Chapter Text
Cangse Sanren comes to the mountain with nothing, not even a name.
It’s not infrequent for the immortal to take in orphan children. Brothel toddlers, street urchins, runaways with debt heavy on their thin shoulders. Her students do not venture out into the cruel world but she does. She shields them from horrors she is not afraid to face and comes home from her ventures with grimy little scholars on her heels. They have names from their parents, reminders of the world that failed them.
Some of the temples that dot the lower slopes know to send their most promising wards upwards, to plead for sanctuary on the celestial peak (they have priest-given names, inspired by nature and the poetry of the great sages).
With the reputation of the mountain and its mistress being what they are, it’s no surprise that foundlings turn up regularly. Most often they are found at lower elevations, and taken in by the Taoist temples that ring the rocky base. It is risky to leave an infant higher up on the slopes, amid the still wild woods and winding paths. Even in summer, the mountain is cold.
No one expects to find a child in the wilderness so they nearly miss Cangse. She is nestled amid boulders by the most peaceful part of the meltwater stream where Baoshan Sanren’s students fetch water and wash their clothes. It’s the sort of place a parent might leave a child they hoped would live, if they were foolish. Only the bright red of her swaddling clothes and the keen senses of her to-be-older-siblings save her from the waiting cold and the predators of the mountain.
Her surname comes from the fluttering red that protected her. No one bothers with a milk name. Cangse is Cangse, there is no need for an extra syllable to differentiate her from the rest of the mountain children.
When she is older she takes her teacher’s title. Sanren. It means “far flung person”, “wanderer”. When she asks for it, she does not think of it as prophecy, just as a way to pay homage to the woman who took her in.
Cangse grows up in the arms of patient students of the never-ending Path.
When she is old enough she joins in studying, sparring, and chores, outstripping the temple transfers and recently adopted orphans who make up her peer group. Children of a crueler world, they flinch at first when Teacher shows them the motions of martial meditation and cry out at night though no ghosts dare haunt the holy mountain. They inch their way across string bridges and hand-width shelves of stone, while Cangse skips ahead, unafraid.
Even when she watches a little brother topple from a precipice and crumple at the bottom of the cliff, a twisted lump barely visible in the fog, she’s certain of the proper course. She runs as fast as her half-grown legs and unfolding spiritual power will take her (which is quite fast indeed) and fetches their Teacher. Then she watches as Baoshan Sanren pins the spirit to the broken body and pulls meridians back into alignment with hands that blur with the mist. Only later does she realize that her little brother died, and even then she is unfazed. The mountain tried to take her once— her family saved her and they always will.
Teacher loves her, as she loves all her students. When she is home on the mountain, not off attending to the decay that festers below, she takes time to answer Cangse’s questions and correct her many faults.
She is never tetchy or frustrated, unlike her older students who have put off the pursuit of their own cultivation to attend to the little ones (who hold wisps of resentful energy behind their foreheads alongside bottomless wells of love and serenity). In all matters, she is a model of Daoist philosophy, knowing and unthinking, following the footsteps of a Way the modern world has lost.
Sometimes she is… sad. Especially when Cangse Sanren speaks her mind.
“Inaction is the most natural course of action. The laws of the universe do not make exceptions.” Baoshan Sanren repeats, for the third time.
“But—” Cangse’s knees hurt. It has been a long morning, sitting on the unsanded wooden floor of the main cabin where Baoshan Sanren teaches disciples. She prefers days when she gets to run through the woods, fetch water, and forage for food. Meditation through motion has always suited her mind better than lectures and frozen patience. There is no replacement for the calm that comes after hours of the same sword drills, the thoughtless ache as your body and the whirling stave fall into a pattern. Even martial arts forms would be preferable to this.
(This is a failing of hers, a true student would be able to find the motion of the world even sitting still.)
“But?” Teacher’s voice is light, even teasing, but her face remains still and unsmiling. Cangse misses the joviality doled out to the younger children.
“But we are urged to be compassionate. What if compassion demands action? What if by doing nothing we fail to help another?”
Her classmates shift uncomfortably. Teacher’s imperturbable calm isn’t ruffled. “And how do you know your action is wise? A stone thrown into a pond causes many ripples, and you never know you may disturb under the surface.”
“What if a man had a sword right now and he was going to kill another?” Cangse demands. “Wouldn’t we be bound to help?”
“What if the man is an executioner and his victim a criminal? What if he is a demon or a god? How do I know the totality of the circumstances, and what authority do I have to enforce my will on others?”
“You’re so powerful and wise, of course you could help people if you wanted to!” Cangse insists, feeling as though she’s being mocked.
“Ah, daughter, but what if ‘people’ do not want my help?”
Little brother is trembling next to her and even her favorite middleolder sister is giving her a withering look, so Cangse lets the matter go.
Later, as they make dinner she can’t help but rant a little. Her manners and discipline are horrendous, some of her temple raised siblings accustomed to strict schedules and sharp punishments have told her as much. Teacher is the unquestioned center of their school, in a way no normal old priest could ever be, and so she tends to be lax about respect.
In the end most of her pupils respond to her gentle remonstrations with such devotion that harsher methods are hardly needed. Cangse is the exception. She has always been demanding. She has always been difficult, and that too has been tolerated. Teacher is water, as clear, pure, and cold as the first springmelt. There is no obstacle she can’t adapt to, no image she doesn’t reflect with flawless clarity.
“She’s always avoiding my questions,” she complains, adding a dab of honey to the congee given to the youngest children. Sticky sugars and rice are bad for the flow of energy, but the small ones are barely old enough to have golden cores so it won’t do much harm. Licking the remaining honey off her own fingers might, but it’s her internal alchemy and she’s allowed to upset it if she wants. “Veering off into hypotheticals and responding to questions with questions!”
“That’s how she teaches?” Little Brother rebukes mildly.
“I know, I just, sometimes it’s not about the underlying state of the universe and encouraging inner peace. Sometimes when I ask what her trip was like, I really want to know. ‘Nothing had changed and yet everything had’ isn’t an answer.”
Her brother stares at the bamboo steamer.
“Maybe she doesn’t like it when you make all our lessons about those affairs occurring down there?” he says, with a boldness she is unused to from him. His voice only quavers a little at the last.
“Hmph!” Cangse pulls the pan off the fire-- the steam trapped within the bamboo cage can do the rest of the work. “She ought to say something then.”
There’s another long moment of silence. Little brother’s eyes are watering up, even though she’s kept him away from the smoky side of the firepit.
“ I don’t like it when you speak of what is happening down below,” he tells her. “Our brothers and sisters might not like it either.”
“Why not?”
“Because we left for a reason. They are heartless, full of resentment and ill intentions. Everyone moves fast and the smallest and weakest get left behind or trampled into the road. You never experienced it. We did and we know what it’s like to be abandoned,” It was more words than her serious little brother had ever said before.
He had cried when he’d first come to them. A full bowl of rice, the thin blankets they slept under, the clean white robes of the students, all these things brought tears to his eyes.
“There must be good deeds as well as evil ones, otherwise where would good people and principles of morality come from? Not all justice can dwell on our mountain.”
“If there are good people, there are not enough of them. If there is justice, it’s not enough.” He’s just quoting Teacher now, and the words that seem like platitudes from her are full of emotion when he says them. “Better to live alone in good company than among others who are wicked, right?”
Cangse relents a little. It’s true, she doesn’t know what it’s like out there, beyond the mountain.
“You really never want to go back? Not even to help people?” she asks, feeling foolish.
Little Brother shakes his head so fast his hair falls out of its ponytail. “No. I am not smart enough or strong enough to confront the evils there. At least here, on the mountain, I can help Teacher and she can go help others,” He’s one of the less ambitious, less philosophical of their friends. Because of that, he is most inclined to kindness; the most likely to help her when she rescues baby birds that ought to be left to die.
Still, she knows most of the others think similarly. They loathe the idea of interference and believe that the best way to bring harmony is by sitting quietly in caves, meditating on nature until the sky falls in. They trust their Teacher to take on bare minimum of interaction that the sages might suggest of an enlightened soul.
All she ever does is bring children back, Cangse thinks. It’s good, it helps them, but there isn’t enough room on Mount Hua for all the children of the world.
She wants to do more.
“You have never known life among petty people,” he adds, in response to some mutinous expression on her face. “It’s better here.”
Ever since she first wheedled the story of her origin from an indulgent older brother, it has been a comfort. It’s not just a reminder of how surely she is loved, it’s a connection, however thin, to a world outside the mountain.
The red wrapping cloth is long gone, bleached or dyed and worked into the plain black and white clothing of the school because thriftiness is godly and good. Her childhood clothes and toys have been passed down to younger disciples. Only the story remains and it raises so many questions.
She has never known life outside the mountain. More and more, she wants to.
Most of the brothers and sisters who first took her home and raised her have moved onto the later steps of the cultivation process. They sit in seclusion, bellies growing bloated with the weight of their golden cores, nascent souls glowing in them, arms and legs thin and muscled, skin wrinkled as they age without dying. The higher slopes of the mountain, all the way up to the three peaks, are dotted with the homes of hermits who sit still as stone, seeking the immortality of their teacher. They fast and meditate and mix potions out of the secretions of the earth; they live a hundred years and it is still not the endlessness that they seek.
Others go to the temples halfway down the mountain and become great sages. Some marry one another and live lives of absolute natural harmony, living and dying in the forest, never knowing the evils of complexity. If they have children they send them to their Teacher at five, and those siblings are nieces and nephews as well. Wood that has never known the knife, Teacher calls them, approvingly, the children and the parents both. Most seek to emulate their patron, their rescuer, a being of perfect balance.
Few succeed. There is not room in the world for an abundance of immortals. But there are other mountains Baoshan Sanren has called home, scattered across the land. Here and there in caves and on distant summits are those who have found the way.
Even they do not leave their mountains. Once the Teacher takes you, you are bound. Cangse Sanren has only ever heard of one exception.
In spite of the mystery their lineage cultivates it is an open secret in the surrounding villages that she dwells somewhere on the holy mountain. The peasants must know so they do not venture where alchemists work their slow and potent art. These hills are not for hunting, not for terracing, not for exploration or the carving of paths. It is already sacred, a center of great learning, but her presence makes it more so.
The great clans are not allowed to know where the immortal dwells. They are too hungry to be trusted, ghosts in human form. But the forgotten people, who know only the turn of the seasons and the fear of greater powers, whose own power turns the earth to farmland and the wild into cities; they are allowed this secret.
The knowledge of Baoshan Sanren has been kept in trust for three generations. When the gravity of gossip inevitably makes a wreckage of this privacy she will find another mountain.
Yanling Daoren left the mountain.
For this sin, he died.
His fate isn’t something the older brothers and sisters like to talk about. There are no stories on the celestial peak and little gossip. Instead of morality tales and family histories, they get Lessons.
Yanling Daoren is a Lesson, one that Teacher is willing to tell them over and over again.
He went down the mountain full of hope and pride. He fell in love with the world, formed every attachment he should not. When confronted with the failings of humanity, the wickedness and misdeeds, he fought back. He fought and he fought, until he forgot what he was fighting for. Then, without a path to follow, he became one of the wicked misdeeds himself.
A thousand heroes set out to kill him and finally, pierced by many arrows and stabbed by many swords, he perished.
The day that Teacher tells them about Yanling Daoren, Cangse lingers in the lecture hall long after the pupils have been dismissed. She doesn’t start arguments around her little brothers and sisters anymore— she knows now that it upsets them. That doesn’t mean she’s not going to debate the esteemed immortal when she leaves questions unanswered.
“Do you miss him?” she asks first. She’s always wondered if Baoshan Sanren, who cares compassionately for all but especially her students, could cast aside that love when they went away.
Teacher pats the floor next to her, as if she expected this ambush and has nowhere else to be. “I do. He was the best of my students. His cultivational base was second to none, and his mind was like a sword. He cut through even my convictions. If he knew enough to let go he could have been immortal.”
“Maybe he was the best because he cared,” Cangse suggests. It’s a theory she’s been developing for some time.
Baoshan Sanren pours herself more herbal tea. “Go on.”
“A sage should understand everything and let none of it affect him. He must be alert and composed, aware and aloft. Here we are kept above the affairs of the world so they do not concern us. Yet we cannot fully understand them. Maybe, he was better than your other pupils because he wanted to know the world. He knew that conscientious inaction starts with effortless knowledge.”
“Is this how you feel as well?”
Cangse is one of the most talented of her current crop of disciples. It’s not arrogance to know that, just self-reflection. She’s faster, keener, more in touch with her core than her siblings. The others look for detachment, and in that detachment find a lack of ambition. They’re not like Cangse. There are things she wants.
Knowledge, justice, a sense of purpose. Fulfillment that the mountain has stopped providing.
Inaction is the last thing on her mind.
“A little. I just… there is so much I have not yet seen. There are so many ideas still to discover, and so many other souls out there who I could help.”
Teacher sips her drink. “Yanling wished to bring knowledge down from the mountain. He killed hundreds and was killed by thousands. I have had friends, people of great skill, who overstepped their bounds and suffered for it. You must understand why I worry for you, Cangse.”
The idea of Teacher with friends is silly on its own. She is untouchable, unknowable. She walks on air and rides clouds, she knows how to transform into a crane and heal the dead. She is as much a saint as a mother. Saints do not have such casual acquaintanceships.
“You do not wish for me to become evil? I promise, I won’t,” Cangse holds up three fingers to swear. “That doesn’t change my desire to do more than meditate my life away.”
Something like pain passes across Teacher’s face. “If you seek to change the flow of water, it’s best to be a stone judiciously placed at the edge of a swift stream. You will divert some droplets but won’t disturb the path of the water or the life of the creatures that live within. Over time, those few drops may make a large change.”
Cangse nods, as if she knows what this diversion into metaphor meant, and Teacher goes on.
“Yanling… Yanling was a boulder thrown into a still pool. His impact did damage, yet in the end the pond remained. I worry, Cangse, that you will be a boulder. You’ll crash hard and then mud will cover you. You will suffer and be forgotten.”
“I’m a person, not a stone,” Cangse laughs, “People know how to swim!”
Her laughter falls on seemingly deaf ears. Teacher’s face is full of thought. When the last peals die away, Cangse is left squirming.
“You are still a child,” comes the verdict. “Come to me when you are certain what you want.”
A scholar looking for clarity ought to lock themselves in seclusion and meditate until the answers are revealed. Cangse has never had the temperament for long stretches alone; nor does she wish to become another hermit on the mountain. Cave real estate is becoming rather hard to find.
Rather than secreting herself away with her treasonous thoughts, she goes about her daily routine. She gathers herbs and wild vegetables, she runs errands for her seniors and tends to her juniors. She trains, swinging the wooden sword until it flashes like real steel in her hands. When slower, form practices are ordered, she does them as well, tracing stances under the mountain moon while her siblings sleep. When the little ones come to her, she teaches them, she makes them laugh. Laughter is not forbidden on the mountain, however its inhabitants are often too busy refining their inner strength to properly enjoy a good joke. Baoshan Sanren has her rare smiles, that quiver like pine trees in the wind. The other older siblings, the ones who think themselves alchemists of inner and outer power, they are stern and boring.
That’s another thing she can’t quite come to terms with. What is the use of seeking eternity if you become thin and grey along the way? Life is meant to be lived in harmony with nature, and what is more natural than merriment?
What is more natural than humans seeking out other humans? She doesn’t want to live as a saint, she wants to live as a human. She wants to know the world that gave her up and she wants to make it better, so fewer children will find themselves on the slopes of cold mountains without even a name.
Her brothers and sisters know that she’s growing apart. Her training has intensified; a temple priest who is also a brother sends her manuals of sword maneuvers and meditation guides geared for warriors and not sages. She studies every book on the mountain and ventures as far down it as she dares to talk to the acolytes of the lower elevations.
Finally, she makes her choice. It is not a sudden breakthrough, a burst of knowledge that comes to her one day. The revelation feels as slow as the turning of the stars. Every day she wakes up a little more certain that she will leave the mountain and never return.
“You’re leaving then?” warns Fifth Eldest Sister.
Of all the siblings on the mountain, she’s one of the most venerable. Excluding those whose studies require silence and isolation, and those who do not need their juniors’ company from time to time, she’s definitely the oldest. Numbers fall by the wayside when it comes to Cangse’s generation— they’re somewhere in the forties or fifties and that’s far too burdensome to count out. Fifth Eldest Sister though, she’s earned her rank.
As the brightest of Teacher’s students, it’s Cangse’s job to check in on the most senior of the seniors to make sure they are comfortable.
Cangse has just set the water for pine needle broth boiling, which means she will have to sit with Fifth Eldest Sister for another half an hour. “How did you know?”
“I saw a young owl leave the nest at daybreak. As they are night birds and it was barely fledged, I thought it worthy of a divination.”
Gossip is more reliable than the hexagrams, Cangse knows, and it’s not like Fifth Eldest Sister is short on conversation partners. She mentors a number of the students who are fledging themselves, just beginning to move away from Teacher and towards independent cultivation. Because she is a dutiful student, she nods. “Your talent is unparalleled.”
“It is not. The readings were muddled. Your future is too complicated for the stars to understand.”
“Well, they are a very far way away. It’s probably hard for them to see the details.”
Fifth Eldest Sister waves her arms and her wide sleeves flap, sending dust eddies swirling around the little cave. “Silly girl. Go play with the children, enjoy your time at home.”
“Your broth…”
“I can put pine needles in hot water and douse the fire myself.” Thin and wrinkly as she is, there is still some strength in her limbs. “Leave.”
With that permission, that order, Cangse rises unsteadily and heads back out into the sunlight.
“Will you miss me?” she asks after she lays out all the reasons she must go. Teacher has argued every one, but Cangse has counter-arguments now. First and foremost among them is ‘I cannot stand to stay any longer .’
Even though Teacher makes her fight for permission to leave there’s a resignation about it. It feels like the playacted tears used to send away a bride. All the arrangements have already been made, the crying comes too late.
Teacher pulls her up from her place on the floor. “I miss you already. I fear… I fear there is nothing but suffering waiting for you.”
“Then it will be suffering I chose.”
“Oh, daughter,” Baoshan Sanren touches her face and her hands are so warm. Power flows through every inch of her, intense and hot. The older students brim full of energy, their dantians weighty with power. It bloats and distorts them. Teacher isn’t like that. Her inner strength is rendered down, potent as medicine. “You know that you can never return?”
When Cangse was little she used to climb in her lap and lay her head against Baoshan Sanren’s stomach, where a golden core small as a grain of rice and dense as a star pulsed. It felt like being next to a hunk of magnetite or a roaring bonfire. It felt like love.
She leans into the touch, savoring the heat that suffuses her. “I know.” Then it’s gone.
“Have you thought about where you’ll go?”
Cangse hasn’t. The outside world is such an amorphous concept to her, trying to plan around it is nearly impossible. The carefully selected volumes of poetry and philosophy Teacher brings to them offer little in the way of travel advice.
“I’d like to travel. Help people.”
“Hmm. If the Lan are reliable— and they always are— they should be holding lectures in the Cloud Recesses this year. I’ll write you a letter of recommendation. They’ll help you transition. You’ll need a sword too, there’s a smith in Weinan who can make one.”
Dizzying as this deluge of information is, Cangse manages to remember her last request.
She sinks to her knees again. “I need one more thing to face the world. I can’t be Cangse forever.”
Most people have two names.
Baoshan Sanren looks at her as if she is already dead and gone. “Take it, take whatever you need.”
Cangse Sanren comes to the mountain with nothing, not even a name.
She leaves it with the title of an immortal stamped on her like prophecy, a letter of introduction to Sect Leader Lan, an order for a sword, and a command to never come home.