TRANSMISSION

Deshan was dying, and he would not let anyone make a fuss about it.

He had been ill since the spring. A cough that would not leave, then a weariness that sleep did not touch, then the morning in August when he could not rise from his cushion at the end of the first sitting and Tenzin and I carried him back to his room between us. He weighed almost nothing. He apologized the whole way for the trouble.

Dr. Xu Yun examined him that afternoon and came out of the little room with his face carefully empty. In the four years since he had followed me up the mountain from Redding, Yun had become a monk in everything but his robe. But he was still a doctor, and he still could not hide from me what doctors know.

“Weeks,” he said quietly. “Perhaps a month or two. He refuses the hospital.”

“Of course he does.”

“You could try.” He did not look at me when he said it. He did not have to. Down at the gate, as there was every day now, a line of the sick and the hopeful stretched along the dirt road, waiting for the man from the television.

I went in to see Deshan that evening.

He was propped up on two thin pillows, looking out the window at the mountain. When I sat down beside him, he did not turn his head.

“No,” he said.

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You were about to put your hands on me.” He smiled at the mountain. “I can feel you thinking it from across the room. It is very loud.”

“Roshi, if I can—”

“You can. I know you can. I have watched you do it at the gate for four years.” Now he turned and looked at me, and his eyes were as clear as they had been in the diner in Redding, the night he had told me I was in hell. “And that is exactly why I am asking you not to.”

I did not understand. I said so.

Deshan was quiet for a while. Outside, the light was going gold on the snowfield near the summit.

“When you came to me,” he said, “you were a man who could not stand to lose. Every case. Every argument. Even the koan, you wanted to win.” He coughed, and waited for it to pass. “Then you stopped. You let it all fall. That is why you woke up. Not because you fought your way through. Because, for one morning, on a path with a broom, you stopped fighting.”

“I remember.”

“Now you have this gift. A real one. I do not understand it, and Yun does not understand it either, though he fills a great many notebooks pretending.” A faint smile. “And with it, you can win again. Against sickness. Against pain. Against death, a little. It is a beautiful thing, Xavier. I have seen children walk out of that gate who were carried in.”

He reached out and laid his thin, dry hand over mine.

“But be careful. A man who can win against death may start to believe that he must. That every loss is his failure. That he is the only thing standing between the world and its suffering.” His fingers tightened. “That is the old lawyer, wearing a robe. He will not come to you as an enemy. He will come as compassion.”

I looked down at our hands.

“So you want me to just let you go.”

“I want you to let me do the last thing I have to teach you.” His eyes were gentle and absolutely immovable. “I am going to die. It is nothing special. It is the most ordinary thing in the world. And I would like my student to sit beside me while it happens, and not do anything at all.”

He gave me Dharma transmission on the first Sunday in October.

There was no audience. Only the two of us in the little interview room where he had rung me out a hundred times, with the candle and the worn tatami and the brass bell between us. Tenzin had carried him there in his arms, and settled him on the cushion, and propped him upright with a folded blanket at his back, and then bowed and gone out and closed the door.

Deshan could barely hold his own posture anymore. But when he lifted the old black robe from the lacquered box beside him, his hands did not shake.

It had belonged to his teacher, and to his teacher’s teacher before him, a lineage that ran back across an ocean and through more than a thousand years. It was patched at both elbows and faded almost to gray along the shoulders. It smelled of incense and woodsmoke and, very faintly, of the man in front of me.

He laid it across my open hands. Then the bowl, black lacquer, chipped at the rim. Then a single sheet of rice paper on which he had written, in a hand I hardly recognized, the names of every teacher in the line, ending with his own, and beneath it, still wet, mine.

“Now you are a link in the chain,” he said. “Do not be a heavy one.”

I tried to say something. I could not.

Deshan looked at me for a long time. Then, with what was clearly an enormous effort, he reached forward and picked up the brass bell.

I thought he was going to ring me out, the way he always had.

Instead, he held it out to me.

“Your turn,” he said.

He lived eleven more days.

I sat with him through most of them. Yun came twice a day to check on him, and each time he took Deshan’s pulse and said nothing and went out again. Tenzin brought tea that no one drank and swept the floor of the little room, which was always clean.

Twice, in the long nights, I felt the current rise in my hands without my asking it to. Both times I felt Deshan stir on his pillow, as if he knew, and both times I set my hands flat on my knees and let it go back down. It was the hardest thing I have ever done. Harder than the wall. Harder than the ghosts.

On the last evening he asked me to make him a salad.

I looked at him, and he looked back at me with something very close to mischief in his face, and I understood. I went down to the kitchen and made it myself, lettuce and a few slices of tomato and a little oil, the way the bartender in Redding had made it, and brought it back on a plate with a glass of water.

He ate two bites. Then he set down his fork.

“There is no black and white,” he said. “Do you remember?”

“I remember.”

“Not in the world. And not in you.” He closed his eyes. “Not even in this.”

In the morning, Tenzin went in before the bell to help him dress for the first sitting, as he had every day for a month.

He came out again almost at once, and found me in the corridor, and could not find any English at all. He did not need it.

Deshan was sitting upright on his cushion, facing the window and the mountain beyond it. Somehow, alone, in the dark, he had found the strength to get there. His legs were crossed. His hands rested in his lap, thumbs lightly touching, in the cosmic mudra he had taught me on my first morning. His eyes were half open, the way he had always said to keep them: not looking at anything, and not looking away.

He was not breathing.

On the low table beside him lay a sheet of rice paper, folded once. His last poem. Monks in his lineage have written them for a thousand years, in the final hours, the way other men write wills.

I unfolded it. There were only four lines.

Sixty-six years

of trying to step outside

the mirror. This morning,

no one there to step.

I stood in the doorway for a long time.

Then I went to the zendo, where the others were waiting in the dark, and I took my place for the first time on the cushion at the head of the hall, and I picked up the brass bell, and I rang it.