear, and kept her face seemingly calm and composed — only her voice carried a tremor almost too faint to hear:
“But my lifespan can only be extended a few years at most, can’t it? The truth is… the truth is I was never going to live past my jiji4 in the first place. I’ve known for a long time. I… I’m not afraid…”
“That’s right. You were never meant to live past your jiji. But if you cultivate the Bodhi Heart Method, then barring accidents you will live to at least past twenty. And if you wish to add still more years to that, it isn’t beyond possibility.”
Xie Miao’s head came up quickly, hope shining in her eyes as she looked at Jiuru.
Her claim of fearlessness had been words of comfort for Jiuru alone. In truth, then and now — even after hearing Shan Lan’s understanding of life and death — Xie Miao had never once been able to accept her own dying.
“First: keep your daily routine and diet in strict order, supported by medicinal regulation. You said before that you wished to take me as your master and learn medicine and the art of poisons from me. That I can promise. Once you have learned them, you will be able to tend your own body yourself.” Jiuru’s voice was crisp. She paused a moment, then went on, weighing every word:
“Second: from this day forward, no matter what happens around you, no matter what you live through, you must keep a mind like still water, unmoved by the eight winds. You may not let the world’s affairs stir your joy or your anger so easily again.”
The first wasn’t so hard. But the second, for a child as soft of heart as Xie Miao, so quick to feel others’ pain as her own… Jiuru couldn’t hold back a faint sigh. Sure enough, Xie Miao found this “second” deeply puzzling. She turned it over for a long while before saying softly:
“So I’m never allowed to be happy, and never allowed to be angry?”
But every human emotion — joy, anger, sorrow, delight — springs from the heart, and of all things in this world the heart is the hardest to govern. Xie Miao shook her head without thinking. That was simply impossible.
“At the least, no great grief, no great joy, no great rage,” Jiuru said gravely. “If you want to live, you must achieve it.”
The words struck Xie Miao another heavy blow. Do I want to live…? she answered without a sound. Of course I want to live.
Jiuru continued: “This Bodhi Heart Method, so the legend goes, was written several hundred years ago by an extraordinary figure of the martial world. Cultivated to the first tier, it can heal only minor ailments; the further one advances, the greater the benefits to the body. Should one reach the ninth and highest tier, any incurable illness would be cured on the spot, and one would be granted a natural span of a hundred years. It’s true that in all these centuries no one has ever truly reached the ninth tier — but legends don’t rise from empty air. You must govern your emotions all the same. Every extra year you live is another year of hope for reaching that ninth tier.”
That last sentence, in truth, Jiuru herself didn’t believe.
It was comfort, and nothing more, offered to Xie Miao.
Xie Miao had known too many disappointments; this so-called legend struck her as flowers in a mirror, moon in water — beautiful, untouchable, adrift in mist. Yet never before had she heard Jiuru speak so many words to her. She blinked, startled, and in that instant felt Jiuru’s care for her — felt it, for the first time — and so, unwilling to make her worry, she considered a brief moment, then gave a solemn nod.
Jiuru took Xie Miao’s hand. “Come. Once we are back at the valley, I will teach you how this heart method is to be cultivated.”
“I…” Xie Miao rose slowly, but her feet didn’t move. She hesitated. “There is one more thing I wish to ask you…”
“What is it?”
“The man who killed Doctor Qu — was he ever brought to justice?”
“And you’re still concerning yourself with others?”
Xie Miao was struck speechless.
Jiuru sighed. “By the time I discovered Junior Martial Sister’s body, the killer had already fled. When Second Martial Sister learned of it, she pursued him a thousand li and killed him — vengeance for Junior Martial Sister.”
At those last words, Xie Miao nodded. She had no love of killing, but a great villain who repaid kindness with enmity, she felt, had to be punished. Yet in the very next breath, Jiuru continued: “But besides the killer himself, the several common folk who stood there that day, who watched with their own eyes as Junior Martial Sister was harmed and did not step forward to help — they too died beneath Second Martial Sister’s blade.”
Xie Miao went utterly still. For a long time she couldn’t speak.
She didn’t know how to judge such a thing. In the end she could only hesitate, turn the subject aside, and ask after something else that had a curious hold on her: “And you took the tonsure because of…”
“What I promised Master and Second Martial Sister, I failed to do,” Jiuru said. “For this life, there’s only cultivation to atone.”
It wasn’t an unexpected answer, yet hearing it, Xie Miao’s heart surged and sank once more.
Qu Lian’s death had plainly remade the whole of Duheng’s and Qin Jiao’s lives.
To see this all at once was like being enfolded in a sorrow fine and boundless as drifting rain. Xie Miao struggled to press down the emotions welling up inside her, but she couldn’t help grieving for Jiuru — and, unbidden, her thoughts turned to her father and mother, her brothers, and her many friends, Fuli among them.
If she was fated to die young, and they would grieve so terribly — then in the years to come… should she even let them know news of her?
Footnotes
- 杏林 | Xinglin | Literally 'apricot grove'; from the legend of the third-century physician Dong Feng, who asked cured patients to plant apricot trees instead of paying fees until a grove grew. 'Apricot grove' remains a classical byword for the medical profession.
- 圆寂 | Yuanji | Literally 'perfect quiescence'; the Chinese Buddhist term for the death of an ordained monastic, signifying final release from the cycle of rebirth rather than an ordinary demise.
- 篆字 | Zhuanzi | Seal script, the oldest surviving style of Chinese writing, named for its use on carved seals; its archaic, sinuous strokes lend book covers and inscriptions an air of antiquity.
- 及笄 | Jiji | Literally 'reaching the hairpin'; the classical coming-of-age for girls at fifteen, when a girl's long hair was first gathered and fastened with a hairpin, marking her entrance into adulthood.
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