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pathic or otherwise psychic, at least sporadically, for it was maya that tended to cloud psychic abilities.
Being both delicate and telepathic, Min expected to progress quite rapidly.
Adepts commonly meditated with their eyes open, seeing nothing, but it was entirely acceptable to close them, to cut off the distractions of vision. Telepaths might also close their inner eye, so as not to be distracted by other people’s thoughts, and in meditation this was customary among novices who were telepaths.
When the barbarian first came to the room of meditation, the sight of his gross physical nature disgusted Min, so that he closed all three eyes. Surely someone like the barbarian could never attain enlightenment. Such size and strength would come only to one born with the idea that reality was purely physical, and solutions violent.
Yet Master Jampa must have approved his being here. Perhaps, Min told himself, he has brought him here to provide a challenge, an experience. Certainly he will be a distraction. Perhaps his presence will bring to the surface of our awareness things which are resistive, thus loosening elements of maya that might otherwise persist for a longer time.
Snap!! Master Ho’s slender staff rapped Min’s shaven skull, causing him to recall that one does not dispose of a thought by elaborating it.
Nonetheless, Min had one more thought about the barbarian before he let the matter go; he decided to speak with him after supper, and examine the thoughts and images stirred up.
Jampa Lodro knew, of course whose knuckles knocked on his door post. “Come!” he said.
Hsu Min entered and bowed. Jampa Lodro had not lit a candle; it was dusk out, but not yet twilight.
“Master,” Min said. His voice was quiet, but tight with urgency and upset.
“Speak.”
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“The barbarian giant is a murderer! A monster! He came here for refuge after killing many men!”
“Indeed? How did you learn this?”
“I questioned him.’
“He speaks neither Chinese nor Tibetan.”
“The man is a telepath!” Min said as if somehow the Tao had betrayed him by allowing this to happen. “I spoke to him in Chinese, and he read my question telepathically!”
Tampa said nothing, simply regarded the young man calmly, so Min continued. “He went about in a dark room somewhere, with a knife, and killed many men in their sleep!”
“Ah. And who were these men he killed?”
“Uh, I do not know.” Min groped inward. There was that about Jampa Lodro that when he asked a question, you usually came up with the answer. “They—they seem to have been soldiers. Or—they were bailiffs men!”
“Indeed? Any others?”
“I—not that I know of. But he killed dozens of them, mostly in their sleep, though some—some in a fight.”
“Hm-m. And why did he do this thing?”
Min stared blankly inward. If that had been part of what the barbarian showed him, he hadn’t noticed. He’d been too shocked. After a moment, Jampa continued. “To enter a room full of bailiffs men must have been dangerous, unless he was one of them. Was he?”
Min shook his head. “I think not, master. No he wasn’t.”
“Well then,” Jampa said affably, “let us ask him how all this came to be.” The master got up from his mat, and after gesturing toward the door, left the room behind the novice.
Nils was not in the novices’ room. One of the others said he’d gone outside. They found him sitting on a footbridge over the stream, his large bare feet dan-
gling. He didn’t even stand up to meet Jampa, let alone ow. Truly a barbarian, Min thought, and kept his
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third eye open to perceive whatever thoughts the two might exchange.
This student is Hsu Min, Jampa said mentally. He is troubled over violence you have been part of. He believes it was with some bailiff’s men.
Most recently it was. I have been violent many times earlier, however.
Ah. Please relate to us the circumstances of this most recent violence.
The reply began largely with what Nils had learned from Wu and Chen, both verbally and from what lay beneath the words, and from the bailiff’s wife: a montage of confiscatory taxes and insults, humiliation, and ruin. And by the bailiff’s personal army—beatings, tortures, rapes and murders, perhaps mostly not ordered by the bailiff, but known and condoned by him. And of peasants preparing to rise against him, in a fight that might have killed his ruffian army and himself, but would surely have killed many peasants and townsmen as well.