Law had the extraordinary sensation of the sky being torn in two by lightning and a hallucinatory vision of the stupa floating several feet above the ground, defying the laws of gravity and eventually vanishing in a puff of smoke. He woke the two hundred monks in the temple, announced his vision to them and asked them to pray with him all night for the stupa to be removed to the eternal peace of Parinirvana. As dawn broke the rain slackened, the dark mists stopped swirling and there was a huge thunderclap, creating so much electric discharge that the sky seemed to explode and the ground to disintegrate. The framework of the temple cracked and shuddered; then, in a fraction of a second, the left side of the stupa, which had been struck by lightning, collapsed. The right side remained standing in the rain, its damaged silhouette—bearing the clear tear line, which ran from the highest point right down to the ground—outlined against the sky like a fragment ripped from an architectural drawing. The following morning, in among the lightning-blackened bricks and planks at the foot of the building, soaking wet pages of the Avatamsaka Sutra were found lying in concentric circles on the ground. This was Buddha’s ‘Flower Garland’ Sutra, which the monks were not surprised to see here, as, for many centuries, faithful wealthy donors had had the right to lay down offerings (rolls of silk or sheets of paper on which scribes had been paid to copy out sacred texts) inside the thick walls of the temple. But when the superior of the monastery climbed to the top of the broken stupa to take down a pitifully damaged bronze statue of Buddha, a manuscript rolled on valuable shafts made of white sandalwood, jade and ivory fell from the belly of the statue. Unsettled by the unfamiliar language on the roll as much as by the circumstances in which it was found, he presented himself to Emperor Huizong in person to offer him the manuscript, convinced that it bore a message concerning a higher authority. What came next proves that deciphering this text would have tremendous repercussions on the country’s fate as much as on that of the emperor himself.
“Huizong, a weakened sovereign, an artist shipwrecked on a throne, ended his colophon in a hand that admittedly proved he still had a dazzling mastery of the skill but increasingly lacked discipline: ‘My imperial person, in his concern to decipher the manuscript, devoted all his erudition and hours of research, reading and reflection to every last sign. In vain.’ As this item seemed to date back to the period of An Shih-Kao, the emperor asked the then king of Parthia, where this genius originated, to send him a delegation of intellectuals and experts, but they too were unable to identify the language. They pointed out that, according to the annals of history, An Shih-Kao was familiar with some twenty languages, most of them dead. The mystery remains impenetrable but the emperor is convinced that, despite its brevity, the text is a sutra, since it was positioned at the very top of the reliquary, inside the most sacred statue. This hypothesis is joined by another, from Su Shi, the emperor’s favoured poet with very pronounced inclinations towards Buddhism: remembering that An Shih-Kao was assassinated, Su wondered whether there was any secret link between this crime and the roll of silk in which An Shih-Kao might reveal something about the authenticity of the relics.’
“As for Puyi,” the professor went on, after gazing for a while at the silent streets flitting by through the tram window, “his fascination with the manuscript took an unexpected turn. Towards the end of the 1920s, before the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War, Puyi, who was then twenty-five, was confronted with the dilemma of behaving patriotically at the risk of never regaining his throne or collaborating with the Japanese who might one day restore him to his imperial role, albeit at the expense of his honour. It was at this point, as if trying to find a message to resolve his dilemma, that he threw himself into deciphering the unknown language, firstly on a whim but later with a nervous intensity that gradually consumed him. Books translated by An Shih-Kao began to overrun his study, dining room, bedroom, bed and soon his whole existence. For the most part these works, devoted to various techniques of dhyana meditation or to numerical categories, made him feel faint and dizzy,