“A girl arrived at the temple gate in the autumn of 2008. She was nine or ten, barefoot, her feet thick with hardened skin and scaly with sores. She sat down in the courtyard and looked at the monk with the peculiar weatheredness of a child who has lived through things that did not belong…

“In 1966, some children came, a line of red dots ascending the trail. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old. They called themselves Red Guards. They came up the mountain with crowbars and red armbands, and they smashed the altar and broke the bell and tore the books and cut the persimmon trees.”

‘“Tell me a story,” the little monk piped up. “Ma always told me a story before bed.” The old monk gave him the simplest one he knew, which was also the only one he knew.’

“Suppose Father had gone to heaven. Wasn’t he born there, then, again? Every birth, thus, was a death. A death from nothingness.”