And what did I do that same year? Shi-Rong thought ruefully. Failed to get the salt inspector’s position and was accused by my own son of taking bribes. The year of my humiliation and my shame.
As for Cixi, it seemed to him she’d achieved nothing in the first few years except to outmaneuver Prince Gong, the one man the empire really needed, and to reduce his role from head of her council to a mere advisor.
Then something strange had happened. Cixi had suddenly fallen ill. Word came she was close to death. For months no one saw her. She sent messages to the council from time to time; but it was the docile empress who conducted business. This went on for about a year.
What was wrong with Cixi? Nobody seemed to know. What was she hiding? Ru-Hai had made a brief visit home at this time and Shi-Rong had asked him: “Is it possible she got herself pregnant and wants to hide it?”
“I doubt it, Father,” he replied. “She’s a bit old for that.”
“There are no rumors?”
“Might be smallpox, but we don’t think so.” Ru-Hai had smiled. “Say what you like, the Forbidden City knows how to keep a secret.”
“Perhaps she’s being punished by the gods for her sins,” Shi-Rong remarked sourly. But he was never able to learn anything more.
A year later, she appeared again as though nothing had happened. Some said she looked older. More people started calling her Venerable Buddha after this. The two empresses resumed their regency. Shi-Rong imagined it would last another five or six years until the new boy emperor came of age.
So how was it, he asked himself, that the kindly little empress, who’d never done anyone any harm, should suddenly drop down dead a year later? Ru-Hai wrote that she’d had a stroke. At forty-four? Or had she been poisoned? And if so, by whom? Might Cixi have concluded, since the empress had managed the business of government well enough without her while she’d been ill, that people might say that she, Cixi, was not really needed, and therefore decided to poison her little friend?
The idea was not so outlandish. Everyone knew the story of the only female emperor of China, twelve hundred years ago, who’d begun her life in a similar way to Cixi. She’d been the concubine of one emperor. When he died, she’d become the concubine of his son. She’d murdered two legal empresses, two other concubines, and probably four of her own children before making herself sole ruler of the empire.
Was Cixi cut from the same cloth? It seemed to Shi-Rong that she might be.
For the facts alone about Cixi’s court were enough to invite censure. And now the events of the last three years had confirmed all his fears.
She’d dismissed her entire council. Prince Gong, still her best advisor, she’d sent packing. Told him to retire from public life. Then she’d made the boy emperor’s father, Prince Chun, head of the council. Quite apart from the fact that the once gallant prince had degenerated into a toady who’d do anything Cixi wanted, it was also against palace law for the boy emperor’s father to be his official councillor. Finally, when the boy emperor reached his majority, when he was supposed to take the reins of government, she got her new council to say he wasn’t ready, leaving her in charge. Would she ever give up power? Shi-Rong doubted it.
And so he had formed his secret plan.
Once the plan was settled, he’d be free. His Confucian duty to his family and his country would be completed. Nothing more to hold him back from other things. From the meditative life. And beyond.
—
Shi-Rong couldn’t say exactly when he had begun to withdraw from active life. It was certainly after he had retired from Jingdezhen. The following year he’d been busy with Ru-Hai’s marriage. Then there had been the excitement of his grandson’s birth. Young Bao-Yu would be ten next birthday.
After he’d left Jingdezhen without the salt inspector’s post, he’d retired to the family estate. His friend Mr. Peng had come up with one other suggestion—a lucrative position, down in the south—but after the humiliation of his failure the last time, Shi-Rong wasn’t anxious to go through anything like it again. Besides, the estate needed his full attention just then. So he’d decided to devote himself to handing on the home of his ancestors in the best shape he could and content himself with that.
Thanks to these efforts, the estate was now in better shape than it had ever been before. Everything was in good repair; the storehouses were full. His duty to his family being accomplished therefore, Shi-Rong had felt free to devote himself to the things of the mind.
Whenever the weather was fine, he had fallen into the habit of walking through the village before dawn and taking the narrow path that led up the steep hillside to the family graveyard. Or sometimes he would continue to the little Buddhist temple higher up. And from these high vantage points he would gaze down the great sweep of the Yellow River valley while the dawn chorus began. Often he would remain up on the hill from before even the first hint of light appeared on the eastern horizon until long after the sun was up.
At these times when the whole world as far as the eye could see was filled with the sound of the birds’ grand salutation to the sun, he would so lose his sense of self that he felt as if he had dissolved into the great space of the morning. Some days he’d return to the same place to watch the sunset and then, for an hour or more, stare up at the stars.
Over time, these sessions became as important to him as prayer to a monk, so that he could hardly imagine living without them anymore.
—
He’d also made
