The seeds of my prison were sown in the third century when a drunk calligrapher scrawled an impromptu poem. On a spring afternoon beside a stream, the calligrapher Xizhi composed the Orchid Pavilion Preface, an ode to life’s brevity. After his seventh cup of wine1, he produced a feat of beauty that even he could not reproduce sober. After his death, the work of calligraphy passed to his son and his son’s son, until war shrouded it from public record for centuries.
Three hundred years later, the martial Emperor Taizong, my gaoler, won the original from a nun in a wager. Obsessed with recreating Xizhi’s exquisite work, the aging conqueror ordered an elaborate complex constructed for the sole purpose of producing facsimiles. Anyone who could make a copy to his satisfaction would win an estate in the capital and have his name engraved onto the imperial stone steles. An initial trickle of court calligraphers turned into a flood; gout-ridden masters and untested schoolboys alike flocked from around the empire to try their hand replicating the original. So many aspirants flooded the palace complex that an entire industry sprang up around the supply of paper and ink, the vendors hawking wares outside the palace. They say every sandalwood tree was felled within a hundred miles of the capital.
Since the sheer number of entrants meant not all could view the original at once, the calligraphers deemed less skilled copied from the copies already made. Some traced the work by placing it against a translucent screen of bamboo paper. Others drank until barely conscious before trying to recreate the original’s fervor freehand.
Despite three thousand entrants, five sprained wrists, and one death2, none succeeded in replicating to the emperor’s standard. There was always a stroke out of place, a space too wide or narrow. Most commonly the emperor’s complaint was a failure to capture Xizhi’s frenzied artistry. In time, the emperor decided that if prizes and glory would not draw forth the one capable of recreating this art, he would compel one man to find that ability by force.
The complex became a jail for a peculiar breed of prisoner. I was sealed in with the promise of freedom if I could complete one task—the successful reproduction of the scroll placed there by the emperor. Rather than freely roaming across the palace complex, I am confined to a single eight-sided tower. I sleep on the second story and work on the first. Each morning I rise and light the eight lanterns that stud the walls. The lantern oil, my food, and my calligraphy materials are passed daily through a narrow window on the first floor. From the vantage of that window, I can peer at the thin slice of the universe left to me. My clock is the slow movement of this window’s shard of light across the walls, a pillar of fire that retraces the identical journey day after day.
The scroll itself is three feet long, its edges worn and vellum paper amber from centuries of age. The three places where Xizhi wrote an unintended character and brazenly corrected his error with a brush’s sweep are left intact. Like the stream he sat by, Xizhi’s calligraphy flows smoothly from corner to corner, the characters morphing and tapering to follow the natural course of his thought. The poem’s three hundred characters begin arranged in neat columns, as if meandering slowly, then grow more disordered as the words rush downhill, tumbling over in a cascade.
Before Taizong imprisoned me, I was the grand hierophant of the Cult of the Mirror. We believed in the coming of the Mirrored One, a master whose mind and body are a pure reflection of the external world. The finest tapers of Sanskrit scriptures or the delicate hues of lilac are imprinted on the Mirrored One’s consciousness like light penetrating glass. Will and world become one; the gap between perception and object is naught. By emptying his own mind of all content, he could project the world’s substance on his consciousness like sunlight striking the bottom of a clear pool.
In living memory, though, no one had yet achieved this state of enlightenment, and none have come close. The emperor thought we hid the truth from him, and that sufficient torment would draw out our latent skill.
He misunderstands the creed. My misery is a testament to that. It has lasted now four hundred and sixty days. My bones grow weary; my sight dims from want of sunlight. My skin feels thin, papery like the skin of an overripe persimmon slipping off the fruit. The Mirrored One is not just a master craftsman, though he would undeniably have some skill. By my time our lamas had come to believe the Mirrored One is merely an ideal that we use to teach our acolytes to hone their perception. We know the world is a parade of fleeting forms, hollow of content, but we choose to study these shadows. Our acolytes master the disciplines of martial arts, painting, music, and calligraphy; through the practice of observing and acting, they reduce the distance between mind and matter, and ultimately understand that all the world is one. The perceiving mind is shaped by the object, just as the perceived object is molded in the glittering cavern of the mind.
But there are different degrees of understanding. I, who mastered the seventy-two scrolls of poetry by nineteen and defeated khans in combat by twenty-five3, am lost. I know what I must do, but I cannot do it. I have made countless copies of the scroll and have burned all of them before entering them for imperial approval. I knew they were flawed. I have tried the old techniques of tracing, guided by the weak light I possess. I recalled our temple’s meditation techniques. I fasted for two weeks to induce a trance-like clarity, letting my rations rot slowly in the corner. None bore the correct results.
I fear sleep now. My dreams are imperfect, crooked. They are twisted reproductions of reality, and how can I see the truth if I spend hours mired in duplicities? Lord, grant us weak eyes for the things that do not matter and eyes full of clarity in all your truth.
One night, a vision came to me that I looked at myself in a jade mirror. On its polished emerald surface, I saw not my reflection, but a pure darkness that spread from the center to occupy the entire mirror. As I backed away from it, I realized in horror that what I thought to be a mirror was merely the pupil of a great eye, not malevolent but merely indifferent, and I stood helpless in its gaze.
When I awoke I lay supine, in the hinterland between sleep and wakefulness. The dream had stirred memories, much as a familiar strain of music can unearth realms of the mind so long forgotten as to be thought lost. As I had done a hundred times before, my mind drifted to the meaning of Xizhi’s poem. In my attempts to complete Taizong’s demand, I had returned often to the words of the scroll in hopes that a hidden meaning lay written in a language of patterns and ink. Unbidden, one line resounded in my mind: “Above, look upon the vastness of the heavens, and below upon the abundance of all things. Butterfly wings move wind, wind moves dragons, dragons move heaven.” In an instant I saw my body and my mind were of the same essence as the rock that entombed me, the fires that lit the room, the cockroaches that scurried across the flagstones. I saw Xizhi’s life’s work as a bright node of energy. They all made the same demand on me: let me be. They cried to me in a deafening chorus, and I felt I must answer.
At my desk I closed my eyes and dipped my brush in the ink.
I knew the Orchid Pavilion Preface—no, it was more than knowledge. I felt the world swirling in a sea around me, and I drifted in it, powerless and yet not seeking control. I could not see it, but I sensed it nonetheless. I pressed the brush to paper as I had done hundreds of times before and this time felt different. I knew I had done what Xizhi himself could not. I had recreated his work of art in perfect detail.
Taizong’s guards unlocked the door one morning when they found I had not eaten or drank for three days. On the table they found the scroll, and though my eyes were closed I sensed that they looked at me in wonder. I heard one say that the emperor requested my presence, and that he would wish to honor me. But when I looked at them, I saw not only the three men, outlined against the doorway of the tower, but also a double world. Even as I gazed around the interior of my tower that I had seen a thousand times, I felt the ebbing and flowing of its energies.
I know not where I lie now. Why should I, who has seen the truth, care for the emperor, or his servants, or any man under the sun? I see now that the Cult of the Mirror was misguided. The Mirrored One is no ideal. When someone has embodied the universe, what thought does he have for any individual life? In his scroll, Xizhi wrote that though no man can determine the length of his life, in the end, we all return to the same nothingness. He is right, but there is no true return—we belong always and forever to everything, and death changes little. I ask only that they let me be.
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1 It is known that Xizhi generally drank Crane’s Elixir, a mix of fermented millet and osmanthus for flavoring. A year ago, I tried to make it out of the modest means I have in the tower. I could not write for three days after.
2 He had already fourscore winters before arriving. The stress broke his heart.
3 I regret these victories now. My time as an imperial champion on the northern frontier is what first brought me to the emperor’s attention.