Without a word, but nodding once in a show of keen understanding, the Buddhist master smiled, and all the Westerners who sat in a circle around his low tea-table immediately refocused their attention and pondered the meaning of this tiny gesture.

“It’s his mischievous side showing through,” a certain follower of his told me after, “his child-like prankster side.” She spoke with glutted satisfaction, as though her recognition of the man’s wise workings had been a privileged gift, something nourishing. I agreed, because I knew she was really talking about something else, the impish glee with which the masters in Chinese legends always deal with their pupils. She and I had attended similar classes in university where we studied similar stories, and when Master Wang smiled, he was really stepping out of a Sunday night in downtown Taipei and into the great classics we’d both both read in translation.

At the time, I hadn’t thought Wang’s placid smile seemed mischievous at all. It was too small, for one thing. Barely crimping the smooth lines of his wide face, it wasn’t large enough to be magnanimous but instead queerly timeless, like bound feet. Sweet, tender, it had the pity of a chess player who has seen his victory in the moves ahead, and knows his opponent is doomed.

I hadn’t paid much attention to the question he had been answering. As he listened to the translator, Wang played with one of the Chinese nick-knacks that always littered his tea table, turning it around in his hands as if pulling the memory of a apprentice-hood taichi form like a precious gem from this dull moment.

We were all foreigners. This was a special class weekly held just for us, and now, at the end of the night, it was our opportunity to meet and ask questions of the Master. New people always asked vague and probing questions, “What is good?” or “How can we act without desire?”, which is fair enough since better questions are hard to think of when put to the test. Sometimes a new person would come and Wang would take a special interest in them, at the sight of which we would all reshuffle ourselves into a new formation, treat the newcomer differently, hope that through our acceptance of them and the Master’s graces, we would too recognize whatever the Master had seen.

This young man, though, whose features I’ve forgotten, was new and getting little attention until he asked a question about global warming. Here, Wang suddenly perked up, and before answering, smiled his rare, soft-touching rebuke. Then, he explained why it had been a stupid question.

Firstly, environmentalism and global warming don’t matter in the least. In the Buddhist universe, the world is just one of an infinite number, where beings struggle through life, die, and are reborn according to their karma. A new world begins first with a sentient being, who, having a massive store of ‘good’ karma, is reborn in the highest position, and being present at the birth of the world, incorrectly assumes this makes them God. Soon other beings pop into the new world, being born as demigods or demons, or dogs, or wherever their karma leads. The world goes on like this for eons, and then ends. When it does, everyone is simply reborn into a different world, or perhaps creates their own.

The point is, when a world ends, everyone continues along their karmic journey as if nothing happened. What Wang informed us is that the survival of the Earth is irrelevant in every way, that however it ends, now or later, our reason for being continues unchanged and in total disregard.

People were aghast. This mini-revelation didn’t bother me much, though; I was there to study Taoism and qigong, not Buddhism, so after I had my conversation about the mischievous master and went on with my night, I mostly forgot about it. More than a year later, though, picking up the pieces of that experience and turning them over again in the gentle grip of my mind, I realize that this one surprise moment holds the key to the strange surreality that surrounded the whole affair, and the explanation of what went wrong, and the reason why I can’t go back to Wang and the Tea House.

The fish bangs its head against the wooden banister on the fishing boat’s starboard side before gracelessly tumbling back-first into the motor’s churning wake. Like the dozens of others, he falls with the pathetic clumsiness only living things can manage. I can’t help but wince as it slaps the white surf.

At my side are rows and rows of large plastic tanks, and in them writhe dozens of live fish. I’m one of six people, each with their own section of the fishing boat, pulling bucketfuls of fish to pitch back into the sea off the coast of Northern Taiwan. Next to me, another foreigner dumps her bucket of fish overboard and mutters, “I dedicate all merit from his to the Master, so that he can live long and healthy and continue to teach the dharma.” I was told that I must say this, but that if I wanted to add anything personal for the fish’s coming life, words of encouragement, that was fine, too.

The two-hour ceremony on the cliffs, now faint and grey behind the other fishing boats that follow in our train, had rewritten the fish’s karma, balanced the heavy weight that had kept them in a low-level of existence - the life of animals, which is all fear and hunger. I plunge the bucket and scoop up two big fish - muttering through clenched teeth, arms exhausted from dozens of loads, I struggle to raise the bucket. What wisdom have I for brethren souls still locked in darkness? “I dedicate all merit from this to the Ma-aster, so that he can live lo-ong and healthy and continue to teach the d-dharma. In your next life, be considerate lovers. Don’t be selfishhhh…” and the bucket pitched as the fish began their decent into the light.

The practice, which could be translated as Saving Souls if you had a Christian bent, is best rendered as Releasing Life. Buddhist cultures all over the world engage in this custom, buying up animals from restaurants where they are soon to be slaughtered and served to release into the wild, sanctified, ready for the next life, when they too will study Buddhism and release the lives of lesser beings, gifting upon their unwitting animal heads the truth they can only begin to understand somewhere in their myriad lives to come. For now, though, they are dumb, dead weight, currency for the merit economy.

The ceremony that brought them here, to the deck of a boat, had been impressive: four massive and specially equipped tanker trucks teeming with the living cargo, a dozen tour buses, a stage and even a pair of portable toilets were all neatly arraigned on the gravel cliffs, wide and flat enough to host such a party. If this sounds expensive, it is. Some fish were donated by restaurants happy to trade the stock of one day for a does of merit (what we call ‘good karma’) but most had to be purchased. Then there were the truck, boat, and bus rentals - not to mention all the equipment. This was all paid for by donations from thousands of true believers all across the island - a larger collection of same group that funded Master Wang’s Tea House meditation center, as well as his life and work. For every dollar spent, of course, came matching merit, like carbon credits for your coming lives.

For an hour we’d milled around the hot cliffs as the sailors stood smoking with their fishing boats moored in a small harbor below. There were twenty or so selected foreigners from the Sunday night practice, each having been specially picked by the Master, who’d joined a larger group of Taiwanese adherents to pile into a tour bus and make the trip along Taiwan’s beautiful northern coast. Those outside the inner circle, who hadn’t been invited personally by Master Wang, had been notified in sudden phone calls, or confidential sideline conversations, that only a few people could come, and so as not to damage the other foreigner’s fragile feelings, we couldn’t tell them.

When the tour bus would drop us all off near the tea house after the long drive back from the coast, we would stand around again with our hands in our pockets as one at a time we made our way to the Tea House. Going in as a large group, we would be told, raises suspicions. This was normal, however, as exclusive messages for one were constantly passing through the tearoom on dashing, socked feet, creeping whispers you were always only mostly unaware of. Ironically, the operations of an enlightenment-seeking organization seemed to hinge on winking ignorance into the eyes of curious near-believers, always for their own good.

Further out behind my boat, a disorganized group of other fishing boats maintain a respectful distance - when all of our tanks have been emptied, and we’ve turned back towards the rocky cliffs, they will overtake us to fish the waters we just seeded. My arms are heavy and tired, slick with the scum the teeming fish have whipped their tanks of water into. I struggle to balance my bucket on the banister. “I dedicate this merit to the Mas-” I begin but the boat tosses, and the bucket pitches its own contents shoddily into the sea. I look down to watch a fish glance of the side of the boat before hitting the water. Do I lose merit if I kill one?

Cargo spent, we turn and the real fishermen overtake us, casting out their nets. Most of the fish we freed will be caught and eaten within a week. The sooner they die though, I’m told, the better. The sooner they give up this pointless life, the sooner they can be reborn to seek the dharma, and that was the real point - not some momentary kindness to mindless fish.

I think about the return to Taipei, and the Tea House qigong workshop tonight. When I see the others, I know I’ll feel bad about having had the chance to go, and about having to keep it secret. It feels strange to have to lie. After all, we’re all good people.

He’d piped up with some question, some qualified, gutless question, a man of about forty who sat in the back in a chair so as to spare his weak knee, and Wang’s sluggish cat eyes fell on him as though before that instant the man hadn’t occupied any space in the world, that his relevance would have to be channeled, and that Wang was once again back at work managing this.

I don’t recall the question, or if he got an answer, just that then Wang asked his own question and set the man to nervously rubbing the side of his short beard. He gestured towards one of his Taiwanese followers sitting near him, in her early thirties and lovely, a woman who was always at the Tea House, but never engaged in the furious martial and meditative exercises of the others. She mostly attended the Master, brought him tea or ran errands, although often enough, as tonight, she acted as the translator for the crowd of foreigners lining the walls of his audience chamber.

“You are attracted to her, aren’t you? Would you like to date her?” Wang spoke through her, and the distinctly masculine directness of the questions found strange value in her voice as she remained as flat as ever, confronting the man as to his affections in front of some thirty people through another person’s words.

I got the feeling that there was a real backstory as she went on speaking about herself in the third person, the man shifting back and forth between hers and Wang’s doubly steady gazes. He stammered and Wang laughed airily, high-pitched, and totally alone. The entire room sat with stuffed breath transfixed by a private scene forced suddenly on them. The woman, placid, sat as ever - waiting for words from either men to translate. At length, Wang’s cold eyes unflinching, the man lowered his own and nodded that Wang was right about his affections. He clearly wasn’t certain what to do, like all of us, caught in a strange scene he didn’t want to be in, already having made the decision to follow the Master’s lead while in his house, unclear where this would go.

“Well, you should ask her out, then.”

And like that, Wang broke away from the man his terrible steady look, unpinned him and released him from the focus of the entire room.

He had been enjoying the man’s discomfort, I could tell. Throughout the exchange, he wore the supercilious grin that sometimes overcame him on festival days, when he obliged us all to ignore the five precepts and drink glass after glass of rough gaoliang sorghum liquor cut with juice, while he as a monk abstained, watching us all get drunk as monkeys and caper around his small audience room. In Chinese cultures, this is the height of generosity, and any man would rightly relish being a host of enough abundance to leave scores of foreigners stupid with wine.

There was some of this satisfaction traced on his face as the bearded man wriggled, and I wondered if Wang wasn’t being possessive of the woman. These girls that attended him, I thought silently as the next question was raised and Wang continued his brief Chinese lessons, does he fuck them? I only wondered because, after months of coming to the Tea House, I was certain they would if directed. No, it not unimaginable - he;s got a wife somewhere, and children, so celibacy’s not a concern for the Master unlike other monks, for whatever reason (who would dare ask?). For her part, she held in check throughout the encounter a sly amusement, and in her total lack of discomfort at suddenly speaking Wang’s words about herself, she’d seemed as distant as would any paramour at the suggestion another man stood a chance of having her. It amused me to think of, but more than that, it would explain the strangeness that hung so often in the air, the weirdness of their connections.

As Wang again resumed his slow gaze of roving disinterest, I considered an alternative. The bearded man, like many men in many places, almost certainly been trying to use the group’s common bond to wheedle and work at her affections. He was no serious practitioner, and wouldn’t be able to become one as long as he let himself be distracted and tempted. He’d gone long past the trial period all newcomers were given, when anyone’s presence was tolerated unconditionally as slowly they were given chances to show their dedication and worth. Masters do not teach uncommitted students, and so at the Tea House, Wang was doing something fairly revolutionary and opening wide his doors to all that would come. There wasn’t an endless welcome, however, and eventually it would be worn out. Wang’s confrontation was a standard passive-aggressive technique nearly universal in Asia (I’ve had the dubious honor of riding several such rails), so perhaps Wang wasn’t really being vindictive.

I don’t think I ever saw the bearded man again, but if so, it was only once or twice more. Wang had driven him out - either putting the lesser man in his place as he overreached at Wang’s table, or discouraging an unfit student from remaining at his school. In truth, I suspect it was both. Or rather, for Wang, the two are one in the same.