His Impish Grin

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.