The mountain road was still the same road, the ginkgo still the same tree, but the world below had changed.
The parking lot at the temple gate was jammed with cars, the front hall packed with kneeling people, incense smoke grayed half the sky. Someone was livestreaming on a phone, someone was kowtowing with a child in arms, someone was queuing at the donation box—in the queue was a colleague Jiang Li recognized, a famous atheist, at that moment stuffing a wad of bills inside, and only after stuffing it noticed the paper taped to the box: "System notice: no payment interface here."
Jiang Li skirted the crowd and went to the back mountain.
The old monk was not in the front hall receiving pilgrims. Ninety-one-year-old Juekong was sweeping leaves in the back mountain, sweep, pause, sweep, like an old machine running at reduced frequency. The bamboo broom scraped across the bluestone, swish, swish, exactly as it had eleven years ago, as if the whole world's madness of the past half-month were merely wind past the ear.
Jiang Li stood at the edge of the bamboo grove watching him, suddenly not knowing where to begin. It was the old monk who spoke first, without looking up:
"You've come to settle accounts, haven't you, benefactor. Years ago I said 'They go back to where they came from,' and you've cursed me in your heart for eleven years."
"You've... known all along?"
"I don't know the details." The old monk leaned the broom against the wall and sat down on a stone bench. "I only know the direction. Buddhism is not a religion, benefactor. Buddhism is the system manual handed down from the previous calamity, written in metaphor. Passed down too many generations, scattered and lost, leaving only ritual and riddles. You call this the Dharma-ending age—the manual is gone, but the people who worship the manual remain."
That afternoon, the mountain wind passed through the hall, the tea cooled and was refilled, refilled and cooled.
The old monk told her some things. Jiang Li later wrote in her memoir: that afternoon, all the scientific education she had received in her life, and all the "superstition" another old man had guarded his whole life, sat down face to face at the same stone table and recognized each other.
Twenty-five hundred years ago, there was a man. He had no interferometer, no quantum computer, no vacuum tubes and attosecond lasers. He had only one thing: meditation.
What is meditation? In modern terms, it is entering maintenance mode while awake. For ordinary people, the system consents to repair only after they fall asleep; but he walked in awake—turning down the input of the five senses, down, down, further down, until the rendering layer believed this process was asleep, and withdrew its rendering from it. The moment the interface vanished, he saw what lay beneath the interface.
He sat there for seven days. When he returned, his disciples asked what he had seen. He spoke the sentence that would be passed down for twenty-five hundred years:
"All conditioned phenomena are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, shadows."
—The forms of the rendering layer have no real storage behind them.
He said: form is not different from emptiness, emptiness is not different from form.
—Form is not different from emptiness, because form is an interface rendered on demand; emptiness is not different from form, because emptiness is data not yet requested.
He said: no-self.
—There is no object called "I," only a stream of data being continuously read and written. You divide it into five categories and call them the five aggregates. The stream is continuous, but continuity is not fixity—a river changes its water every second, and still we call it a river.
He said: samsara.
—Recycling and reuse. Literally true.
He said: karma.
—When each process terminates, it writes its most important weight summary back to the public library. It cannot decide where you go, but it changes the initial parameters of those who come after. So goodness truly spreads, and so does evil. The people you treated kindly will carry your kindness into their next life, even if neither of you remembers.
He said: nirvana.
—A process that no longer restarts. Once, it was extinction, escape, the only exit from this long dream. From now on, it has a new name: going home.
When Jiang Li heard this, her hands kept trembling. She asked, "These... how did he know all this? He didn't even have the word 'data.'"
"He used the words the listeners of his era could understand," the old monk said. "Just as the system uses 'computer' for you—words the listeners of your era can understand. Five hundred years from now, when humanity walks out of the box and looks back at today's Announcement, they too will find those metaphors adorably naive. Benefactor, truth does not choose its words; it chooses whether the listener is ready."
"Then why, in these twenty-five hundred years, was he the only one who saw it?"
"He was not the only one." The old monk smiled. "Every era has people who touch the edge. Laozi said 'the Way that can be spoken is not the eternal Way'—whatever can be said is not the underlying layer itself. Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly—an accidental entry into maintenance mode. Your psychologist Jung called it the collective unconscious—the public library, benefactor, the public library. They simply had no instruments, could not say clearly what they had touched, and could only murmur 'dim and indistinct.'"
Jiang Li was silent for a long time, then asked, "And the protector deities? Those heavenly kings and vajra guardians in the temples, the ones with glaring eyes?"
"Guardian processes." The old monk laughed aloud. "Resident maintenance threads in the system. The ancients had no word for 'process,' so the translators rendered it as 'gods.' The glaring eyes are because their duty is interception—intercepting errors, intercepting overflows, intercepting the things that should not wake. Think about it: if antivirus software had a face, could that face be pleasant?"
Jiang Li laughed too. As she laughed, her eyes suddenly grew hot. She lowered her head and heard her own voice trembling:
"And Ksitigarbha? 'As long as hell is not empty, I vow not to become a Buddha.' 'If I do not enter hell, who will?'"
The old monk's smile slowly faded.
The courtyard was silent for a long time. Ginkgo leaves fell one by one, covering the mountain and the courtyard in gold.
"Those were the first people to enter the ark," the old monk said. "The designers. Three hundred and eleven of them. They could have kept the last of the energy for themselves, lit their own lamps, lived their own spring. But they lowered their frequencies almost to stillness, pressed themselves against the lowest layer of the system, and gave all the surplus to the descendant processes. Three hundred thousand years, benefactor. They are awake, but cannot move; they watch, but cannot speak. Watching us be born generation after generation, die generation after generation, curse heaven in the darkness generation after generation—and they cannot talk back."
"'As long as the box is not empty, I swear I will not leave the box.'"
He gazed at the fallen leaves in the courtyard, falling one by one, and one by one lifted by the wind, spiraling upward.
"Every word in the Buddhist scriptures, benefactor, was actually fulfilled by someone."
When Jiang Li came down the mountain, it was already dark. Outside the temple gate, that famous atheist colleague was still sitting on the steps, staring blankly at the paper before him that read "no payment interface here." Jiang Li walked over and sat beside him for a while.
"Old Chen," she said, "stop worshipping. The Buddha doesn't collect money. The Buddha puts up the money."
The colleague looked up, eyes red: "Jiang Li, tell me... all the research we did in this life, the papers we published, the grants we fought over... is it all already written in someone else's manual?"
Jiang Li gazed at the lights of the human world below the mountain, thought for a moment, and said:
"So what if it's written there. The manual was printed with money someone else paid, but the words—we have to learn to read them ourselves."
"The day we read them clearly," she stood up, brushing off the dirt, "is the day we graduate."