What the Wall Showed Me
The legend of Bodhidharma's nine years facing the wall is among the most famous tales in the murim of the Jianghu.
After arduous training that one could hardly say whether to call sudden enlightenment or gradual cultivation, the Great Master Bodhidharma is said to have refined the very foundations of Shaolin.
A temple of a thousand years. Shaolin of the Northern Song. All the martial arts under heaven come from Shaolin. The foremost sect of the Jianghu.
If all of that glory truly began with Bodhidharma's nine years before the wall, then the greatness of wall-facing meditation is not to be doubted.
But there is a fact that must not be forgotten: it is not that staring at a wall for nine years makes a man a Great Master — it is that those nine years had value because the one who sat before it was Bodhidharma.
"Did you gain anything?"
"...I don't know."
Ten days of silent wall meditation, and my answer meant that I had gained nothing.
At least, that was how it felt to me.
Whether it was because ten days is but an instant beside nine years, or because my aptitude is infinitely modest next to Bodhidharma's, there was no way of knowing.
"Good."
And yet, hearing my answer, Sword Emperor Mugeuk's face broke into a smile.
Masters treading the higher path sometimes forget sleep and food, and no one thinks much of it — but ten days of silent wall meditation had been an ordeal worthy of the name, even for me.
What I mean is, graciously accepting the Sword Emperor's habit of beaming at me for admitting I had gained nothing was a tall order. My nerves were frayed raw, you see.
"And what, exactly, is so good about it?"
I cannot deny that my question came out a touch sharp.
"What pleases me is that you are honest with yourself."
"...?"
This was something I had noticed more than once: the Sword Emperor's words did not lend themselves to quick understanding. Whether that was the airy vagueness common to Daoists long in the Way, or simply Mugeuk Jinin's natural temperament, I could not say.
As if he understood my feelings perfectly, the Sword Emperor smiled with benevolence. A youthful face that looked not even twenty, yet steeped in the serene emptiness of an ancient master.
"It is so because all knowing begins with the recognition of one's own ignorance. For the most part, when your kind of martial folk sit ten days before a wall, they come out chattering that the first sprout of enlightenment has found them, or that their inner cultivation has matured and their spirit has grown. But you said yourself that you did not know — so I take it that you carry no useless vanity, and that is a fine thing."
"Hmm."
Perhaps it was a residue of the life I had lived as Myeong-gae, but I could hardly deny that it was praise. He had never once styled himself a Great Master — and out of respect for the stature my Sword Emperor had earned, how could I not feel pleased by his regard?
"Behold."
"...!"
The moment the words left him, I could not help but startle. For there, hanging before the Sword Emperor in perfect solitude, was the spiritual Heart Sword I had once seen on the sparring stage.
A brilliant radiance that surpassed even the Formless Sword was there.
"Try to grasp it."
As though the Sword Emperor's suggestion had become truth itself, my hand stretched toward the Heart Sword unbidden.
Tup.
It could hardly be called a sensation of the material world, and yet I had, unmistakably, touched the spiritual Heart Sword.
As if he had known I would, the Sword Emperor's smile deepened.
"This old Daoist has named it the Spiritual Perception Way."
"...What in the world is this?"
It seemed those ten days of silent wall meditation had not been for nothing after all.
Ten days. That was the time I had spent with Sword Emperor Mugeuk, and at the same time the time I had devoted to silent wall meditation.
Time is relative by nature, but where the training of the martial arts is concerned, this was a span I could hardly bring myself to call long. Ten days was a stretch that, far from unveiling any sublime mystery, was barely enough to melt a single complete form into the body. Is it not common sense that the achievements of martial arts are measured in years, not days?
Of course, that is no license to equate ten days of silent wall meditation with ten days of ordinary life. As I said before — time is relative.
Some might ask whether simply keeping one's mouth shut and staring at a wall could really be so taxing to the martial spirit. In truth, before those ten days, I had stood in much the same camp — so allow me to enlighten the ignorant and benighted.
To add a personal impression: asked what makes wall meditation so difficult, I would answer — "myself."
I cannot say how it was for the Great Master Bodhidharma, nor how it will be for Cheon-am Jinin, who is to carry his own wall meditation on for another three hundred and fifty-five days. But through those hours before the wall, I saw myself inside the unyielding stone.
— Mom...
The Dancheon Myeong of childhood, searching for a mother whose face he had never once seen, took shape within my mental imagery — curled up with a blanket wrapped around him in his quarters on the outskirts of the Dancheon Clan compound, grasping for any warmth he could find.
— ...Master?
— Now, now. None of that 'master' talk.
A fragment of the Third Elder flickered past as well.
— Mother?
— I am not your mother.
Then came the figure of Baek Yeo-hae, the woman who had once been so cold to me.
— Pathetic.
I remembered, too, the words Dancheon Hak had left in a low voice at the end of the contest for Young Patriarch, his blade resting against my throat.
— If I had been given a chance as well...
I had pretended it meant nothing, but I could see my own back in that memory — turned away from the clan, swallowing down the burn of humiliation.
— Haah, fuck's sake.
The life of Myeong-gae — untroubled, and yet full of hardship — flowed on.
— It's horrific...
Myeong-gae, drinking in the carnage of the Great War of Righteousness and Evil with his own two eyes, wept softly.
All of it had happened once. Most of it no longer existed at all.
The important thing was this: among all those faces was a lesser me, one who fell far short of what I now expect of myself.
Truthfully, had this restlessness found me late at night beneath my blanket instead of here in meditation, it would be fair to call it exactly the sort of time I'd have spent drilling kicking techniques against that blanket.
The me inside the wall kept flowing.
— Why do you want to become Clan Head?
— Because I don't want to live with regrets.
I met Uncle Yeobaek.
— Will you stand with me?
— With you? Any time.
Brother Chun-baek broke straight through the wall.
— Heh heh.
I won my father's acknowledgment.
— You!
Yang Su-rin and I stopped being enemies.
— Kwahahaha!
And a new bond had blossomed as well — the Sovereign of Destruction.
"..."
When the long retrospection finally ended, what came calling on me was anxiety.
What are you anxious about? I asked myself.
The future. That was the answer I gave.
The future — or to be precise, the future in which the Great War of Righteousness and Evil arrives — was the true wellspring of my anxiety. I had declared with my own mouth that I was certain of a future in which I would erase that war, yet perhaps I had never fully believed my own words.
The once-in-an-age opportunity called regression. The preparations I had engineered through the power of information. The unforeseen coincidences that had visited me after my return. And the new bonds forged along the way. All of these together were what had made me who I now was.
I was no perfect god — how could my preparations, however meticulous, have unfolded exactly as planned? And unlike deficient me, there was one figure who had stood complete and godlike.
— A pleasure. This sovereign is Seol Cheon-sang, the Heavenly Demon of this age.
The Heavenly Demon Seol Cheon-sang — the man I myself had named "death that cannot be defied."
— Die now. I will send the rest along with you, so you need not be lonely.
Perhaps it was because his untouchable majesty had been branded so deeply into my mind.
Could I truly defeat him? Honestly, I did not know the answer. The future is, after all, precisely that which has not yet come — and at my core I remained an information broker, which made boundless optimism divorced from objectivity a difficult thing to muster.
— Now, as for what happened today...
— Boo. No answer from you again today, I see.
In truth, looking back, that was exactly how it had been. Whenever anxiety closed in on me, the Sword Emperor Mugeuk would appear at my side, spin a stretch of idle nonsense, and then vanish as though he had never been there at all.
Perhaps the Sword Emperor had read the imagery of me staring at nothing but that wall. He was, after all, a Daoist who walked realms of the unfathomable that I could not begin to comprehend — so I thought such a marvel might well have been within his power.
In any case... it had been a mere ten days.
Ten days had been long enough to relive every life I had lived, before my regression and after, and still leave time to drown in dread of the future — so the ten days of wall meditation had been amply long.
Even so...
What mechanism within that process had allowed me to perceive the spiritual, I could not say. Even my sharp mind could not grasp the faintest fragment of it, so it was a matter that deserved to be called a mystery. My gaze, which had known nothing but the wall for ten days, turned down to my own hand — and the sensation in the fingers that had touched the Sword Emperor's Heart Sword as though it were a thing of matter still tingled sharp. The Sword Emperor's name for it, the Spiritual Perception Way, was, as ever, exactly right.
"Myeong-ah."
"Yes."
"Boo."
In appearance we could have passed for peers, but the gap in our years was more than enough to make us grandfather and grandson — so settling on forms of address had been inevitable. And my habit of answering with a bare "Yes" was, it seems, not to his liking.
"Myeong-ah."
The Sword Emperor called again, and this time I chose to oblige.
"Yes, Elder Sword Emperor."
Only then did the Sword Emperor nod, his face full of satisfaction. It had been settled between us: he would call me Myeong, and I would call him "Elder Sword Emperor" or "Mugeuk Jinin."
The Sword Emperor was the first person since my father, Dancheon Gang, to earn my full and unreserved honorifics. It hardly seemed a momentous thing, and yet I decided it would be wise to keep it a secret from Yeom Gi-ha, the Sovereign of Destruction. "Elder Sovereign of Destruction"? Call him that, and I might well break out in hives.
Mugeuk Jinin, plainly delighted with the seniority now properly arranged, put a question to me.
"What is the most important thing in one's intent?"
Like a grand master bestowing a teaching, gravity had settled into the Sword Emperor's voice.
"Is this a Zen riddle?"
"If you think it so, then think it so."
The Sword Emperor's rather smug expression was irritating, but this was not a matter I could dismiss. It was not about seniority or standing — it was that I had failed to seize even a fragment of the Spiritual Perception Way he had awakened in me.
"Hmm."
I turned the question over and over. I knew from experience that in Zen dialogues, the answer often hides inside the question. What is most important in one's intent? After a long deliberation, the conclusion I reached was...
"I don't know."
I don't know. I was, it is true, growing comfortable with the thick skin I had learned in my Myeong-gae days — but not yet thick enough to claim knowledge of what I did not know. The words "mental imagery" did flicker through my mind, but rather than offer up an answer I could not stand behind, it seemed right to say I did not know.
The Sword Emperor grinned, and delivered his answer —
"The answer is mental imagery itself."
...or so he said.
"...Ah."
"Do you understand something now?"
"Ah... yes."
I forced down the "no" that had climbed all the way to my throat. I had brought this situation entirely upon myself, so the sting of it was mine to swallow as well. Still, a small rebuttal was in order.
"That said — I do paint my mental imagery every single day."
That was no lie. Ever since achieving the Unity of the Five Dantians and the Five Energies Converged at the Origin, it would be no exaggeration to say that not a day had passed without my painting that imagery. For a martial artist who has reached the Profound Realm, training the imagery matters far more than training the body — that was why.
"Do not cut off my words."
"Yes."
I had never once interrupted him, but it seemed best to simply agree. True, I had done nothing but stare at a wall — but ten days was more than enough time to learn what manner of man the Sword Emperor was.
"Imagery — and then belief. That would be the right answer."
"Belief, you say?"
"Yes. Belief."
"Hmm."
Myeong-gae had been an information broker. Since the life that left the deepest mark on me was Myeong-gae's, it would be no stretch to say that I, too, remained an information broker still. Information brokers are, by their nature, fond of concrete figures and tangible substance. Thanks to attaining the enlightenment of Five Energies Converged at the Origin through my own effort, I could accept even an abstraction like mental imagery — but wholly accepting his words, which bound belief to the martial arts, was another matter entirely.
"What is belief?"
"The heart that believes in something."
"Correct. Belief is also called faith. Then what is faith?"
Against a man pressing on with his Zen dialogue, it seemed right to deploy a skill learned in my Myeong-gae days.
"Faith would best be defined as the attitude of holding a thing to be true, regardless of whether concrete empirical evidence or any tangible substance actually exists."
I knew full well that those who savor Zen dialogues usually despise pedantic rhetoric. And yet the Sword Emperor nodded in satisfaction.
"Your words are correct."
"..."
I had failed. It seemed the Sword Emperor did not despise pedantic rhetoric after all. Once again I learned that the words of the supreme one of great Wudang were not to be taken lightly.
"The reason this old Daoist first began to probe deeply into the nature of faith was..."
For a long while after that, I had to endure the Sword Emperor's one-man lecture. Still, I would have to call it time that became blood and flesh to me.
"..."
That it was.