The Temple of a Hundred Bones

I. The Bone-Bearer

Shen Jiu had been gathering the dead for twelve years, and most of those he carried were people no one claimed.

He bore a paulownia-wood chest, lined with year-old lime, and whatever lone ghost fell where it fell—he would collect its bones, lay it out, and carry it on to where it ought to go. It sounded like decent work, but the truth was there was seldom anywhere for them to go. The yamen would not bother; kin would not own them. The rain swelled them, the wild dogs scattered them, and all that remained was a nameless, faceless husk, waiting for the likes of him.

He had learned the trade from a master. Master Mo was a mute corpse-collector who never spoke a word his whole life, guiding the way only with his hands and marks made in lime. When Shen Jiu was twelve, he had been dug out of a plague pit still half-breathing; Master Mo carried him back to a ruined shrine, poured a spoonful of ash-charm water down his throat, and kept him alive. After that the boy followed him north and south. When Master Mo died, he passed on the paulownia chest and signed three words with his fingers: Don't look back.

Shen Jiu kept those three words for ten years. Yet tonight, for the first time, he wanted to turn and look at the road he had walked.

Late that autumn, a fresh body appeared on the unmarked graves outside Qingxi Town. A young man, no more than twenty, with neither wound nor scar, his face the blue-white of well water steeped three days. In his hand he clutched half a peach-wood token, carved with a single character—Ci, "mercy." The corners shone where his grip had polished them. The town coroner turned him over and said it was neither illness nor violence; the pulse had stopped at the midnight hour, as if a breath had been drawn gently out of him, with no sign of struggle at all.

"This token," the coroner said, dropping his voice and glancing toward the door, "is a pilgrim's tag from the Temple of Compassionate Bones. The lad must have gone there to ask for something. He asked—and then he was gone."

Shen Jiu turned the peach-wood token over and over. He had heard of the Temple of Compassionate Bones. A ruined mountain shrine whose incense burned with an unnatural fervor; from a hundred li around, those who sought children or cures flocked there, saying the clay Bodhisattva was the most responsive of all, that any vow made before it was surely answered. Yet the temple never raised a stele, never recorded a name; pilgrims came and went like smoke, and no one could even say the priest's true title—folks only ever called the old Taoist "the Master of the Temple."

"The lad," the coroner went on, "clutching the temple's tag, must have entrusted his body to them for keeping. Will you take him on your way? The town will cover the few coins of foot-money."

Shen Jiu had no wish to take it. In all his years carrying the dead to their rest, he never went where the incense burned thick—such places swarmed with eyes, and a heavy corpse-reek invited trouble; and the Temple of Compassionate Bones had always carried a queer name. Yet the lad's hand would not unclench; the fingers had stiffened into hooks, as if he had swallowed a word and refused, even in death, to spit it out. Shen Jiu sighed, latched the chest, shouldered it, and turned toward the mountain.

II. The Mountain Road

The path ran west out of Qingxi Town and narrowed with every step. The fir trees on either side grew so tall they shut out the sky; even at noon only a few threads of light slipped through. Shen Jiu carried the chest half a day until his calves began to ache—but the smell reached him first.

It was the smell of incense ash. Not the sharp bite of fresh burning, but the sweet, rank reek of ash long laid down and thick, stirred up by the wind—mingled with something he could not name, like old blood-clothes gone rotten in a stew. He had smelled its like as a child on the plague field: the breath of corpses steeped three or four days. Yet here the stink was wrapped in incense, and the incense wrapped in rot, layer upon layer, forcing its way up his nose.

Mist rose from the valley floor and wound about his ankles, cold enough to pierce. He felt, suddenly, that the chest on his back had grown lighter, as if the one inside were also smelling it, and had sat up to do so. He shook his head and cursed his own nerves—twelve years carrying the dead, what had he not seen?

But the silence of this mountain was wrong. No insects sang, no birds called; even the wind through the fir-needles was muffled, as if a hand were clamped over its mouth. There was only the sound of his own steps, and the growing reek of ash, leading him down into the fold of the hills.

When dusk pressed down, he saw the temple.

III. The Temple of Compassionate Bones

The Temple of Compassionate Bones was not large: three courts, two cloisters, plaster flaked from the walls, weeds sprouting from the eaves. Yet the three characters of its name above the gate had been freshly gilded, and in the failing light they gave off an oily gleam, as if someone had just licked them. Strangest of all were the offerings before it—beneath the stone steps stood rank upon rank of unburned incense sticks, some still smoking, some spent, yet their thin columns of smoke twisted together into a single thread that drove straight up toward heaven, as if to punch a hole through the mountain, lingering long and refusing to scatter.

He pushed at the unlatched gate. The hinge did not creak. But the row of bronze bells hung along the back of the porch, stirred by the night wind, fell silent all at once—not ringing, but dumb, as if a hand had seized each clapper and gripped it tight, so it would not even sway.

No one came to meet him. In the main hall stood three clay Bodhisattvas, each some ten feet high, their gilt flaking. Yet the clay figures bore an unease he could not name: the shoulders, the arms, the hanging hands were not the rounded, full proportions of ordinary statuary, but seemed cast from living bodies, even the crook of the fingers distinct. Shen Jiu drew near, and by the light of the ever-burning lamp on the offering table his spine turned suddenly cold.

The hanging hand of the Bodhisattva had split along a fine crack at the little finger, and from that crack showed something pale and raw—not clay, but bone. A joint of a human finger, set into the clay, yellowed by incense smoke, yet still recognizable in shape; the pad of the finger was polished bright, as if stroked countless times.

He stepped back half a pace. The ever-burning lamp gave a sudden pop, and in its flicker he thought he saw the Bodhisattva's eyes move—but when he looked again, they were only two black holes, empty of anything at all.

IV. The Master of the Temple

"Honored guest comes to deliver a bone?"

The voice came from behind the hall, rasping like sandpaper on tile. Shen Jiu turned. An old Taoist stood in the shadows, his robe washed white, patched upon patched, his face seamed deep enough to trap incense ash—yet his eyes burned with an unnatural brightness, like two coals buried in cold ash, glowing faintly.

"The lad clutched the temple's tag," Shen Jiu set down the chest and brushed off the dust. "He entrusted me to bring him here for keeping."

The old Taoist did not answer, only stared at the chest a long while, then slowly pulled his mouth into a smile whose every crease held ash, a smile that made the skin crawl. "Good, good. The Temple of Compassionate Bones takes in nameless bones, and never turns away one who comes." He stepped aside. "Follow me. The keeping-place is at the back."

Shen Jiu followed him through the main hall and down a narrow cloister. Night wind ran through the passage and snapped the scripture-banner on the offering table; the banner was not painted with the usual sutras but with row upon row of tiny characters, and when he leaned close he saw they were all manners of death—drowned, starved, plague, unnamed, unnamed, unnamed. His heart tightened and he quickened his step to keep up.

The cloister wall was set with many small niches, and the niches held no gods, only tablets—nameless spirit-tablets of black-lacquered wood, rank on rank from floor to ceiling, one against another, like a cellar of stacked firewood, or graves lined up on a potter's field.

"All these?"

"Nameless bones in keeping." The old Taoist did not turn his head. "The Temple of Compassionate Bones has stood over a hundred years, and taken in only the nameless dead of fate. The Bodhisattva requires a hundred bones made whole before it will show its power. With each nameless bone that comes, one is set into the clay. Now we lack the last."

Shen Jiu's step halted. "The last?"

At the cloister's end the old Taoist stopped and pushed open a heavy wooden door. Beyond was no hall but a low stone vault, so cold it bit to the bone. On the wall burned a few ever-lamps, and beneath them stood row upon row of nameless tablets, one against another, like graves lined on a potter's field. Before the tablets, the floor was marked in white lime with square upon square of grid; most were already filled—yet the words were not names, only a year and a manner of death: such-and-such year, drowned; such-and-such year, starved; such-and-such year, plague; such-and-such year, unnamed.

The last square was empty, its border traced in white lime, and within it were carved only two words:

The One Who Comes.

V. The Bone Vault

"The One Who Comes," Shen Jiu read the two words, his throat tightening. "What 'one who comes'?"

The old Taoist paced two steps in the vault; the ever-lamp drew his shadow long across the wall of tablets, like one more nameless stone. "The Bodhisattva of this temple is molded from a hundred bones. A hundred nameless skeletons, one bone from each, set into the clay—only then can the Bodhisattva open its eyes, show its power, and answer the pilgrims' vows." He paused, and dropped his voice lower still, until it was almost at Shen Jiu's ear. "Yet among the hundred bones, after the ninety-ninth, what is wanted is the bone-bearer's own bone."

Shen Jiu did not understand. "What do you mean?"

"I mean," the old Taoist turned, those coal-hot eyes fixing him straight, "that each bone-bearer, having delivered the last nameless corpse into the temple, becomes himself the hundredth. What the Bodhisattva has ever wanted was never ninety-nine corpses, but ninety-nine corpses and one man willing to stay. This temple has stood a hundred years and more, and you are the ninth."

In the vault the silence was so deep he could hear the lamp-wick crackle. Shen Jiu's back against the cold stone, he suddenly recalled the road that had brought him—the coroner's words that the lad's pulse "stopped at midnight, as if a breath were drawn out"; the temple that never raised a stele or kept a name; the wall of nameless tablets, stacked floor to ceiling with not a crack between.

"In this temple of yours," he asked slowly, "where did the eight bone-bearers before me go?"

The old Taoist laughed, a laugh without warmth, like the wind in the vault. "All came to fullness. Look at the tablets on the wall"—he pointed to the innermost one, its wood gone black, its corners worn smooth—"carved: 'such-and-such year, bone-bearer, unnamed.' Seven more stand before it. One after another they brought the bones in and left themselves behind. The Bodhisattva's power feeds the incense; the incense feeds the willingness to bring bones. You think the pilgrims bow to the Bodhisattva? They bow to the vows piled up by the eight bone-bearers before them."

Something in Shen Jiu turned clear. He turned to the row of tablets; the innermost few were indeed older than the rest, their wood blackened, polished bright by handling, as if someone came each day to brush them. The newer ones outside still bore the knife's fresh marks, and a green-wood rawness.

"The pilgrims come for children, for cures," the old Taoist went on, "and they do not know that the Bodhisattva they bow to carries ninety-nine nameless skeletons in its belly, lacking one—lacking the bone-bearer himself. The Bodhisattva's miracles are bought with these bones. Behind every 'answered' vow stands a corpse without name or surname. The lad you brought is the ninety-ninth."

VI. The Pilgrims

Before the words had faded, footsteps sounded outside the gate. Several pilgrims climbed the dark with lanterns: a woman carrying an infant, a young man supporting his blind old mother, and a lame man on a crutch who crawled on his knees to the hall and stuffed a bundle of paper money into the burner; the grey ash, caught by the heat, whirled up and plastered his face.

"Bodhisattva spare her, my mother's sickness—" the woman murmured, setting the infant on the offering table. The child neither cried nor fussed, but opened a pair of murky, heavy-lidded eyes and stared straight at the clay Bodhisattva, as if gazing back into those two black holes.

Shen Jiu stood in the shadows of the cloister and watched, a feeling he could not name in his chest. These people believed, truly. They had groped through the dark from dozens of li away, knelt on the cold stone, and knocked their foreheads until they bled, begging only that the Bodhisattva open an eye. They did not know the Bodhisattva's eyes were only cracks in clay, did not know a human finger lay embedded in the mud, did not know that beneath the very brick they bowed to pressed who knew how many nameless bones.

The lame man finished his kowtow and rose; as he did he glanced at Shen Jiu, his eyes muddy yet carrying a devout, ferocious resolve. "The Master says, so long as the heart is true, the Bodhisattva answers," he rasped. "This leg of mine—the Bodhisattva's miracle cured it." And he hitched up the empty length of trouser-leg—not cured, but cut away. The stump bore an ugly scar, as if something had gnawed it.

Shen Jiu said nothing. He saw the infant in the woman's arms suddenly twist its mouth—not a smile, but the very same curve he had seen on the Bodhisattva's face, in the crack where the little finger split the clay.

The old Taoist saw the pilgrims down the mountain. When he returned he held a fresh stick of incense, which he set in the burner; the smoke twisted once more into a single rising thread. "You see," he said to Shen Jiu, "they believe. Believing, they can never be made whole; yet not believing, why would they come at all? The Temple of Compassionate Bones takes in precisely this belief, and the bones pressed down beneath it. You saw that child just now? His mother came for a son, and got one; but what is got must be repaid."

"Repaid how?"

"With a nameless bone." The old Taoist said it flatly. "The Bodhisattva does not answer for nothing. A son is taken—someone must be put in his place. The lad you brought, perhaps he repaid another's debt; and you, perhaps, repay his."

VII. The One Who Comes

Deep night came. Shen Jiu was given a place to rest in the temple, but he could not sleep. He rose in the dark and walked again to the vault, and by the ever-lamp read the last empty square—the two words "The One Who Comes," traced in white lime, giving off a cold light, like two coffins set side by side.

He thought suddenly of himself. Twelve years ago he too had been a man without a name; his parents died in the plague, and he was dug from the pit with half a breath left. Since then he had followed Master Mo north and south, and never kept a proper name. "Shen Jiu"—Nine—was a name his master had tossed off, saying the ninth apprentice, so call him Nine. How many nameless bones had he carried in his life? He could not count. Each one, like this lad, had clutched at something, swallowed something, come without name, gone without name.

He had thought himself only a passer-through, carrying the dead to where they belonged, never staying long. Yet what the Temple of Compassionate Bones wanted was precisely the one who stayed.

He turned to look back at the main hall. The clay Bodhisattva wavered in the night, its bone-baring hand hanging, as if waiting. The ever-lamp jumped and flickered, casting the Bodhisattva's shadow on the wall, a shadow far larger than the clay, as if it would stand and reach out.

Shen Jiu remembered the old Taoist's words: a hundred bones made whole, lacking only the bone-bearer himself. He looked down at his own hands. The knuckles were coarse and hard, worn by years of bearing the dead; on the left little finger ran an old split, from the year he fell carrying a heavy corpse, which still ached in the damp. He thought suddenly: if he truly became the hundredth, set into the clay, whose finger-bone would show outside? The left little finger, like the Bodhisattva's? Or another?

The thought turned him cold through, cold enough that the chill sweated out from the very seams of his bones.

VIII. The Choice

Near dawn the old Taoist came. In his arms he bore the lad's body, laid out and wrapped in white cloth, the peach-wood token pressed to the chest. "The bone should be set," he said. "Having brought him, you are fated. The Temple of Compassionate Bones never forces a man to stay—yet in a hundred years not one bone-bearer has left empty-handed."

Shen Jiu looked at the white-wrapped body. The lad's peach-wood token was still there, the character Ci smudged dark by incense ash. He remembered the coroner's words—the lad had not died of sickness or violence, but had a breath "gently drawn out." Now he understood: that was the Bodhisattva's taking. The lad came to ask a vow; the vow was answered, and his life was taken in payment, becoming one bone in the Bodhisattva's clay—the ninety-ninth.

"What if I do not stay?" Shen Jiu asked.

The old Taoist looked at him, and for the first time those coal-hot eyes dimmed, like coals about to die. "If you do not stay, the temple lacks one bone, and can never be made whole. The Bodhisattva cannot open its eyes, the pilgrims' vows go unanswered, and the vows piled by the eight bone-bearers before you are piled in vain. Yet you may walk out that mountain gate"—he raised a hand toward the tablets on the wall—"but you cannot walk out of the two words 'The One Who Comes.' Having looked upon them today, you are already the one who comes. The Temple of Compassionate Bones does not lock men in; it locks those who have looked."

Shen Jiu was silent a long while.

He remembered the coroner's dropped voice in Qingxi Town, the infant's murky eyes in the woman's arms, the lame man's empty trouser-leg, the wall of nameless tablets, the joint of finger-bone showing from the Bodhisattva's clay, and Master Mo signing "Don't look back" on his deathbed. The corpses he had carried all his life—it turned out they had gone, one by one, into this temple; he had thought himself ferrying the dead, when all along he was the one being ferried, stage by stage, to this vault.

"Whether I stay or not," he said softly, "this temple is waiting for me."

The old Taoist did not answer. He laid the white-wrapped body gently in the center of the vault, turned, and withdrew to the door, leaving it open a crack. Night wind slipped through the gap and made the ever-lamp flicker between bright and dark, and set the shadows of the wall of tablets swaying, as if they would wake.

Shen Jiu stood before the empty square. The two words "The One Who Comes" looked at him coldly.

He reached out a hand and touched his left little finger; the old split gleamed pale in the lamplight—

(Here the dread is left unfinished. The recorder does not know whether Shen Jiu at last set down that one bone. Only the bronze bells at the mountain gate are heard—dumb, all night long.)

IX. From the Recorder of the Midnight Register

The Recorder says:

The matter of the Temple of Compassionate Bones was told to me by Shen Jiu in person, at the midnight hour; having spoken, he shouldered his chest and went out, and was seen no more. I have examined the local gazetteer of the mountain, and indeed there is an old record of the "Temple of Compassionate Bones," which says that in the early Qing a wandering Taoist built a hut here and molded three Bodhisattvas, and the incense grew prosperous; yet the temple raised no stele and kept no names, and pilgrims came and went without register, so that in a hundred years and more not one left a surname. In some year of the Guangxu reign a mountain flood broke the temple and destroyed the clay, and within were found heaps of white bones; the county record notes only "a certain number of unnamed bones," and sets down nothing else, nor tells whence they came.

I once climbed the mountain alone, and at the old temple site found half a broken stele, without a single character upon it, only a square frame carved, within which something had once been written and afterwards ground smooth. The mountain folk still burn incense before the site, and say that at midnight there are dumb bell-sounds, and a chill wind threading the cloisters from the seams of bone, and a small child standing on the steps, neither crying nor fussing, opening murky, heavy-lidded eyes.

The Recorder dares not assert that Shen Jiu at last left that one bone. Yet examining the matter closely: this so-called "hundred bones made whole"—does the Bodhisattva require the bones, or does man require a place to believe? What do the pilgrims kneel to—a spirit, or the vow in their own hearts that they cannot let go? The words of the old Taoist, the account of Shen Jiu, are each but one man's telling, and truth is hard to know; yet the mountain folk burn incense as before, seek children and cures as before, and the two words "The One Who Comes" in that square remain as before.

The Recorder records only this: whoever enters this temple and sees the words "The One Who Comes" is already the one who comes; seen or not seen, the bones are waiting. In every man's heart stands a Temple of Compassionate Bones; every man bears a nameless bone, and every man waits for a "one who comes" willing to stay. Whether Shen Jiu left that one bone no longer matters—what matters is that the empty square remains, coldly, waiting for the next man willing to stay one more night.

Here the record ends. Beyond the window the night wind threads the cloisters, as if with dumb bells. I lay down my brush, and dare not look back.