But I was not allowed to think the matter through - the light of torches glimmered below me, I heard footsteps and voices. There were about ten men - I could not cast a spell on so many all at once. Pondering for no more than a second, I leapt in through the window.
I decided I would quickly bewitch the flute-player, then hide and, when the men had gone away, go back to my palanquin, since fortunately it was already almost dark outside. I landed on all fours without making a sound, raised my tail and called out quietly to the man sitting in the room.
‘Most honourable sir!’
He calmly put his flute down and turned round. I immediately tensed my tail and focused all the power of my spirit at its tip - and then something quite new and unexpected happened. Instead of the pliable fizzy jelly which is how my tail perceives the human mind (it is pointless to attempt to explain this to someone who has never experienced it for themselves), I encountered absolutely nothing at all.
I had met many people who were strong or weak in spirit. Working with them was like drilling through walls made of different materials: everything can be drilled, only in different ways. But here I discovered nothing to which I could apply the willpower focused in the fine strands crackling with electricity above my head. In my astonishment I literally lost my balance and slumped to the floor like a fool, with my tail squeezed between my legs, which were exposed in front of me in an unseemly manner. At that moment I felt like a fairground juggler whose balls and ribbons have all fallen plop into the liquid mud.
‘Hello, A Hu-Li,’ the man said, and inclined his head in polite greeting. ‘I am very glad that you have found a moment to call in and see me. You may call me the Yellow Master.’
The Yellow Master, I thought, drawing in my legs. Probably from the Yellow Mountain on which the monastery stands. Or perhaps he is aiming to be emperor.
‘No,’ he said with a smile, ‘I do not wish to be emperor. But you are right about the Yellow Mountain.’
‘What, did I say it aloud?’
‘Your thoughts are reflected so clearly on your sweet little face, that it is quite easy to read them,’ he said with a laugh.
Embarrassed, I covered my face with my sleeve. And then I remembered there was a tear in my sleeve, and began to feel completely ashamed - I covered one arm with the other. My robe at the time was a beautiful one, an imperial concubine’s cast-off, but no longer new, and there were holes in it here and there.
But my embarrassment was, of course, a pretence. In actual fact I was feverishly searching for an exit, and I deliberately hid my face so that he would not read in it what I was thinking. It was not possible that I could be defeated by one man on his own. I could not feel his mind anywhere. But that did not mean that his mind did not exist at all. Clearly he knew some cunning magical trick . . . Perhaps he was showing himself in a place which was not where he really was? I had heard about such things. But he was not the only one who knew some tricks.
We foxes have a method that we can use to transmit an illusion in all directions at once, instantly subduing a human being’s will. When we do this, we do not attune ourselves to a specific client, but become, so to speak, a large, heavy stone that falls on to the smooth mirror of the ‘here and now’, sending out in all directions ripples that make people’s heads spin. And then the disoriented human mind grasps at the very first straw offered to it. This technique is called ‘Storm above the Heavenly Palace’.
I applied it straight away - jumping up on to all fours, pulling up my robe and shaking my tail furiously above my head. It is not the tip of the tail, but its root that has to be shaken, that is, the point from which it grows, and therefore this action appears both indecorous and suggestive, especially with one’s robe pulled up. However, we foxes overcome our innate modesty because the man has no time to see anything properly.
I mean a normal man. The Yellow Master not only saw, he laughed offensively as well.
‘How very pretty you are,’ he said. ‘But do not forget that I am a monk.’
Refusing to capitulate, I strained my will to its very limit: and then, frowning as if he had a headache, he removed the hat from his head and flung it at me. The black string of the hat caught on my tail and the hat pinned it to the floor - as if it were not a simple cone of dry straw, but a massive millstone.
The Yellow Master followed that by picking up two sheets of paper covered with hieroglyphs, rolling them up and flinging them at me as well. Before I had time to think, they had pinned my wrists to the floor, like two shackles of iron. I tried to reach one of the sheets with my teeth (when we are badly frightened, the same thing happens to us as during a chicken-hunt - our human face grows longer and is transformed for a few seconds into a pretty, sharp-toothed little muzzle), but I could not. This, of course, was some sort of sorcery. I managed to read a few of the hieroglyphs written on the paper - ‘there is no old age and death . . . and also no deliverance from them . . .’
My heart felt a little lighter at that - it was the Buddhist Heart Sutra, which meant this man before me was not a Taoist. Everything might yet be all right. I stopped thrashing about and calmed down.
The Yellow Master lifted his cup of tea and took a sip from it, looking me over like an artist surveying a picture that is almost finished and pondering where a final flourish of ink is required. I realized I was lying on my back and the entire lower part of my body was indecently exposed. I even blushed at such humiliation. And then I started to feel afraid. Who could tell what was on this sorcerer’s mind? Life is terrible and pitiless. Sometimes, when people manage to catch one of my sisters, the things they do to her are so terrible, it is better not even to recall them.
‘I warn you,’ I said in a faltering voice, ‘that if you are intending to violate a virgin, the earth and the heavens will shudder at such a sin! And in your old age you will know no peace.’
He laughed so heartily that the tea splashed out of his cup on to the floor. In my unbearable shame, I turned my head away and once again I saw the hieroglyphs on the sheet of paper shackling one of my hands. This time it was the other sheet, and the hieroglyphs on it were different: ‘having taken as a support ... and there are no obstacles in the mind . . .’
‘Shall we talk?’ the Yellow Master asked.
‘I am not a singer from the bawdy quarter, I do not converse with my skirt hem pulled up,’ I retorted.
‘But you pulled it up yourself,’ he said imperturbably.
‘Perhaps I did,’ I replied, ‘but now I am unable to pull it down again.’
‘Do you promise that you will not attempt to run away?’
I mimicked an expression of agonizing internal struggle. Then I sighed and said: ‘I promise.’
The Yellow Master quietly muttered the final phrase of the Heart Sutra in Chinese. All the men of learning that I knew claimed that this mantra should only be recited in Sanskrit, since that was the way the voice of the Victorious One had first pronounced it. But nonetheless, the hoops round my wrists instantly released their grip and were transformed into two ordinary sheets of crumpled paper.
I adjusted my hem, sat up on the floor in a dignified pose and said:
‘How instructive! The gentleman uses the same sutra as the lock and the key. Or does the meaning here lie in the fact that this mantra truly does bring relief from all suffering, as the Buddha promised?’
‘Have you read the Heart Sutra?’ he asked.
‘I have read a smattering,’ I replied. ‘Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form.’
‘Perhaps you even know the meaning of these words?’
I gauged the distance to the window with a glance. It was two leaps away. Well, I thought, even if he were an imperial body-guard, he would never catch me.
‘Of course I do,’ I said, gathering myself into a tense spring. ‘For instance, the fox A Hu-Li is sitting here before you. She appears to be quite genuine, she has form. But look closely, and there is no A Hu-Li before you, for she is an empty void.’
And with those words I made a sudden dash for the dark square of freedom already scattered with stars.
Anticipating later events, I should say that this was the experience that subsequently helped me to understand Kazimir Malevich’s picture
Black Square
. I would just have drawn in a few tiny bluish-white dots. However, Malevich, although he called himself a supremacist, remained faithful to the truth of life - for most of the time there is no light in the Russian sky. And there is nothing left for the soul to do but produce invisible stars from within itself - that is the meaning of his canvas. But these thoughts only came to me many centuries later. Just at that second I collapsed to the floor, overwhelmed by an absolutely unbelievable, unbearable sense of shame. It hurt so badly that I could not even cry out.
The Yellow Master had removed the shackles from my hands. The window was very close. But I had forgotten about the hat that was pinning my tail to the floor.
No physical or even moral pain can possibly compare with the suffering that I experienced. Everything that anchorites endure in years of repentance was packed into a single second of incredibly intense feeling - as if a flash of lightning had lit up the dark corners of my soul. I felt myself crumble like a handful of dust, and a stream of tears gushed from my eyes. There in front of my face was a crumpled page of the Heart Sutra with its indifferent hieroglyphs gazing out at me, telling me that I, my failed attempt to escape, and the inexpressible torment I was suffering at that moment were nothing but empty appearance.
The Yellow Master did not laugh, he even looked at me with an expression of something like compassion, but I could tell he was barely able to restrain his laughter. That made me feel even sorrier for myself, and I kept on and on crying, until the hieroglyphs that my tears were falling on blurred and dissolved into formless blots.
‘Is it that painful?’ the Yellow Master asked.
‘No,’ I replied through my tears, ‘I feel . . . I feel . . .’
‘What do you feel?’
‘I am not accustomed to talking frankly to people.’
‘In your trade that is hardly surprising,’ he laughed. ‘But even so, why are you crying?’
‘I feel ashamed . . .’ I whispered.
I felt so dreadful at that moment that I was not thinking of any cunning tricks, and the sympathy showed to me by the Yellow Master seemed undeserved - I knew very well what the due reward for my deeds was. If he had started skinning me alive, I believe I should not have objected greatly.
‘What are you ashamed of?’
‘Of all the things that I have done . . . I am afraid.’
‘Of what?’
‘I am afraid that the spirits of retribution will send me to hell,’ I said in a very low voice.
It was the honest truth - one of the fleeting visions that had just flashed before my inner eye was this: a black wheel was turning inside an icy stone cell, winding my tail on to itself, tearing it out of my body, but the tail would not tear away, it kept on growing and growing, like the silk thread emerging from a spider’s belly, and every second of this nightmare brought me intolerable torment. But the worst thing of all was the realization that it would go on like that for all eternity . . . No fox could imagine a more terrible hell.
‘Do foxes really believe in retribution?’ the Yellow Master asked.
‘We do not have to believe or not believe. Retribution comes every time our tails are tugged sharply.’
‘Ah, so that’s it,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘So I should have tugged on her tail . . .’
‘Whose tail?’
‘A few years ago a highly cultured fox from the capital came here to pray for forgiveness of her sins. Unlike you, she had no fear of hell at all - on the contrary, she asserted that absolutely everybody would find their way there. She reasoned like this: even people are sometimes kind, and how greatly the mercy of heaven transcends earthly mercy! It is clear that the Supreme Ruler will forgive absolutely everybody and send them immediately to heaven. People themselves will turn heaven into hell - exactly as they have done to the earth . . .’
I am usually curious, but at that moment I was in such a terrible state that I did not even ask who that fox from the capital was. But her argument sounded convincing to me. Swallowing my tears, I whispered:
‘Then does that mean there is no hope at all?’
The Yellow Master shrugged.
‘The realization that everything is created by the mind demolishes even the most terrible hell,’ he said.
‘I understand this idea already,’ I replied. ‘I have read the sacred books and my grasp of them is really quite good. But it seems to me that I have a wicked heart. And a wicked heart, as that fox from the capital said so correctly, will always create hell around itself. No matter where it might be.’
‘If you had a wicked heart, you would not have followed the sound of my flute. Your heart is not wicked. Like all foxes’ hearts, it is cunning.’
‘And can a cunning heart be helped?’
‘It is believed that if its owner lives a righteous life, a cunning heart can be cured in three kalpas.’