Wesley Mattson Writes

“What does it say of me, Tissa, that I have spent twenty years a monk in the forest, and I still grasp so desperately? Tell me, Tissa, if I am to ask you one more favor before you go, though this body has aged since we were boys in these woods, though my voice now sounds like gravel under wood sandals, am I wiser than I was?”

“Mahinda,” Tissa addressed his friend as a mother would her child. “how could your life not bear you fruit? You have lived as Gotama and the perfected saints have taught. There is surely not a monk in this forest whose actions align better with the path. I have no doubt you will be reborn a Radiant God, ruling over that which has no need for the pleasures of the five senses. Of this, esteemed Mahinda, I have no doubt.”

Through twenty years of daily meditation, of all the moments Mahinda felt he progressed on the path to the cessation of suffering, he had never felt a peace so pure. A clean coolness penetrated limb and vein inside limb. Blood inside vein flowed slower, dharma inside blood sighed with its own breath. Even his most successful meditations were stained somewhere in the periphery with an itch or pain, with Tissa or Ramadattha. Then, during the time it takes an acorn to fall from a tree, there was nothing.

The monk remembered the saint in this way, as a comforting presence in a moment of exceptional suffering. He remembered Tissa’s scar and how it moved as if tugged by a string when he smiled wide before leaving Mahinda for the last time. He remembered straining to make doubly long those final seconds of having the holiest alive in his sight.

At this moment Mahinda closed his eyes and saw clearly that wise men do not weave fate but negotiate with it. Surely a lifetime of joys deferred and destroyed had entitled him to a reward so simple and precious as a man. And just so surely he opened his eyes to an empty forest. The monk forgot the world as he walked to his quarters, sandals leaving long tracks behind him on the dirt path.