"Gachirin-kan," intoned Dr. Hakeda, "contemplation of the full moon. The monk meditates on the painting of the full moon, Gachirin-kan Honzon. What do you think?"

"The full moon represents absolute truth, enlightenment," declared Nelson, "but it also symbolizes the mind, both its conscious and unconscious contents. In a sense, the moon is the mind."

"But the moon is not always full," commented Alice. "It's always in a cyclical process. Why is it a symbol for enlightenment, which presumably is changeless?"

Ralph Strand was wriggling with excitement. He had an odd habit of crossing his right leg over the left, then slipping his right foot under his left ankle. Amos had tried to duplicate this pose, but his legs were too stocky or bowed, and he found it impossible. Perhaps this was some tantric contortion, but it seemed an exceedingly pointless one. Strand was almost tying himself into knots today, and his intensity made Amos nervous.

"Don't forget the Pure Land imagery!" he exclaimed. "There's a poem which likens the moon, hiding itself behind a mountain, to the mind going west into the Pure Land paradise."

That's a very nice poem, mused Amos. He wished that he could remember some nice poems, but he felt oddly distracted today. He glanced around the seminar room, feeling strangely distant from the rest. The sight of the peeling yellow paint made him faintly nauseous. Alice looked old today, brittle, almost fossilized, sweat frozen among the tiny hairs on her upper lip.

* * *

Amos hurried out of the seminar as soon as it was completed and set out on his customary afternoon walk, hoping to calm his mind. Sometimes he would sit quietly under the dome of the cathedral before going down into the park. Into the giant maw of the cathedral, thought Amos, into the stone tomb, the heart of the mountain. He loved this cathedral almost religiously, for its tremendous proportions, its cool, cavernous interior.

But the liturgy, the few times he'd attended services, held no mystery for him. Only the processional caught his imagination, the straggling peregrination of robed bishop and altar boys across sacred space, and the odor of incense it diffused. The scent was tantalizing. It materialized for an instant, musty and tart, and then dispelled. He loved the cathedral for its weird contradictions - the huge ceramic vases beside the high altar donated by the pagan Japanese emperor, himself a manifest god; the lavishness of the edifice itself juxtaposed against the stark squalor of Harlem. In fact it perched on a cliff overlooking one of the most devastated corners of the ghetto.

Occasionally he walked below, amid burned out and abandoned apartment houses, some sporadically occupied by junkies. Gazing up at the stone cathedral soaring over the sordidness, Amos felt a welter of mixed emotion at this stark conjunction of first and third worlds.

Inside, the dome was unfinished. The raw rock pillars were ordinarily a source of comfort, of stolid peace, but today they looked ragged and sore. Amos tried to sit, to absorb the peace which this massive space usually instilled in him. But today the rock did not speak to him at all. If anything it seemed vaguely menacing, as if accusing him of some sort of betrayal.

He walked down the broad cathedral steps and west toward the park, uneasily avoiding people's eyes. Those he chanced to glance at wore an expression of intense anxiety, or appeared distorted with fear. He descended the steep stone steps to the park, holding his breath to avoid the everyday stench of urine, which today stank, overpowering.

There were high rocky places in the park, and Amos clambered up the side of a massive stone pile, then began leaping from rock to rock, imagining himself a Castanedan brujo. He tried to sit, perched on his haunches, but his restlessness drove him back to the path. A woman approached, walking a poodle. Amos was aware of an enormous gasping, rasping noise, a vast labored breathing. It contracted and expanded and drew his own breath in with it. When he inhaled the trees shivered. When he exhaled they relaxed. Amos realized with a start that the sound was the dog's panting. The woman walked by with a rustling clatter like an enormous snake in dead, dry grass.

Terrified, he began to run. The leaves on the trees shriveled, curling and turning brown before his eyes. Poisonous gases swirled out of the rocks. His jeans burst into flame, and he rolled on the ground to smother the fire, then pulled them off. His shirt clawed at him like a living creature. He tripped on a rock and cut his shoulder.

Amos struggled to his feet. There, striding down the path, coming to judge him, was his professor of Chinese history on his daily constitutional, now fearfully manifested as Emma-O, Yamaraja, the King of Hell.