By the time Bunny had recovered sufficiently to go out in the courtyard and sit under the apple tree with his grandma, a good few days had passed. Gela and Sangdan had already vanished from Ji village.
Though Ji village was a very small place, somehow no one noticed the disappearance of two very visible loafers from the streets they normally frequented. Of course, it's possible that some people did notice, but pretended they didn't. It is also possible that still more people noticed, but decided not to say anything anyway. If Gela and Sangdan really had disappeared … well, then they disappeared. Nothing more to say about it. Two problematic people like Gela and Sangdan acted almost as living mirrors for the people of Ji village, in which they could see their own problems, communal as well as personal.
After Bunny's recovery, Enbo and his family remained downcast; Enbo, because he was supposed to have renounced secular life—If not for the unnegotiable circumstances of his return, he would still be at the temple, living out a life devoted to Buddha. But the temple was rubble, and its gold-coated Buddha statue was fine dust. Not long after his dismissal, Enbo and the other monks who had already hung up their robes were summoned back to the temple for what was to be the final time; that was the day the Buddha statue was destroyed. The de-frocked monks stood in the square in front of the temple building, shoulder to shoulder with the remaining monks who obstinately refused to leave the temple. The walls of the main temple hall had been torn down, covering the golden image of the Tathagata Buddha with a dirty film of dust in the process. Rain began to fall on the assembled men. Soon, rivulets of rainwater were lifting the dirt off the surface of the statue's face and washing it down towards the floor, crisscrossing the Buddha's full moon like face with streaks of muddy water.
A huge coil of rope was looped round the Buddha's neck, long enough for each of the monks and ex-monks gathered in the square to hold a section. Apart from the monastics, there were also spectators; it was easy to differentiate the two groups because the spectators were waving red flags and blowing excitedly on whistles. For now, the monks did nothing. The filthy Buddha was still seated on his even filthier lotus dais. Then, a red-robed Lama was grabbed and dragged out of the crowd of monks. He was handcuffed and put under guard by the People's Militia. Meanwhile, a line of soldiers armed with rifles stood to stern attention in front of a jeep.
The red flags danced back into motion to the accompaniment of whistles—the monks gave a forlorn shout, the rope around the Buddha's neck pulled tight. With one more, this time ear-splitting, yell, the Buddha swayed, then crashed to the ground. The dust danced upwards, its initial resemblance to fire smoke quickly extinguished in the drizzle. The yellow plaster and straw that formed the stuffing inside of the Buddha statue was poking out through the holes in its crumpled body. The monks fell to the floor, sitting in the rain in silence, until one monk, quickly followed by the rest, began to weep his despair. It was said that, in contrast to the emotional but docile huddle of monks, the one Lama who had been arrested kept up a furious mood throughout the ordeal. According to the story that was passed around afterward, he was furious because his fellow monks were so abject, so hopeless. Anyway, the point was moot, since no one ever saw that Lama again after that day. The rumour forever stayed a rumour, never to solidify into something verifiable.
As for Enbo, he was haunted by a strange feeling in his heart whenever he recalled the events of that day, especially the sight of the monks rolling around in puddles, weeping like women—he felt like a knot of contradictions had his insides all tied up. Well, the Buddha statue fell, didn't it? What else is there to say? There were no dramatic consequences like with a landslide, or an earthquake; life went on. Enbo the monk gradually died, slowly, day by day, while the Enbo that struggled for existence in the world of men grew and matured steadily.
At least, he kept growing until what happened between himself, Gela and Sangdan on that night brought back his internal knot of contradictions with a savagery that even made him think back on that day in the rain, sitting in the cold mud and crying like a little girl who'd lost her parents, almost as a happy memory.
In the past, everyone thought it was a good thing that Gela and Sangdan, a drifting single-mother-and-son duo, had settled in Ji village; life there was so hard and the village so impoverished, that having the two of them to draw comparisons with made the rest of them feel their own lives were that much better. Everyone looked down on Gela and Sangdan, believing it beneath them to bother with vagrants, but the villagers' treatment of the two also pointed to how Ji village covertly divided everyone into two camps: those nearer the top, and those nearer the bottom. For example, Enbo's family counted two former monks, a kindly old grandmother, and the lovely Ler Kymcog, which, combined with the fact that they'd never before treated anyone harshly, including Gela and Sangdan, meant that: "This is a good family, they measure up very well on the scales of the village's heart" , to borrow the words of Zhang Lobsang.
Whenever people heard Zhang Lobsang hold forth on the subject of scales, they would nudge each other and murmur: "What a surprise, he's weighing metaphors with his precious scales again."
