This time when I approached the little bridge I saw that there had been many changes in the surroundings. On the left side were several smart new houses where previously there had been nothing but fields, while the opposite bank was bare, the old tanning works having been removed.
          There were two men idly fishing from underneath one of the arches and I had to wait for them to leave, walking restlessly up and down the bank. In the end they went sooner than I expected and it was still afternoon when I sat down once more in what I considered to be my very own place. The sun was bright as it often is at this time of year – it was not yet spring but no longer winter. As I watched the moving patches of brightness on the water I felt more and more at peace. I would, I decided, throw myself into the water at nightfall: for the moment there was still time to enjoy the charming scene before me. I felt myself to be in between life and death: I was no longer what I had been up to this moment and not yet what I was about to become. By all accounts there would be a wait of several years before I was reborn into this world of turmoil. This according to the Buddhist views with which I was familiar — to what extent did I believe them? Such questions suddenly seemed of no importance: they were like earnest discussions about the meaning of ancient texts going on in an adjoining room, of great interest to the participants but not to persons who could not read or had better things to do. Much more significant was the play of light on the water, the patterns that were endlessly forming and reforming. They had no inner aim or meaning: they were a purely gratuitous display. They would be just the same whether there was a conscious being like myself watching them or not. I thought of the lovely flowers that bloom in mountain crevices, or the green and gold colours on the backs of beetles that spend their lives buried in the earth. There was a kind of magnificence about this wastefulness. Indeed, I said to myself, what was the difference between this play of light on the water and my entire life, many lives, the present dynasty, the whole history of the Empire? Everything was just a rapid succession of moments —  too rapid for the eye to become aware of them. In reality there were no walls, no trees, no houses, no persons, only relatively persistent patterns forming and reforming. When the pattern repeated itself we speak of permanence, when it does not of cause and effect. But all these events had emerged from the same void to which they immediately returned and which was their home. There was no underlying substance, no matter, no mind, no deity. The whole of reality was being created and destroyed at every instant, an amazing and wonderful procedure. And to what did all this tend? Was there a master plan guiding this incessant activity? Not so: the whole vast glittering display was without purpose or intention, nor was any needed. Everything  would end as it had begun, in the void of pre-existence. All this seemed so clear and obvious to me that I wondered why I had not always thought in this way — but so I had without until this moment being able to find the words for it. Suddenly I saw myself in a small house in a town with many canals in the company of a tall young girl. We were preparing rice; at the back of the house was a long narrow garden with a high wall at the end of it. Then the vision was gone: it was just another play of light on the water. I knew then that I would soon be leaving Tsenking and that I did not need to employ the senseless method of taking my own life. ‘My’ past had already gone: it was a bundle that had fallen off a barge into the river and that I did not trouble myself to bend down and pick up. There it was drifting away from me, in another moment it would reach the bend in the river and be taken out of my sight forever.

From Impressions on the Way by Lin Ch’ien translated from the Chinese by Sebastian Hayes