Bark and Clay

by Asaṅga, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The scroll came to Dhamasena in the eleventh month, when the river below the monastery had shrunk to three channels and the mornings were cold enough to make the ink thicken in the pot.

His teacher, Saṃgharakṣa, carried it in from the store-room himself, held flat across both forearms in its cloth, as a gardener carries a tray of seedlings, and set it down on the copying board without a word. Then he sat on the bench opposite, and put his hands in his sleeves, and waited for Dhamasena to undo the cloth.

There are three things a copyist learns to see in an old roll before he touches it: the colour of the bark, the state of the edges, and the places where the sheets were joined. The bark was the colour of a dry leaf in the inner turns and darker, almost the brown of a lentil, at the outer, where hands had held it. The edges had gone. Where once they had been cut straight they were now a coastline, bitten in, with here and there a long tongue of bark hanging on by a fibre. The joins, where one strip had been stitched to the next with thread, had held better than the bark around them; the thread was intact, and the bark had torn away from it, so that at each join a little row of holes stood open on nothing.

"The Rhinoceros," said Saṃgharakṣa. "Forty verses, when it was whole. It was copied in the time of the teacher of my teacher's teacher, and it has been read every rainy season since. The potter is making the jar. You will copy it, and then we will put this one away."

Dhamasena knew the custom. A roll that had been read until it could not be read was not burned, and not thrown into the river, and not left to the mice. It was copied, and the old one was wrapped and laid in a jar, and the jar was sealed and set in the ground beside the stupa, among the other jars, where the words it had carried could lie in the dark in company with the Teacher's relics. He had helped dig such a hole once, as a novice, and had found the shoulder of an older jar a cubit to the left, and had been told to fill it in gently.

"How long?" he asked.

"Before the rains are so long gone that the potter forgets he made it," said Saṃgharakṣa, and went out.

---

He could not unroll it cold. The first morning he tried, and a flake the size of a fingernail came away from the third turn with a sound like a sparrow landing, and he sat for some time with the flake on the board in front of him and did not move his hands.

After that he did as the old copyists had told him: he set a bowl of water on the brazier, not to boil but to steam, and held each turn of the roll over the steam for the length of three slow breaths, and then opened it a hand's width, and weighted it, and waited. The bark softened. It did not become supple, but it stopped being glass. A turn took the whole morning. By the end of the first week he had opened a third of the roll and copied eleven verses, writing from the right as the letters run, the reed pen making its small dry noise on the new bark, which was pale and smelled of the mountain it had been peeled from.

The new bark had come up from the hills in bundles. He had cut it into strips, pressed it under boards, rubbed it smooth with a stone, and stitched the strips into a roll as long as his outstretched arms twice over. It lay to the left of the old one on the board, filling as the old one opened. In the evenings he rolled them both up, the new one tight and the old one loose, and put the old one back in its cloth.

The verses were known to him, mostly. He had heard them recited every rainy season since he had come to the monastery as a boy of nine, sitting at the back of the hall among the novices, and some of them he could have said aloud with his eyes shut. But a copyist does not copy what he knows. He copies what is in front of him. That was the first thing he had been taught, and he had been taught it by having his ear twisted: he had once written a verse as he had heard it rather than as the roll had it, and Saṃgharakṣa had found it, and laid the two rolls side by side, and put his finger on the two words that differed, and said nothing at all while Dhamasena's face grew hot.

So he looked. Where the roll said let him wander he wrote let him wander. Where the old copyist had made a letter in his own way, with a hook at the foot where Dhamasena would have made none, he did not make the hook, because the hook was the old copyist's and not the verse's, but he made sure that the letter was the same letter. Where the old copyist had made a mistake and corrected it with a small mark above, he wrote the correction.

In the second week he came to the outer turns, where the roll had been held most, and the work slowed again.

---

The twenty-ninth verse was nearly gone.

It sat on a part of the bark where a long tongue had torn away along the grain, so that the verse had been cut lengthways, as if someone had drawn a knife through a line of people walking. Of the first line he could read the first word, as, and the bottom halves of the letters after it, which might have been a dozen words. The second line was in the missing tongue entirely. Of the third line there remained, at the far left, one word that he read three times and was sure of: carried. And then the fourth line, whole, because the fourth line of every verse in the roll was the same and the old copyist had written it every time with the same care: let him wander alone like the rhinoceros.

He looked for the tongue of bark in the cloth. It was not there. It had come away years ago, perhaps before he was born, and gone wherever bark goes, into the dust of the store-room floor or the stomach of a mouse.

He sat back. A good copyist leaves a gap. He marks the place, writes what he can read, and leaves the rest of the line empty, so that whoever reads the new roll will know that something was here and is not here now. That was one way.

He tried to recite the twenty-ninth verse from memory, and found that he could not. He knew where it came, between the verse of the bamboo and the verse of the companion who is not found. He could hear the shape of it as it was chanted in the hall, rising on the second line and falling on the third. But the words would not come up into his mouth. Something about crossing over. He was not sure.

He wrote as and the bottom halves of nothing, and left the rest of the line blank, and wrote carried at the left of the third line, and the refrain below it. Then he went to find Saṃgharakṣa.

---

His teacher was in the walk behind the hall, going up and down. He listened to the question without stopping and turned at the end of the walk and came back.

"I learned the Rhinoceros in Puruṣapura," he said, "from teachers who recited it in their own order, and not in ours. When I came here I had to learn it again. The order is still a little wrong in me. I will give you what I have, but you must understand that it may not be the verse that stood in that place."

He stopped, and closed his eyes, and recited a verse about a man who has made a raft of grass and branches and crossed a river on it, and who does not, having crossed, carry the raft on his head. The fourth line was the refrain.

"Is that it?" said Dhamasena.

"I do not know," said Saṃgharakṣa. "There is a crossing in it. Is there a crossing in yours?"

"I do not know. There is carried."

"There is carried in mine." His teacher looked at him for a while. "Go to the old sister Utarā. She was hearing the Rhinoceros in this hall before I was born. And she heard it read from that roll, not recited from memory by a stranger from the city."

---

The sisters lived in a smaller house across the stream, below the orchard, and Dhamasena went across on the stones in the early afternoon, when the sun had some warmth in it. Utarā sat in the doorway on a mat, with a shawl over her head and her hands working a bit of wool without looking at it. She was very old. Her eyes had gone white at the centre, and she turned her face towards the sound of him rather than towards him.

He said who he was, and whose pupil, and what he wanted.

"The twenty-ninth," she said. "After the bamboo." Her hands went on with the wool. "The one who read it to us when I was a girl was called Budhila. He had a very high voice, and we used to laugh at him, and the elder sisters used to pinch us. He read it from that roll. He would hold it so —" and she held her hands apart, the width of a turn — "and we could see the letters from where we sat, but we could not read them, we were only girls from the villages. We only had the sound."

She was quiet for a time. He thought she had forgotten him.

Then she said:

"As a man who has crossed at the ford, having set down what carried him over, goes on without looking for the ford again, let him wander alone like the rhinoceros."

He said it back to her, to fix it, and she nodded at each line.

"Carried," he said. "There is carried on the bark."

"Then that is right." She seemed neither pleased nor surprised. "But I must tell you something, because you are a copyist and you will want it. When I was a girl I heard the second line wrong. I heard having set down what married him, because Budhila's voice went up at the end and we had all been talking that morning about a girl from my village who had been married. For years, when the sisters chanted it, I chanted married. I thought it was a verse about leaving a husband. I was quite sure of it. Then one day I heard it properly, and it was carried, and I could not hear it the other way again."

"So you are sure now."

"I am sure now," said Utarā, "as I was sure then."

---

He went back across the stones with the verse in his mouth, saying it under his breath so as not to lose it. In the copying room the light had gone low and yellow and lay across the board at a slant, and when he unrolled the old roll to the place, a letter stood out of the torn line that he had not seen in the morning: a clear stroke, and a cross-stroke, in the second line where he had thought there was nothing. It was the first stroke of ford. He was certain of it. He bent close with the lamp, and the letter became a split in the bark where the fibres had parted along the grain and then crossed, a little, where a knot had been in the living tree. It had been a split in the morning too. In the morning light it had looked like a split.

He sat back on his heels with the lamp in his hand. Then he put the lamp down and moved it to the other side of the board, and the split was a split, and he moved it back, and it was a letter again, and he blew it out.

---

He did not sleep well that night. The verse went round in him as verses do when one has been saying them all day, and it went round in Utarā's words, and then in Saṃgharakṣa's, the raft and the ford changing places, the man on the bank and the man in the water. Some time after the second watch the shape of it changed. He did not decide anything. It was more like turning over in bed: one moment he was lying on one side and the next on the other, and he could not have said where the turning was. A verse stood complete in him that was neither his teacher's nor the old sister's, and he lay in the dark and looked at it.

As the ox that has been driven through the ford does not go looking for the ford again, the yoke that carried him set down on the bank, let him wander alone like the rhinoceros.

An ox. Where had an ox come from? There had been oxen at the ford below the monastery that week, a carter bringing up the potter's clay, and he had watched them from the wall, the water to their bellies and the carter shouting. That was one source. Utarā had given him the ford and the crossing. His teacher had given him the setting-down on the far bank. The twenty-ninth verse on the old bark had given him as, and carried, and the length of the lines, which this verse fitted, he counted it on his fingers in the dark, exactly. And under all of these, perhaps, Budhila's high voice reading in that hall to a row of girls before Utarā's eyes went white, and before Budhila, whoever had read it to Budhila, and the hand that had first cut the bark of that roll and written on it from the right with the hook at the foot of the letter. Perhaps none of that. He did not know which of these had made the verse, or whether he had. He lay and counted the syllables again, and they came out the same.

---

In the morning he did not leave the gap.

He sat a long time with the pen dry. He thought of his ear being twisted. He thought that if he left the line empty, then whoever read the new roll in fifty years would find a hole, and would go to whoever was oldest, and that person would give him a verse with a man in it, or a raft, or a husband. He thought that if he wrote it, whoever read the new roll in fifty years would find a verse, and would not know there had ever been anything else.

Then he wet the pen and wrote it, all four lines, from the right, in his own letters without the hook. When it was done he looked at it in the new bark, pale and smelling of the hill, and it looked like every other verse in the roll. He did not put a mark beside it. He wrote the thirtieth verse, and the thirty-first.

It took him eleven more days to finish. When he had done he rolled the new roll tight and tied it and took it to Saṃgharakṣa in the walk, and his teacher sat on the bench and unrolled it across his knees, a turn at a time, reading with his lips moving and his finger going along under the line, right to left, as he had read Dhamasena's copies since Dhamasena was nine years old.

At the twenty-ninth verse the finger stopped.

Dhamasena watched the lips move through the first line and the second and the third, and then go back to the beginning and move through them again. The finger did not move. A crow came down on the end of the wall and looked at them both and went away again.

Then the finger went on to the thirtieth verse, and to the end, and Saṃgharakṣa rolled the roll up and tied it and gave it back, and said that the potter had been asking.

---

They buried the old roll on the last day of the twelfth month.

The potter brought the jar up himself, on his hip, a round-shouldered thing the colour of the riverbank with a lid that fitted into its mouth like a stopper. Around the shoulder, before he fired it, he had let Saṃgharakṣa scratch the words of the gift with a stick: that this jar was given to the community of the four quarters, for the acceptance of the teachers, and in it a book. Dhamasena had read the scratched letters over his teacher's shoulder while the clay was still soft, and had seen that his teacher made the letters with a hook at the foot.

The old roll lay in its cloth on the copying board. When Dhamasena lifted it, flakes came away from the outer turns and lay on the cloth, small and brown, like the scales of a fish. He did not leave them. He gathered them with the edge of his hand into a little heap, and lifted the heap on the flat of a knife, and tipped it into the cloth, and folded the cloth over the roll and the flakes together, and tied it with thread from the same skein he had used to stitch the new one.

At the stupa the novices had dug the hole. Dhamasena knelt and lowered the jar into it, and Saṃgharakṣa handed him the bundle, and he put it in through the mouth of the jar, where it went down with a soft sound and settled. The potter had brought a lump of wet clay wrapped in a leaf. Dhamasena set the lid in its place, and took the clay, and worked it round the seam between the lid and the jar with his fingers until there was no seam to be seen, and smoothed it, and then, because the clay was still soft and the hole was waiting, pressed his thumb once into the place where the lid met the shoulder, and took it away, and looked at the whorl it had left there, and the novices began to put back the earth.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ab Asaṅgā per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Asaṅga, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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