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Collection of Short Stories by Shui Xin Sha Chapter 1

By

siofra

Translator’s Note:

I recently stumbled upon this short story collection, 《短故事集锦》 (Short Story Collection) by Shui Xinsha (水心沙), and fell in love with its dark, atmospheric prose.

A quick heads-up for readers tracking this on NovelUpdates: the cover image currently displayed on NU actually doesn’t match the original work. I’ve already submitted the correct, official cover art to NU, but it’s still awaiting approval from the moderators.

In the meantime, if you’d like to check out the original raw text, you can find it directly on Jinjiang Literature City here:

jjwxc

-Siofra

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Collection of Short Stories by Shui Xin Sha

Chapter 1: The First Story — The Amorous Monk

Without birth and empty form, without self is this void nature.

There is a Weituo Temple on the mountain to the east of our town, called Baoguo Temple. It was built during the previous dynasty and enjoys a very thriving incense trade, largely because the abbot inside is a monk who came all the way from the capital.

The monk’s name is Huipu, and the people in the town call him the “Little Living Buddha.”

They say that when the Little Living Buddha was three years old, he was already lecturing on scriptures for the Empress Dowager. The year he came to our temple, he was not even eighteen. Yet no one could explain clearly why a living Buddha favored by the Empress Dowager would come to such a small place to serve as a temple abbot—just as no one could tell me why, on the night of every full moon, he would always sit atop the east peak and stare blankly at that wheel of a moon.

On those nights every month, if you bypassed the waterfall outside the temple, walked up along the mountain stream, and turned a bend, there was a spot where you could see him quite clearly without ever being discovered by him.

The first time I saw him like this was by chance. The countless times after that were on purpose.

I thought he looked like a deity sitting quietly in the moonlight, but perhaps monks would rather people say they look like Buddhas.

The Little Living Buddha was strikingly handsome.

I often heard adults say that monks possess a solemn and majestic countenance. I didn’t know what a “solemn countenance” meant, nor could I tell what was majestic, but I loved watching the Little Monk’s silhouette sitting in the moonlight. Slender and delicate, light and ethereal, as if a stronger breeze might blow him away, yet he was entirely gilded in a soft layer of silver light—hazy and as beautiful as a painting.

That is why I peeked at him month after month, even though I respected him, revered him, and feared being cast into the eighteenth level of hell if he ever caught me.

The Buddha is born with the appearance of a lotus, while we mortal beings have muddy eyes. Before him, one must never casually use such filth to desecrate his purity, or else it is a grave sin, a transgression that will cast one into the Avici Hell. That is what everyone in the town said.

I thought… I was only looking at his back, after all. And every day when I passed that stream, I would look into it to check my own eyes; I didn’t think my eyes were so dirty that they would desecrate a monk.

“Benefactor, are you looking at the moon, or are you looking at the monk?”

So when he suddenly spoke those words out loud one day, I didn’t panic, but instead blurted out without thinking: “Looking at the monk.”

After that night, I stopped calling him the Living Buddha and began calling him the Little Monk.

The Little Monk had once given me a few pieces of colored glass.

If you looked at the sky through the red glass, the sky was red; if you looked at the sky through the blue glass, the sky was blue. As I held those pieces of glass and gazed up at the sky, he told me that there is a temple in Hangzhou with a statue of a Buddha named Jiidian. If you look at him from his left side, his face looks sorrowful and weeping, but if you look at him from the right side, he is smiling.

“Many things are the same way; whichever side you look from determines what kind of result you will see,” he concluded.

I couldn’t understand his talk of “this side” and “that side,” but I loved seeing the warm light in his eyes when he spoke of these things—the kind of light I had never seen in the eyes of my own parents.

“Little Monk, are you really the reincarnation of the Buddha?” So I asked him: “Why does the knife-like cold wind in the mountains turn as warm as a basin of hot water the moment it gets close to you?”

He smiled, stroked my head, and stood up: “Seeing mountains as mountains, seeing waters as waters; seeing mountains are not mountains, seeing waters are not waters; seeing mountains are still mountains, seeing waters… are still waters.”

When I turned twelve, I often went to the temple to help the monks prepare vegetarian meals. Sometimes, when I finished what needed to be done, while the monks were having their meal, I would sneak into Huipu’s meditation room to watch him copy scriptures.

Huipu wrote a fine hand; everyone who came to the temple to beg for his calligraphy said so. I couldn’t read, but I loved his handwriting all the same. His words were like fish in a mountain cave; some were playful, some were quiet, and with a flick of their tails, they turned into a flowing painting. That was how I described it to him. He smiled when he heard it, and after that, when he had some spare time, he began teaching me how to read.

Yet I had no love for learning characters.

Often, on the copy-books he wrote for me, I would draw eyes and tails on those pretty characters, and then show them to him with a smug look. “Look, Little Monk, don’t they look just like those fish in the pond? This is Little White, this is Big-Head Lantern, this is Long-Tail Miss Thirteen…”

Helpless, he finally gave up on trying to knock sense into my wooden-fish brain: “Let’s make lanterns using Miss Thirteen instead, Huarong.”

“Yay! Awesome!” The sleep bugs instantly flew away, and I agreed loudly.

Back then, days passed as if they were flying. I ran to the temple at every given opportunity. After a long while, the little novice monks began to tease me: “Lass, you run here so often—do you want to become a nun when you grow up?”

“Not on your life!”

“Why not? Companion to the green lamp and the ancient Buddha—how wonderful.”

“Nuns can’t get married!”

“Oh? And who does our little lass want to marry?”

“Huipu!”

And the novices would burst into roaring laughter.

From then on, behind the backs of the senior and old monks, every single novice monk would call me Huipu’s little wife the moment they laid eyes on me.

When I turned sixteen, my parents no longer allowed me to go to the temple to help in the kitchen, and neither did the monks.

The temple gates, which I had walked in and out of so freely for years, became an insurmountable threshold, and even talking to Huipu became a difficult task. He no longer smiled at me as he used to, nor helped me make lanterns, nor let me sneak into his quarters. I didn’t know when it started, but his meditation room was kept locked, even when he was inside. Sometimes, when I slipped into the temple and no one was around, I would call out to him through the window as he copied scriptures at his desk: “Little Monk, Little Monk…”

No matter how many times I called, he turned a deaf ear, until the welcoming monk was drawn out by my loud voice and escorted me away. Sometimes, after being pushed out of the temple gates, a little novice would hurry after me and hand me a parcel. The parcel smelled wonderful; inside were Western pastries that the concubine of the town magistrate had brought as offerings when she came to burn incense for Huipu. She brought them once a month, and every time, Huipu would let me take them back to eat to my heart’s content.

I threw the parcel back at the little novice. I didn’t want pastries; I wanted to see Huipu.

Yet no matter how much I threw tantrums, they only repeated one sentence to me: “The abbot is too busy; benefactor, please do not disturb him, and do not take offense.”

They had all forgotten how, back when they were still wiping their sniffling noses, they used to laughingly call me Huipu’s little wife. They had become just like my parents, just like these temple gates, and just as heartless as Huipu.

On the night of my seventeenth birthday, I finally managed to catch another glimpse of Huipu gazing at the moon from that hidden corner on the mountaintop—before that, I had thought he would never come again, ever since two years ago.

He sat upon the stone platform, staring quietly at the moon in a daze, wondering what he was thinking about.

The moonlight illuminated his figure, so still there wasn’t a sound. I stood amid the crevices formed by the rocks, shielding my head with tree branches, not daring to make the slightest noise.

Until a gust of wind swept past from behind me, and he suddenly spoke: “Benefactor, are you looking at the moon, or are you looking at the monk?”

I stepped out from the corner.

For some reason, as I walked, I began to cry, feeling an irrepressible grievance: “Looking at the monk,” I said, sniffing hard. “Looking at the monk…”

He let me bury my head in his shoulder, just like when I was a child, listening quietly to me cry, staring up at the moon in the sky without uttering a single word.

“Little Monk, is the moon that pretty?” I asked after I had cried enough.

He smiled and patted my head: “Pretty. The moon is as beautiful as your eyes.”

After that, whenever I secretly came to the temple, I could always smoothly and stealthily slip into the inner courtyard. Sometimes, if I bumped into the sweeping monks, they wouldn’t pay me any mind, treating me as if I were air. I would run quickly to Huipu’s door and call out through the window: “Little Monk, Little Monk…”

He still turned a deaf ear.

Yet sweet pastries were always left on the windowsill. I would bite into a pastry and push open his door; his door was never locked again.

Thus, it felt as though those carefree days of childhood had returned—peeking at him write, nagging him to help me make lanterns, sitting in the flower beds outside his room to bask in the sun, bickering with the little novices…

Until one day, I looked up and saw him staring at me from across the flowers, his gaze stunned and dazed.

So I teased him:

“Little Monk, are you looking at the flowers, or are you looking at Huarong?”

He smiled, turned around, and walked back into his meditation room: “Admiring the flowers.”

“A monk knows how to admire flowers? Doesn’t that make you a profligate monk?”

“Flowers are originally grass and trees; a monk admiring flowers is naturally a grass-and-tree monk.”

“Heh, when did the Little Monk learn to talk back?”

He said no more.

Suddenly recalling the playful words of my childhood, right before he stepped inside and closed the door, I suddenly raised my voice and declared: “Little Monk, marry me.”

He froze. For a long moment, a trace of a blush flashed across his face. Lowering his head, he spoke in a voice so soft it could hardly be heard: “Monks are not allowed to marry.”

“A monk can return to secular life.”

He smiled, silently shutting that pair of slightly shimmering eyes behind the cold door of the meditation room.

And when he sat back down at his desk, I was already standing right outside the window where he could see me the moment he looked up, smiling at him: “Little Monk, why won’t you return to secular life?”

He opened the scriptures and remained silent.

“Is it because you can’t bear to leave the illumination of the Buddha’s light?” I pressed on.

His hand paused.

“But how can one standing in a corner be illuminated by the Buddha’s light, Little Monk?” I wouldn’t let it go.

Long ago, Huipu had told me that the Buddha’s light is like the sunlight in this courtyard: no matter how strong the sunlight is, there are always a few corners it cannot reach. Therefore, to be illuminated by it, one must stand right in the middle of the courtyard; otherwise, if one blindly hides in a corner, even the Buddha can do nothing.

I figured he hadn’t forgotten those words, because he put down the brush in his hand.

Seeming to ponder, he stood up a moment later and walked over to the window.

I stepped back a little.

I thought he was coming to close the window, just like every other time he was driven to wit’s end by my nagging.

Instead, he reached out a hand toward me.

This time, the one who froze was me.

There was no one around, and the look in his eyes as he gazed at me held a heat unlike any ordinary day. My heart raced fiercely, though I knew not why.

“Come here, Huarong,” he said after a long silence.

So I grabbed his hand.

And so I was pulled back to the windowsill by him.

And so his lips pressed against my mouth, right at the instant I looked up to ask him what he was doing.

When I turned eighteen, my parents arranged a marriage for me.

On the night before the wedding procession, I finally broke out and fled. I ran through the night to the east mountain, wanting to find Huipu, but all I saw was half of the east mountain fluttering with yellow banners.

A grand and imposing procession was escorting Huipu out of the temple. I shouted his name loudly in the crowd of onlookers, but he couldn’t hear a single word. Perhaps he did hear; as he rode past me on horseback, he seemed to turn his head slightly and glance in my direction.

Then he kept moving forward, guided by those men in yellow robes, amid the mountain-shattering kowtows of the crowd and the thick, fog-like incense smoke of the temple.

After that day, I don’t know what else I did.

I chased all the way in the direction the grand procession had left, running into my parents along the way, along with the people who had come with them to look for me. I gave them the slip and fled back up the mountain. I ran and ran… ran and ran… running for a long time, all the way to the summit.

A wheel of a moon hung in the sky at the peak, very round and so close it felt as though I could hook it with a single stretch of my hand. I stood on the stone platform where Huipu usually sat in meditation and gazed at it, wanting to know what on earth he was thinking whenever he looked at it like this, but it was so silent—silent to the point that only my own breathing and heartbeat could be heard.

The wind roaring up from beneath the cliff was fierce, blowing wave after wave, like a hand ready to drag a person down at any moment. I swayed on the stone platform following the momentum of the wind, and then I heard my mother’s voice shrieking at the top of her lungs from behind me:

“Huarong! Have you lost your mind?! Get down here right now!”

“Huarong! Has your soul been hooked away by that monk?! He’s a man of the Empress Dowager!”

“Huarong! Get down here right now! Your husband is waiting for you!”

“Huarong! Huarong!!!”

Gradually, those cries drifted further and further away from me until they vanished, yet I never stepped down from that stone platform.

I just stood there like that, on and on, letting the wind from the cliff blow over me, watching the moon overhead.

Sometimes it turned white, sometimes a blood-red—so bizarre that watching it made me forget all sensation in my body. I even felt as if time itself had frozen, its ever-changing colors baffling me as to why I had never seen them before this day.

So I continued to stand, continued to watch, continued to think.

Thinking of the Little Monk sitting in the moonlight, thinking of his smile, thinking of the sound of his voice, thinking of the kiss he pressed onto my lips after pulling me to him that day…

Short and cautious, deep and hurried, tender and lingering…

They say that when you miss someone for too long, your heart grows heavy.

When your heart grows heavy enough, you turn into stone.

So I turned into a piece of stone, I thought.

Right on that stone platform where he sat every night of the full moon, guarding the platform, gazing at the moon, letting the wind sweeping up from the mountain cliff blow past… just like chatting with him here many years ago.

The stone platform was his figure, the moonlight was his aura, and the mountain wind was the sound of his voice.

He said: “Benefactor, are you looking at the moon, or are you looking at the monk?”

I said: “Looking at the monk.”

The moon continued to change colors above my head, while I waited for the sound of his footsteps to arrive from the foot of the mountain, on every night of the full moon.

The first full moon… The second full moon… The tenth full moon… The hundredth full moon… The…

As I watched the moon transform from blue to purple, struggling in my mind to figure out just which full moon this was, a figure appeared before my eyes.

Tall and thin, slender and delicate, as if a stronger breeze might blow him away, yet he was entirely gilded in a soft layer of silver light—hazy and as beautiful as a painting.

Little Monk! I wanted to call out to him, but I found my lips had lost the sensation of a tongue.

“Huarong…” Then I heard him call me gently, reaching out to slowly trace across my face with fingers as soft as his voice:

“Without birth and empty form, without self is this void nature—in the end, I could not penetrate it, nor do I wish to penetrate it any longer.”

“I’m back…”

“Whether in slaughter or parting, I will never leave again.”

I wanted to cry, seized by that irrepressible feeling of grievance.

Yet not a single teardrop could fall.

So I really had turned into a stone, back when I was staring at that ceaselessly shifting moon.

He pulled me into a tight embrace, but I could no longer feel the warmth of his body.

That warmth capable of heating the mountain wind to a simmer.

Yet he kept holding me like this, on and on, as if trying desperately to pass this warmth over to me.

The colors of the moon began to shift again, and I tried to push him away.

This moon is haunted; I don’t want him to turn into a stone because of this.

But I couldn’t push him away.

He held me, leaning against my body as if he had fallen asleep.

So I, too, began to grow somewhat sleepy.

Then I’ll just sleep in his arms for a while, I thought, remembering that I hadn’t closed my eyes in a very long time.

So I closed my eyes, shutting out the changing moonlight above my head beyond my eyelids.

Will he still be here tomorrow morning, holding me like this?

I wondered.

I didn’t know… nor was there any way to know.

I only knew he had said that whether in parting or… he would never leave again…

“Look, there are two trees growing intertwined here.”

“Quick, take a picture, hurry.”

“Hey, be careful, have you got a death wish standing right on the cliff edge?”

“Idiot, why don’t you grab onto the tree tightly.”

“Damn, this tree is savagely grown. How do you suppose it managed this—twisting together right on the edge of a cliff? Heh… maybe one’s male and one’s female.”

“Might as well call it mandarin ducks playing in the water.”

“Alright, snap the picture and let’s get down. Not gonna lie, these trees really do look like a pair.”

“Oh, pull the other one.”

“Didn’t you hear what the tour guide said on the way up? He said back in the Qing dynasty, a local woman was abandoned by her monk lover, and later jumped off the cliff right here. This tree supposedly grew out of her after she died.”

“Then why are there a male and a female?”

“Later, the monk came back. He sat here for days and nights without eating or drinking, and passed away into nirvana (zuohua). Xiaobing, for all you know, the rock your punk-ass is stepping on right now is where that monk’s corpse sat back then.”

“Shit, don’t scare me.”

“…Let’s go, Xiaobing. I suddenly feel a bit cold.”

“Let’s go, let’s go.”