I was sitting in a room on the second floor of a townhouse in Spain, reading my own memoir on a screen.
My outlook on life was strange. There must have been others who saw the world this way.
I asked the AI. It said my outlook was close to Ta Hui, a Chinese Zen master who lived nine hundred years ago.
Ta Hui did not invent the koan. Koans had existed three hundred years before him — records of old masters, used in sermons to illustrate a point. Monks wrote poetic phrases to show they had grasped the hidden meaning. In time it became an intellectual game. They were studying the finger instead of looking at the moon.
Ta Hui changed the meditation instructions. He told students to stop treating the Koan like a poem to be understood and start treating it like a red-hot iron ball in their throats, that would shatter their minds, and force them to see the Truth.
I found his letters in a book called Swampland Flowers. Beautiful in places. But something bothered me. I went for a walk.
The promenade ran on the edge of a cliff, twenty meters above the sea. The breeze was salty. Sunlight glinted off the water and the gulls rode the warm air without effort.
When I returned, I knew what was bothering me.
Ta Hui’s writing was for insiders. A brotherhood of the awakened nudging each other in a private language that looks like plain speech but isn’t. If you don’t already belong to the world it refers to, you stand outside the door trying to decipher.
And yet the AI was right. We were after the same thing. He shattered the mind with koans. I told stories about El Tigre in Island Margarita and the Renaissance painters putting the eye into the center of the world. Different hands. The same moon.