siddhi (I)

I was not long in that liminal captivity before the opportunity came to make for the hills. An hour's trainride north took us to a small buddhist monastery in a country laden with betel nut and tobacco plantations called Jia-yi. I was looking forward to the trip as I thought it would give me the opportunity to unravel some of my thoughts that had been knotted in the city's density.

I went under the auspices of a Taiwanese girl whose boyfriend rarely emerged from our old dorm: the often cooking, praying Pei, whose name can mean to spirit along, a name she quite often lives up to, as now. she reserved her chinese for punchlines and held to long disjointed english expositions. she came once a month, she told me, for the prostrations up and down a busy road. I thought this was not the brand of buddhism I had anticipated. her first time, before the callouses, the equanimity, the monk-like reserve had been difficult. her boyfriends mother had been at her side, looking hard, weighing her devotion. her knees had purpled from continuous impact, palms and nails encrusted with pavement and dirt. the praying, she said, helps me to clear my mind.

拜下去！拜起來！　

go down praying! rise up from prayer!

那無阿彌陀佛.

not without the fullness of the boddhisattva.

in prostrating, the knees give out in act of weakness first feigned and then, eventually, felt, internalized, believed. crouching head lowered, the forearms are overturned revealing the palm.

in regret, in sorrow. request the buddha's mercy.

then the fingers make a fist and turn over again to hoist the body back up. rising and falling ad infinitum. like the siddhi standing on fresh legs, later crumbling and decrepit, then rising again, in myriad lifetimes recapitulating the same devotion.

the nuns sang in droning perfect fifths of the buddha's travels:

"take one piece of each and all of the different kinds of vegetation - including grass, trees bushes rice hemp, bamboo and reeds - and one part of every kind of mountain, rock, and dust-mote. Then let us consider each piece and part to be a separate Ganges river. Then, again, take one grain of the sand in all those inconceivably great number of Ganges Rivers as one chiliocosm, and afterwards, take each mote of dust within each chiliocosm as one kalpa (lifetime). Finally, consider all the dust grains accumulated in each of these kalpas to be, themselves, converted to kalpas. Bodhisattva Ksitigarbha has endured one thousand times longer than this vast length of time since he realized the ten grades of accomplishment."

dogma and prayer: perhaps there is some resonance between the eye's dilation in fear and darkness and the dilation of time in the face of the inexplicable.

(牛) year

I sought some repreive from the city's insistence. the ox's epoch: air dense with the smoke of new years offerings, the streets plastered with totems of fortune and prosperity. he'd cast his bloodshot eye, dug his heel, bowed the coil of his horn. and now a foment roiled, you could hear the hiss of a million crackers from the rooftops. a city suspended in kitsch and confabulation. a week of projected shadows. but what good was all this to one who hadn't held the red envelope in his hand before he knew what all of it meant, hadn't passed below the spring banners first as an animal (child) on his mother's back? I could see the real world giving way to a latent redolence, but one for which I was blind and anosmic. on holiday, I suppose, the foreigner and the amnesiac become mutually indistinguishable.

winter baptism

There seems to be no darkness here that the luminescent sign posts of shops and hotels do not expose. No furthest extent, no haven in the trees, no center, no terminus. The city aggregates in all directions and the further one walks inside of it, the more one is convinced of its concrete infinitude. The maps here present a fantasy of mobility that the streets choke. The iterative swell of traffic from dawn to mid-morning intimidates. If only the grinning visages of the crouching locals would betray some secret - like the secret of their entrenchment, of all that they take to be mundane. A vacant stare is not but a mirror, and so we have only our reflections to see in the eyes of the oggling Taiwanese. A word of Mandarin is an entry, but it is Ta-Yu in muffled whispers, in close confidence, sung out in seven tones at the ancestral night markets.


I am certain of the edge of my map. Inland the street of my mind's eye and the memory of the still, color-coded grid whirl about in unruly concatenations. There is a reason why that bank of symbols is called a legend and not fact. But I am viscerally aware of the edge, and so, of late, I've endeavored to sniff it out. I head west with the sun and the diminishing line of buildings and the canal-fingers of the harbor. The best I can find on the first attempts are sparse liminal passageways. Fisherman's huts, graveyards, bridges to further landlocked settlements, listless dogs, vendors with no particular motivation to sell and shoppers with no money or desire to consume. A land of indecision, in-between, the vertigo of forboding, of a secret that I know lies somewhere near. I can smell it, brine, it's been on my mind since day-1 but no amount of searching has yielded its source.

So I assemble a small group to cast about with me. and we take a map. Still, we find nothing, just parks, not even an intimation of the ocean, it looms mythically in our minds, behind our words. We ask, is the beach far?
Oh yes, very far from here, and cold, too.
Could you show us on the map?
-inept fumbling, vague gestures-

We push on, on our own. Now we've found a tall bridge to further land, hopeless. As I crest the bridge however, I see that unmistakable shimmering. I race down as fast as my bike will take me. There is no sign welcoming, no entrance - just a shady waste of palm trees and would-be dunes, the smell of fire. The beach is deserted, it is winter for these people after all, but the sand is pristine and the waves are tall. The sun is setting so I take the opportunity to dive in: the water is refreshing and warm, I feel as refreshed and new as I have in months.

On the way back, riding along the canal, there is no rush, the city feels incredibly small and warm. For once, there is the distinct feeling of heading home.