The Month of Wood

They gave him an axe at dawn. The woodcutters showed him, briefly, where the firewood pile began and ended, and then they left him to it, because even on Laoshan, no one likes a young man who talks while he works.

Wang Qi chopped. He chopped the way he did everything, with great energy and little method, and by noon the first day his hands were blistered, and by the end of the week he had blisters on the blisters, and a back that ached as though the mountain itself were leaning on him.

At the end of the first week he came to the priest and said he had changed his mind. The priest listened, nodded, and said he might leave whenever he liked. Wang Qi opened his mouth to leave, and then, for reasons he could not have explained, he stayed.

At the end of the second week he wanted to leave again, but by then his hands had stopped hurting, and he noticed that he no longer woke at dawn wishing he were dead. This frightened him more than the blisters had.

It was on a night near the end of the month that he saw the wonders. The priest sat in the hall with two of his brothers, and they drank, and the moon came up, and the priest called for a poem to be written on the face of the window.

One of the monks dipped his brush and wrote the words directly onto the dark glass from inside the room, and when the moon rose the writing was no longer on the glass at all. It had passed through, and was shining on the wall outside, large and clear, as if the window had let the poem out into the night.

Then the priest himself rose and walked to the wall at the end of the hall. He lowered his head, put out his hands, and walked straight forward through the solid plaster and wood. The wall did not open. He did not press against it. He simply went through it, the way a man steps through a curtain, and vanished into the courtyard beyond.

Wang Qi sat perfectly still. He had come for exactly this, and now that it was here he could not move. After a moment the priest walked back through the same wall, shook his sleeve, and asked the young man whether he had enjoyed his month of wood.

Master, Wang Qi said, and his voice was hoarse. Master, I have changed my mind again. I will not leave. I will never leave. I want to learn that.

The priest looked at him for a long moment. The wine glowed in the cups. Outside, the poem was still shining on the wall, and the wind had not troubled a single character of it.

You have a month of wood behind you, the priest said. It is enough, perhaps, to begin. But listen to me, young man, and listen well. The wall does not mind you. It is your own heart that must not press against it.