A dream of the Zhouyi

It was night when I reached out for the Zhouyi which lay on top of the wardrobe to check on something. Of the several hundreds of occasions, this time it was different. The Book of Changes seemed to have a life of its own. With my outstretched hand holding on, Zhouyi flew out of the bedroom window.

Instead of falling down from the first floor window, Zhouyi with me tagging along soared through heaven. While the sky was grey, I remembered, it was a cloudless night. I felt the swirling wind which brought the cold, but the Zhouyi seemed to have a mind of its own flying through the air, knowing where to go.

It was a long while, before we came to a place, unknown to me. It was dark inside and chilly, not unlike an atmosphere when one enters a big cave. The place did look like a huge cavern. We were floating beneath its roof when I looked down below.

Lights were blinking like occasional flashes from cameras taking pictures of a show within a darkened hall. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw groups of monks meditating on the ground below and a few monks had stared up at us. The blinking lights seemed to have emitted from the top of their heads. Although it was still dark, one could make out by their shapes that the entire cavern was filled to the brim with monks who had sat there to forget. I saw more bald heads as we flew across the cavern before returning home.

I woke up the next morning and thought nothing about the strange dream. That was way back in the early nineties.

A few years later, one came across newspaper articles about old caves, grottoes and caverns in China wherein Buddhist monks had gathered to meditate in large numbers. One cave in Longmen apparently is called the ‘Cave of the Ten Thousand Buddhas’. Today, we can surf the net to learn more about this and other caves designated for tourists.

Perhaps the Yi, my teacher had wanted to tell or show me something then. Till today, although one has spoken to a fellow traveler who may have reached that level,one still has not reached the stage where the head emits light. Or has it already, one cannot see or know.(The fellow traveler by chance had other people witnessed the emission of the light.)

And one writes this entry in the blog to keep a record before my memory fades.