Dream-Seeking at Nine Heavens Cave
Dream-Seeking at Nine Heavens Cave By Li Shuiyun The sky was clear blue after the rain. From the dense shade on both sides of the road, dropping straight down and then gently turning sideways, one arrives at the threshold leading to a dream. Descending slowly along dozens of steps, the coolness gradually grows stronger. The clear, peaceful Great Compassion Mantra rises together with a faint mist, and several small houses are lit so transparently that they look like lotuses left behind when the Buddha departed. From this high vantage point, the huge hall is filled with a sense of water, yet only the sound of water is heard, and one cannot see...
Dream-Seeking in Jiutian Cave
Li Shuiyun
The sky was clear blue after the rain. From the dense shade on both sides of the road, I went straight down, then gently turned sideways, and arrived at the threshold leading to a dream.
Descending slowly along dozens of steps, the coolness gradually thickened. The clear, serene "Great Compassion Mantra" rose and spread with a faint watery mist. Several small houses were lit up transparently by the lights, like lotuses left behind when a Buddha departed. Looking down from above, the huge hall was filled with a watery atmosphere, yet only the sound of water could be heard; where the water dripped from could not be seen. Following the tiny splashes rising from the shallow pool before me upward with my eyes, I still could not find the exact place, as if those drops were someone's tears, floating in the hidden air, dripping down even as they pondered.
This was how I felt the second time I came to Jiutian Cave, just after entering the Welcome Hall.
The first time was more than 10 years ago, when I had just returned from the north. Before the black soil powder between my fingers was washed clean, I was dragged in by a colleague. Having lived on the vast Northeast Plain for 17 years, suddenly entering this cave more than 400 meters below the surface felt like falling from a high peak into a huge pit, panicked and unable to tell depth or height, dazed and unable to distinguish north from south or east from west. At that time Jiutian Cave had just been discovered. There were no colored lights, no route markers, and the tourist path was steep and muddy. In many places one had to hold one's breath and climb through. Besides, I still had to carry a hurricane lamp in my hand. Wherever its dim yellow halo fell, there was a chilly air, jagged rocks, and shadowy ghosts. With one step high and one step low, trembling, I had no time to look carefully at the scenery in the cave. When I finally crawled out of the cave mouth, a kind of panic at having survived a disaster could not help but seep from the bottom of my heart.
Compared with Yellow Dragon Cave, Jiutian Cave seems poor, solitary, and desolate.
If Yellow Dragon Cave is a peerless beauty carefully packaged and grandly presented, Jiutian Cave is exactly a woman who, after enduring the vicissitudes of life, has washed away her splendor. She does not have the former's radiant glances and myriad charms, but she is quiet and true to herself. She neither flatters nor refuses, does not care whose gaze falls on her, and only sits calmly in a corner of the green mountains, immersed in her own world of meditation and memory.
About ninety percent of the stalactites, stalagmites, and stone pillars in Jiutian Cave are already dead, their whole bodies suffused with a dim gray-white or gray-black that no longer holds life. But they are tall and magnificent, possessing an innate grandeur, and after death they still painfully propped up that magnificence and grandeur in this vast cave palace for hundreds of millions of years, letting one sense from that decadent desolation an unquestionable nobility and pride. This discovery made me stop involuntarily when I reached a huge stone pillar. The flowing water of time had printed rings of years over and over on the surface of this gray pillar, and the wind, after leaving countless fine and passionate kisses, once again vanished without a trace, making one think that beauty and love are in fact both wounds of life.
Looking at it, then looking back at the silent underground forest of peaks around it that had likewise lost its vitality, a chill suddenly rose from the bottom of my heart. At this moment the damp cold unique to karst caves began quietly climbing and spreading from the soles of my feet through my whole body, and a vast, boundless feeling, together with the dense mist in the cave, slowly surged toward me from all directions. I suddenly realized that, in fact, I had intruded into a kingdom that had once been glorious——
In this rich kingdom, in layer upon layer of fields of a thousand autumns, the soil on the plowshares still gave off the fresh fragrance of rice paddies, and the small flowers on the field ridges were shyly dreaming spring dreams. In the Tujia mountain villages, chickens and dogs could be heard, and cooking smoke and thin mist shrouded the warm days in the stilted houses. In the distance were emerald tea gardens, fragrant orchards on the ridges, luxuriant botanical gardens, and birds flying and singing…… In Lovers' Valley, the young man and woman who had loved each other for a thousand years were deep in intimate talk. The woman's rippling glances were like dew rolling on crabapple blossoms, her embroidered lapels gently swaying the willow waist in the wind, while the man's devoted confession seemed thin and powerless before such immense happiness, and he was at a loss what to do. In the Jade Screen Palace the lights were brilliant, huge tassels hung from luxurious curtains, incense smoke curled around great bronze tripods, the swords at warriors' waists and the whisks in eunuchs' hands faced each other left and right, setting off the majesty of the sovereign. In the hall receiving congratulations, the ministers still lay prostrate on the ground. And in the rear palace, exquisite music, faint delicate fragrance, the smooth sound of jade pendants, and light footsteps lingered and turned in winding corridors and secluded galleries, looking forward eagerly……
……But all of this stopped at the same moment, ended, ended at the most beautiful peak moment of life, as if the sharp blade of time flashed coldly, and the present was frozen into an eternal past, leaving only the endless mystery hidden in broken walls and ruined ridges for people to guess at foolishly——
What power destroyed the former glory of this kingdom in one stroke and buried all that radiance underground? And when was time suddenly cut off? Morning? Dusk? Or the middle of a starry night?
Could it be that some mysterious spell or bewitchment, by a god who hated out of jealousy, on a night filled with cold stars, smiling coldly and lightly snapping his fingers, turned that fresh sunlight in the sky into a desolate underground ruin…… And that emerald river, the leaping waves on the river, the dragonflies vibrating their wings on foxtail grass, the singing that flew in the sunlight, the light wind on the treetops, the cold dew on the tips of grass…… By whom were all these suddenly turned to stone?
Or perhaps it was war, but what kind of war could make the wealth and pride this kingdom had painstakingly built over many years collapse with a roar overnight? And what kind of tragic scene could make all lives that witnessed it stop breathing in grief at that instant?
Or perhaps this was simply heaven's plan, a calamity, the will of heaven. All lives would inevitably be doomed, all pure souls would be abducted, and because of this abduction they would ascend, casting only the illusory prosperity back to the earth, and letting this prosperity slowly die in boundless darkness…… Otherwise, how could there be such soul-stirring, resolute stillness and solidification?
I wound my way among stalagmites and stone pillars. The colored lights behind me quietly went out one by one just after I passed, so that when I happened to look back I could not clearly see the road by which I had come, while the thin water mist followed and entwined me throughout. This winding path and water mist conjured my imagination inch by inch, then extinguished it bit by bit, as if unwilling for me to carry the secrets I had explored out of this world, so that after I left everything could return to meditation in boundless darkness, leaving in my heart only a vastness separated from this life and an infinite awe for life.
Jiutian Cave gets its beautiful name from its unique nine skylights connected to the outside world, but standing inside the cave one can only vaguely see one of them. The bright light outside the cave projected through the skylight onto the cave interior gave the stone wall a faint halo, and the omnipresent mist curling around that halo gave it an indescribable depth and mystery. As for the underground streams running crisscross through the cave, I would rather believe they are the day-and-night outpourings of the souls of this kingdom after its fall. These outpourings, from the walls, from the cave ceiling, from every crack in the rocks, drip by drip reveal the bitterness and desolation at the bottom of their hearts.
On both visits to Jiutian Cave I had no chance to glimpse the beauty of the Crystal Palace. The first time was because it had not yet been discovered, "raised in a deep boudoir unknown to others." This time it was locked deep, "I knock on the wooden gate for a long time and no one opens." Standing on the slope opposite, I could only let a few signboards flickering in the gloom stir boundless imagination in my heart. But I was already satisfied, simply because all encounters in this world arise from karma and end from karma; meeting comes from karma, and not meeting also comes from karma. I am willing to let myself imagine all that cannot be known, rather than use those scattered traces of gilded green to set off the boundless desolation and mystery within this cave palace. Such contrast would weaken the spiritual shock brought by the unique beauty of decay in Jiutian Cave, because no matter what scenery it is: flowing water, peaks, floating clouds, windblown sand, even a brick or a stone, a blade of grass or a tree, it is not merely superficial splendor for appreciation, but a witness to historical vicissitudes, a beautiful wound on the tree of time.