In which the immortal problems of power are discussed, and the possibility of anew

Chapter One: The Masters In which the immortal problems of power are discussed, and the possibility of anew instinct is introduced. 1. One morning in of 1943, a Chinese writer named Nan Huai-Chin packed his bags in Shanghai and began walking out of the city. He was headed west, and traced a route along the Huang Pu river, as he headed out towards E’Mei Shan several thousand miles away in Western China. E’Mei Shan - Eyebrow Mountain - was and is one of the holiest Buddhist sites in China. Nan was an unusual young man. At fifteen, he had won a national sword fighting competition against men twice his age. At sixteen he had been admitted to the best university in Shanghai, where he excelled in the study of natural sciences and philosophy. If you look at photos of Nan in those years, more or less at the moment he left Shanghai for the mountains, you see a clean-shaven, and soft-skinned man. He is handsome, with electric eyes. You can see, if you know to look, the rough intensity of the man he’d become during the anti-Japanese war: A toughness in his stance; some hint too in his grimace of a sword-fighter’s mercilessness. This was long before Nan was regarded as one of the finest living exemplars of the Chinese Buddhist tradition, before he became known as Master Nan. This was before his flight from China with the Kuomintang in 1949 once the communists came to power, before his decades of wandering, and his eventual return to the mainland. All that lies ahead of the man you see in the photo. The man in the photo is young, energetic. He is certain. In Nan’s youth, in his early sword fighting days, he had come to understand that mastering the blade of his sword involved really training his internal spirit to the highest possible level of sharpness. The spirit moved first, then — instants later - the sword. It was his desire to sharpen that inner blade that led him to E’mei Shan and the study of Ch’an Buddhism. Ch’an - you may know it by its Japanese name, Zen - is the steeliest of the Buddhist traditions, bred through the combination of the Buddha’s ancient Indian teachings with the mystical philosophical habits of Chinese Daoism. Its adherents explain that enlightenment in Ch’an demands concentration strong enough to make and then smash diamonds. It produces, as a result, an unmatchable form of enlightenment. So, with the anti-Japanese war still smoldering, Nan traveled for a month through his convulsing country and up E’mei Mountain, where he found a Ch’an lamasery near the peak. Once there, during three years of constant effort and meditation and deprivation, he achieved a breakthrough to samadhi, that state of spiritual alignment in which the world and your own soul become as transparent as water. Fear vanishes, as does lust or any real confusion about the deeper currents of life. You become, the priests like to say, as resilient as a HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018237