Painting the Dao

156 He recounted the strangest of stories. He was a stone fool, but had brought no stones with him, planning instead to seek some out in the surrounding area. He found none and abandoned the idea in favour of painting stones instead. This he did mostly with a twig on the surface of a still pond fed by the nearby brook. One evening he painted a particularly intriguing stone that seemed to take on more substance than usual, and instead of disappearing straight away to remain only in his mind, seemed to linger and then rise slightly above the surface, acquiring tints of colour. He put it down at first to the plum wine augmenting his creativity. That night, however, he dreamed of the stone, in much greater detail, as if it had appeared in the world of dust. The next morning, at the fringe of the pine forest he saw a glint of colour clearly different from the trees with the sunlight dappling through their branches. There it was, set on a neatly cleared patch of ground: the stone of his dream. As he gazed in wonder at it, there appeared a strange sylph-like wisp of clouds, like incense smoke although he had lit none, that circled it, constantly changing form, then appearing as a shimmering deity who paused above the stone, bowed to him, then disappeared as music rustled in the branches. About a year later the same thing happened, only this time when he gazed at it in the morning it was accompanied by an image of a hare, which also bowed to him, then arced upwards towards the pale full moon in the morning sky. One more year passed and another stone appeared, then a year later one more, and so forth, each accompanied by different mysterious images as attendants. Some of the messages were clear enough, although he was wise enough to know that they were probably just his interpretations projected onto the strange phenomena, but he still couldn’t explain the phenomena themselves. But the inexplicable was fine with him. With the last of the eight stone dreams, he rushed out in the morning but there was no stone to add to the previous seven, each in its miraculously manicured space. Puzzled, he returned home, and that evening was enjoying some wine when he heard the music. Following the sound, he was drawn back into the trees to find the eighth stone, and floating near each was its avatar, each playing an instrument to create the ethereal sound he heard. It was like no other music he knew, that, like the strange stones themselves, or the Dao, was more a part of a unified luminous experience. Entranced, he listened beyond the Stage of Time. Then, as the darkness deepened, he was drawn back to the world of dust, looked up at the stones, and saw all the strange smoke-like images bow, this time as one, to swirl into the clouds above. After visiting the nearest village where he could acquire paper and ink, and a rare treat of fresh dumplings, he spent the next eight years painting the stones, one a year, which seemed appropriate. The remnants of the paintings, now faded and darkened by time and smoke, spotted from damp and nibbled by hungry insects, were pinned to his walls. I sojourned with him for many months, and I painted for him another set of images of the stones but on stronger paper to augment those that had begun to blend into the walls. I made a camphor-wood box to protect them and presented it to him as a parting gift. All this took place during the troubled times in the mid-seventeenth century, when it was prudent to remain aloof from the urban world of dust. I thought no more about them until something equally strange happened. In my studio at the Water, Pine and Stone Retreat I have several old Japanese kiri -wood boxes abandoned by collectors who prefer to see their contents on display in a cabinet, not emerging from a series of neatly beribboned containers as is the Japanese preference. While looking through them one day I discovered one I had thought empty contained eight sheets of thick old paper and on each was the image of one of the Daoist of the Pot’s stones. As I removed the sliding lid, a wisp of smoke appeared, and in the gentle draught of air from an open window briefly swirled an image of my old friend seated on a cloud. He burst out laughing as he dissolved into the air. Inscribed at the Nodding Stone Garden in the summer of 2025 by the Master of the Water, Pine and Stone Retreat as a record of inexplicable events.