The Golden Child

I.

The Gift of Gold

Once there was a nobleman who had performed a valuable service for his king. Now, the king was not only the greatest of kings, but a yogi of great power. And he said to this nobleman, “You have performed for me a great service. And in exchange I would like to give you a very precious gift of gold. Now this gold is of an infinite nature; that is to say, you may fashion anything you wish out of this gold. And there is no end to what you can fashion.”

So the nobleman gratefully received the gift of this gold, and set out to experience and understand just what was meant when the king told him he could fashion anything he wished out of this gold. And so to begin with, he had many beautiful cups and plates made of this gold. And he had much beautiful jewelry of all kinds fashioned from this gold. And he found that, no matter what he fashioned from this gold, somehow there was always enough gold left to fashion still more. And that in truth, anything could be fashioned from this gold. He fashioned pillars and balustrades, furniture and fountains; and he found, truly, this gold had this infinite property: that anything could be fashioned from it and it could never be depleted.

And when he had no longer use for the things he had created from this gold, he would melt them down to the original gold and then create still more things. And having created so many things from this gold, he thought to himself, “Well, I’ve created many things, but they are all gold. I’m getting tired of all this gold. There must be more that I can create.” He went back to the king, and he said, “You said to me that I can fashion anything I wish out of this gold, but that is not true, because certainly I cannot fashion something from it that is not gold.” And the king said, “Oh no, no, on the contrary, what I have said is true. Out of this infinite gold you can truly fashion anything that you desire.”

So the nobleman went home, and he said, “All right, if that is true, I will take this gold and from it I will fashion a silver cup.” And so he did, and this gold was able to take the exact form and properties of the silver cup. And he fashioned many beautiful things of silver from this gold. And then he gathered them all up and he melted the silver back down, and what he was left with, again, was the original gold. “Indeed, this is quite remarkable. I can fashion anything from this gold, whether it be gold or no.” But then he thought, “Well, silver, in fact, is very close to gold. It is hardly a test for this remarkable material.” So he set out to fashion still yet other things from this gold. He fashioned precious woods, and stone, and glass, and even diamond. And out of these he created beautiful buildings, and temples, and even villages. And then he even created around him people, who lived in these villages, and walked, and contemplated, and took their repose, and lived there. And he went about here and there creating whole worlds. Out of this gold he created worlds of concrete, and tar, and plastic, and every possible and imaginable material and item of shape and size, and people who lived there, and who maintained their lives, and who rushed off back and forth to their various jobs and rushed back home again to pay the bills. And he realized that truly there was nothing that could not be created out of this gold.

And finally, to fully satisfy himself, he took this gold and out of it he created a little shack, a little dilapidated shack of rotting wood, patched together with a few pieces of sheets of plastic and metal. And he fashioned around it the poorest and ugliest of circumstances, and he scattered all around dirt,

and mud, and excrement. And he put into that little shack a little old man and a little old woman who were poor, and ailing, and irritable, and who fought with each other all the time. And he lived there with them.

And he lived there for so long that he began to live the life of a beggar. And each day he would go out to scrounge a little bit of sustenance to bring back and then to fight over with the little old man and the little old woman. And he lived in this way for who knows how long. And all he could think of and hope for was that one day in his travels he might come across a little piece of gold that would allow him to sustain his life a little better. But no matter where he wandered, or how far he looked, he never found any.

II.
The Golden Boy

The story could end right there. It seemed that ages, lifetimes, passed in this way. Endlessly adrift in his own tale, a beggar, a marauder and a scavenger, he spent his days grabbing what little he could, his nights fighting with the old man and the old woman, and all the time dreaming an elaborate history to look back on with guilt and longing and resentment.

His shoulders now were always hunched, and there was a furrow in his brow that ran through the very center of him, and he went about cursing beneath his breath. Always there was something he needed to do, but he was not sure what it was, and time was not kind. The stars wheeled across and out of sight, the sun rose, taunting, but there was no light for his condition, and his desperation was complete as he surveyed his lot. What God had cast him into this awful state?

It was on just such a day, in just such a life, that he had spent the morning collecting the droppings of the various wild pigs that ran amuck among the shanties. These he would try to sell as manure on the outskirts of the larger town, and it was how he made his meager living. Setting down his odorous sack, he stood now and scanned the roadside ahead. A sudden wind blew up the dust of the road and assaulted him with bits of paper and garbage. Exasperated, he tried to pull his collar up to his eyes and, forgetting his sack, took off, kicking his way through a group of small children, themselves huddling to shield themselves from the wind. Stumbling down the path in this way, bound for nowhere certain, he at last struck his shin and nearly tripped over something he hadn’t seen a moment before. Cursing and recovering his balance, he stepped back and looked at the image of a golden boy sitting half in the middle of the pathway. The boy sat there with a freshness and a lustre that looked more than alive.

Yet in his ongoing stillness and lack of expression, the man had no doubt it was a golden statue.

As awareness of his sudden good fortune slowly dawned on him the man’s eyes became frenzied. Here in this one statue was all the gold he would ever need. He ran to pick it up, but found the boy to be completely unmovable. He tugged and pushed and kicked at the golden boy, but clearly all his efforts were useless.

“This statue is of no use to me in its present form, “ said the man. “I will find some way to break it down.” The man ran everywhere, grabbing first a length of wood, then an iron pipe, and by day’s end

he had managed to steal a sledgehammer. But all proved useless. When he swung the hammer at the golden boy, hoping to reduce him to pieces, the hammer went right through the boy as if there was nothing there at all. Nevertheless he kept at it long into the evening, until exhausted and dejected he returned home to his nasty little shack, and the little old man and the little old woman.

“Eat dirt,” the little old man was saying. “Hop on the spoon,” replied the little old lady. “Drop dead, both of you,” he said to them, and walked back out. He spent that night outside, sleeping fitfully under a piece of cardboard.

He rose the next morning with a new thought. “Well, then I will melt him down if he is still there,” said the thought. So he hurried back down the path, and sure enough, there was the golden boy, sitting. He spent the day finding firewood and surrounded the boy, and laced in scraps of iron to hold the heat. And before long the boy was enveloped in flames, which the man continued to feed into the night. But when all died away, the boy continued to sit as before, unmarked and untarnished.

“If you want to have me, “ said the boy suddenly, “it will not be achieved by changing me. It is you who will have to change.”

This upset the man still more, and he kicked at the remaining coals and went off sputtering and cursing along the road.

The man just walked for hours over the grim landscape. He tried to take his mind off the golden boy, but was consumed by the thought of him. He circled back, and in the early morning watched him from afar. He saw men and women passing now in the road as if they saw nothing at all.

“I must have him,” he thought. “I must know his secret and his power.” And for the first time in his memory, he ventured far outside his shantytown and went searching for some sort of knowledge that would help him master the secret of the golden boy. And he lost track of the days of his searching. And he found himself in deserts and jungles, and at last in the heart of a great city, and there he searched through all the great libraries it contained. But after days spent pouring through the libraries, he left with no more than the jeers and insults of those who disdained his ragged clothes and foul smell, and coarse manner. And he returned thinking only of his misery.

This time, in his distraction, he was almost startled when he passed again by the golden boy, and he stepped back in his tracks. His misery was replaced by a vague feeling of loss. Not quite by any decision left in him, he sat down across the road, facing the golden boy. And now, having nothing more to do, and nowhere else to go, he found himself just sitting, contemplating the golden boy.

Hours passed by, and even the day passed, but the man just sat there, and nothing stirred in him. Now the nights and the days passed, and the man sat, and sometimes it seemed his eyes played tricks on him. And sometimes the golden boy seemed as big as the sky; and sometimes he appeared to vanish to nothing at all. But the man continued to sit and the boy continued to sit. And as day and night came and went, and as sun and rain came and went, it occurred to the man that maybe this golden boy was his friend. Perhaps his only friend.

“Thank you, friend,” said the man. “That’s a start,” said the golden boy.

When the man finally arose from his sitting, he noticed a wooden bowl in the lap of the boy, rounded

with plump purple grapes. “For you,” said the golden boy.

The man took the bowl of grapes silently, and carried them along the road back to his mean little hovel. There he walked in upon the little old man and woman yelling vulgarities at each other, and he set the bowl of grapes on the table. “For you, mother; for you, father,” he said. The old man howled insults, and the old lady kicked at him. “Thank you, mother. Thank you, father,” he said. And sat down in the corner.

For a long while the days passed just like this. The man would sit in front of the golden boy by day, and by evening bring home a bowl of grapes, offering them to the little old man and the little old woman, accepting their abuse, thanking them, and always addressing them as mother and father.

One day, sitting before the golden boy, the man felt the dawning of a new kind of peace. As if everything had a gentle golden presence to it. It was there in his breath, and in whatever he looked upon. And returning home that night, it was in his every step. Even his poor little home appeared before him as a place of peace and refuge. He entered to a new brightness and cleanliness. He noticed the lady carefully arranging a new tablecloth that she had beautifully pieced together from scraps. The old man quietly attended food at the stove. “For you,” he said, as he set the bowl of grapes down on the table. They both looked up at him and smiled softly. “Thank you,” they said.

That night he just slept. Before he awoke, he knew that everything was the same and different. As he walked the road that morning the thought of the golden boy took on a strange irrelevance, and it seemed that there was really no place he had to go. As he sat in front of the boy, his created world gently unglued. The golden boy appeared now as a mirage, as boy and girl, slowly evaporating; and their golden hue was taken up instead along the far horizon of his seeing, and in the surrounding air, and in the nearness of each thought. There was only each thing arising such as it was in his awareness. The weight of his body, each breath, each thought, each pattern of emotion, every sound and sight that registered in the world about him arose empty and infinite. It made no difference now what arose – the hovel, the dusty roadside, the excrement itself. Empty now of any fixed or separate existence, each arose out of that same shining reality as the original gold. It was he who had given them shape. And he released them now to rest again in the same infinite purity that was the infinite purity of his mind itself, abiding nowhere.

Thus, as he knew again the nature of his creation, he awakened for the first time to the nature of his very self -- outshining all creation, outshining the pathways of wisdom, outshining the very courtyards of the king, where he found himself again, dancing in a sea of light that laughed and echoed with the words of the golden boy. But now the golden boy was himself.

“That’s a start,” said the golden boy.

Author’s Note

The story of the gift of gold and of the golden boy was, in its original form, first told to me in the Taoist temple at Nali in the Kunlun Mountains. Its recounter was a monk I had the pleasure of working along side of for a couple of hours, peeling turnips and potatoes in the kitchen. He was a large and striking man – impossible to know his age – who had a strangely crooked nose that only amplified the sweetness of his smile.

“This story has been handed down since before the separation of traditions,” he said to me. I was not sure if he referred to a time before the emergence of a formal Taoist tradition and its divergence into many schools and sects, or to something that was even upstream of both Buddhism and Taoism, since he made many familiar references to Buddhism. He seemed to imply that I would be doing him a personal favor to remember the story and to take it to heart.

“Okay, you go back to your room and rest now,” he said to me, gazing into my eyes.

That evening, as I sat in my room, the obvious truth of the story broke over me like a wave. It was as if the bottom dropped out of the story of existence, and a great timeless ocean of reality washed ashore in its place. A golden sea of eternity forever chanting its own name. And out of this chanting arose all possibilities and all creation – the appearance of in and out, up and down, good and bad, and my own self carving and labeling this “uncarved block,” this “original gold,” spinning my own stories, identifying with them, and shrinking to whatever size character was required of me by the tale.

But now, as I allowed myself to relinquish my hold on life, my attention was released back again to behold the marvelous source. And the source was in no way ever hidden, nor had I ever left it; but was always arising and ever present as what things are, simply shining out in every moment and every event without exclusion. In this openness I found myself embracing all of existence while seeing right through it like glass. The complete and simple reality of all things was by virtue of their very emptiness, their non-fixity as anything other than this same shining source, the whole and the each forever giving birth to each other. And I saw that from the very beginning of no-time there was only the one Giver and the one Receiver and the one Gift, and they were all the same one. One primal bodhisattva intimately serving the nothingness of his own creation. And I was that. We all are.

Perhaps I should have been overwhelmed, but instead I was simply at home in creation for the first time, to the farthest reaches of the galaxies, and on either side of “life” and “death.” I remember walking outside and just watching the mountains in the moonlight, and laughing and crying, perhaps for hours.

The next morning I was scheduled to leave the temple, and I went first to the kitchen to thank the monk and say my goodbyes. But I could not find him there or anywhere in the temple. And whomever I asked, no one knew of a monk of that description.

****

Two years later I had the opportunity to return briefly to Nali. I was able to meet with the Abbot, who had been gone during my previous stay, and I told him my whole story. He sat through it with a broad grin, and then suddenly got very quiet and serious. After a while he gave a burst of laughter and said,

“That was Four Galleys. It exactly describes him. I have no doubt the monk you met was Four Galleys.”

“Who is Four Galleys?”

“You know,” said the Abbot, “these mountains have always been a rich region for Taoist practice. Hermits have lived in these hills for as long as we can know. By middle Song Dynasty four large temples were active right here in the area of this one mountain: this one, one down closer to the river valley, one further up the mountain, one up and around back, facing 'three peaks.' But over the years the practice here began to degenerate. Monks engaged only in superficial ritual and outer practice. The condition was very bad. The temples even bickered and warred with each other over the most petty things.

“One day a large monk walked into this temple here, out of the mountains. He had a striking appearance, a crooked nose and a large smile. He had no attachment to any of the temples, and he was not lost in the externals. He cared only for true practice. His energy and open spirit had a positive effect on the monks here. He was a natural teacher and had a very winning manner. He stayed not only at our temple, but moved freely between the temples and was equally welcomed at all. He greatly reformed the atmosphere on this mountain and helped to revive a true spirit of practice.

“After perhaps two years, the monk suggested that all the temples on this mountain should hold together a special celebrating feast to honor the Queen Mother of the West – do you know her? She was the first woman to achieve immortality in ancient times and she still dwells here in the Kunlun. She is a greatly revered Taoist saint. He managed the cooperation of all the temples for this special occasion. And he himself spent the whole day before the feast, from dawn to dusk, working in the temple galley to help prepare the food. However, at Three Peaks, they say he worked in their kitchen galley all day before the feast; and the other two temples said likewise. So in this way he came to be known as “Four Galleys” or “Four Kitchens,” because he appeared and worked in all four places at once.

“Not long after the feast day, Four Galleys returned back into the mountains, and it was known that he retired to meditation in a cave on Blue Peak.” The Abbot pointed through the heavy mist to a distant peak that was barely and momentarily visible. “No one saw him again, and no one disturbed him, for, who knows, perhaps fifty years.

“Then a monk from Valley Temple ventured up to Blue Peak and found Four Galleys sitting there in meditation pose, but no longer in the body. It was impossible to know how long he had been out of the body, as his appearance was still fresh, but there was no sign of recent activity; and before him was a bowl that he had left overturned, to signal that he had no intention of returning.

“His body was brought down to Valley Temple, where after a proper time he was given a monk’s cremation. His remains were placed in a heavy chest and kept at the temple. But over the years practice again deteriorated, and the temples returned to arguing together – especially about the remains of Four Galleys. Why should they stay at Valley Temple? He belonged to all the temples. And so now conditions were truly bad, and there were even acts of robbery and vandalism as the chest passed back and forth between the other three temples. Thankfully, our temple alone did not involve itself in this warfare. This was no way to honor Four Galleys, do you think?

“Over the next two centuries, very terrible calamities befell the other three temples. Two were

destroyed by fire, and Valley Temple was destroyed by a freak flood. Monks scattered. After all these centuries later, we are the only temple left on this mountain. No one knew what became of the remains of Four Galleys.

“During the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards destroyed whatever buildings were still standing at Valley Temple, including a sealed chamber against the cliffside that no one had paid much attention to.

“Three years ago our monks were down at the Valley Temple ruins, searching for building stones that might still serve us for our building projects up here. On a platform in the remains of that chamber they found a wooden chest that had been passed by. It was the long-lost remains of Four Galleys. We brought them back up here and gave them a place of honor at our temple. That was about a year before you arrived.

“I have no doubt it is he who spoke with you in the kitchen.”

The abbot got up abruptly to return to his busy schedule. He walked off, and as he rounded the corner and moved out of sight I noticed that he was shaking his head and laughing.

-Paul Weiss, 1999