"Kim Stanley Robinson - The Years Of Rice And Salt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

Tripitaka:Monkey, how far is it to the Western Heaven, the abode of Buddha?

Wukong: Youcan walk from the time of your youth till the time you grow old, and after that, till you
become young again; and even after going through such a cycle a thousand times, you may still find it
difficult to reach the place where you want to go. But when you perceive, by the resoluteness of your
will, the Buddhanature in all things, and when every one of your thoughts goes back to that fountain in
your memory, that will be the time you arrive at Spirit Mountain.

- The Journey to the West
ONE

Another journey west, Bold and Psin find an empty land;
Temur is displeased, and the chapter has a stormy end.

Monkey never dies. He keeps coming back to help us in times of trouble, just as he helped Tripitaka
through the dangers of the first journey to the west, to bring Buddhism back from India to China.

Now he had taken on the form of a small Mongol named Bold Bardash, horseman in the army of Temur
the Lame. Son of a Tibetan salt trader and a Mongol innkeeper and spirit woman, and thus a traveller
from before the day of his birth, up and down and back and forth, over mountains and rivers, across
deserts and steppes, crisscrossing always the heartland of the world. At the time of our story he was
already old: square face, bent nose, grey plaited hair, four chin whiskers for a beard. He knew this would
be Temur's last campaign, and wondered if it would be his too.

One day, scouting ahead of the army, a small group of them rode out of dark hills at dusk. Bold was
getting skittish at the quiet. Of course it was not truly quiet, forests were always noisy compared to the
steppe; there was a big river ahead, spilling its sounds through the wind in the trees; but something was
missing. Birdsong perhaps, or some other sound Bold could not quite identify. The horses snickered as
the men kneed them on. It did not help that the weather was changing, long mares' tails wisping orange in
the highest part of the sky, wind gusting up, air damp a storm rolling in from the west. Under the big sky
of the steppe it would have been obvious. Here in the forested hills there was less sky to be seen, and the
winds were fluky, but the signs were still there.
They ride by fields that lay rank with unharvested crops. Barley fallen over itself, Apple trees with apples
dry in the branches, Or black on the ground. No cart tracks or hoof prints or footprints In the dust of the
road. Sun sets, The gibbous moon misshapen overhead. Owl dips over field. A sudden gust: How big the
world seems in a wind. Horses are tense, Monkey too.

They came to an empty bridge and crossed it, hooves thwocking the planks. Now they came upon some
wooden buildings with thatched roofs. But no fires, no lantern light. They moved on. More buildings
appeared through the trees, but still no people. The dark land was empty.

Psin urged them on, and more buildings stood on each side of the widening road. They followed a turn
out of the hills onto a plain, and before them lay a black silent city. No lights, no voices; only the wind,
rubbing branches together over sheeting surfaces of the big black flowing river. The city was empty.

Of course we are reborn many times. We fill our bodies like air in bubbles, and when the bubbles pop
we puff away into the bardo, wandering until we are blown into some new life, somewhere back in the
world. This knowledge had often been a comfort to Bold as he stumbled exhausted over battlefields in
the aftermath, the ground littered with broken bodies like empty coats.