Moonlight is flowing on the edge of my bed and remains there as if it is not light any longer but a radiant flat slab. I am lying in bed, neither asleep, nor fully awake. What I have been through, what I have read, what I have heard—all these impressions are blending inside my mind as I am lying there half-asleep, they are flowing down several oblique planes and into a single spot. Before bedtime I had been reading about the life of Gotama Buddha, so now the words from this book are going round and round inside my head: “As a crow that hopped around a fat-colored stone / Thinking 'we may find a tender delicacy' / Flies away in disappointment / In disgust I give up Gotama.” This phrase is going round and round in my head, reaches its end and immediately goes back to the start. A fat-colored stone that looks like a chunk of lard is growing inside my head.
I am walking down the dry river-bed, reach down and pick up smooth little pebble stones from the ground. These grayish-bluish pebbles have flakes of dust in them that sparkle in the sun. I am pondering these pebble stones, thinking what I should do about them. I am picking up black pebbles with blotches of yellow on them and I am thinking that they resemble little plastic figurines that had been made by some child trying to sculpture a lizard long time ago, and which have since then hardened into stones. I want to throw all these pebble stones as far away from myself as I possibly can but they all drop through my fingers and out of sight. All of the stones that I have played with now are rising from below, crowding around me. Some of them, large, pinkish crab-like stones, are emerging from the advancing tide, are coming crawling to the hillocks, are coming into sight from under the sand, seeking to catch my eye. They seem to have something important that they want to tell me. Others are weak and impotent, they are attempting to rise up and then are toppling on their stony backs straight away: they do not want to tell me anything whatsoever.
From time to time I emerge from my half-sleep and see the moonlight flowing to the edge of my bed where it is lying like shiny flat slab. This moonlight rests there radiating its glow in order to discover somewhere in the maze of my head a stone that tortures me, a fat-colored stone that looks like a chunk of lard. There is a rain-pipe lying on the ground right by its side, bent at an obtuse angle, its edges eaten by rust. Without looking at the rain-pipe I am trying to stir up some thoughts in my head that could have chased away and lulled to sleep my thoughts about the stone. Again I hear a voice inside me, which claps like window shutters in the wind, and it repeats at regular intervals: “This is not the thing, this is not the fat-colored stone that looks like a chunk of lard.” It keeps flapping and I cannot get rid of it.
Gradually, I become overwhelmed by the feeling of helplessness. It is hard for me to bear it. Perhaps, my body is now lying in bed sleeping while my head, detached from the body, is flowing somewhere else. Perhaps, it can no longer hear the voice that keeps talking about the stone that does not look like a piece of lard. I feel like asking what is “my self” now, but I understand that I no longer have the body part that I used to ask questions with. It scares me. I am scared of how silly I have become, I am scared to think that the voice can wake up again and will start pestering me again about the stone and the lard. Suffice it for me to just think of the voice and it has come back to me again: “Follow your path and do not deviate from it! Our brothers that follow the path of death hold the key to the art of oblivion, but you have conceived from the spirit of life”. I have brushed off this voice and have fallen asleep. Almost immediately I saw the light that lay down on my bed as if it was no light but a glowing flat slab.
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