The Painted Wall
At midnight the painted maidens step from the temple wall; a youth follows and finds his self no longer his own.
Upon the wall of the Temple of the Tranquil Bodhi were painted scores of scattering-flower celestial maidens, their sleeves adrift, their brows and eyes lifelike. The scholar Meng Yi, passing, lodged there; sitting alone beneath the lamp, he felt the gaze of all those painted women upon him, as if they would stir. At midnight he heard laughter from within the wall. He looked, and a painted maiden had drawn aside the curtain and descended, beckoning him in. Yi drew near; the wall's colour melted like water, and his body followed without his knowing. Within were pavilions not of the mortal world; the maidens, seeing Yi, some shrank and some welcomed, and led him before one who said, 'Here is the new bridegroom.' Yi, young and startled, would have fled; but looking back at his own form, he found it changed into a painted youth, clad and crowned alike — while his true body sat rigid by the lamp, another man outside the picture. Then he knew his self was no longer his own, and his soul lodged in the wall. Even as he floundered in fear, suddenly the old monk struck the chime, its sound like rending silk. Yi started, and opened his eyes — still beneath the lamp, the maidens on the wall as before, their sleeves unmoved. He rose and looked upon his own body; his clothes and shoes were as they had been, save a coolness at his back, as of one pushing from behind. The monk said: 'It was illusion of the wall. Your heart moved, and so you entered; the heart moved and the body becomes a guest, the body a guest and the self is not the self. Now you have returned — look no more upon this wall.' Yi bowed his thanks, and to his life's end dared not gaze upon it again. The Chronicler of the Strange remarks: A day within the painting, a moment without; yet whether the self be host or guest turns on a single moving thought. The world chases outward things, and the soul is ever a guest in sound and colour — is it only the painted wall? What Yi trembled at, 'my self not my own,' is but the daily footing of all living things.