《lord of light 02》.doc

As they sped from chamber to vaulted chamber, down tunnels and chasms and wells, through labyrinths and grottoes and corridors of stone, Sam set his mind adrift, to move down the ways of memory and back. He thought upon the days of his recent ministry, when he had sought to graft the teachings of Gotama upon the stock of the religion by which the world was ruled, He thought upon the strange one, Sugata, whose hands had held both death and benediction. Over the years, their names would merge and their deeds would be mingled. He had lived too long not to know how time stirred the pots of legend. There had been a real Buddha, he knew that now. The teaching he had offered, no matter how spuriously, had attracted this true believer, this one who had somehow achieved enlightenment, marked mens minds with his sainthood, and then gone willingly into the hands of Death himself. Tathagatha and Sugata would be part of a single legend, he knew, and Tathagatha would shine in the light shed by his disciple. Only the one Dhamma would survive. Then his mind went back to the battle at the Hall of Karma, and to the machinery still cached in a secret place. And he thought then upon the countless transfers he had undergone before that time, of the battles he had fought, of the women he had loved across the ages; he thought upon what a world could be and what this world was, and why. Then he was taken again with his rage against the gods. He thought upon the days when a handful of them had fought the Rakasha and the Nagas, the Gandharvas and the People-of-the-Sea, the Kataputna demons and the Mothers of the Terrible Glow, the Dakshinis and the Pretas, the Skandas and the Pisakas, and had won, tearing a world loose from chaos and building its first city of men. He had seen that city pass through all the stages through which a city can pass, until now it was inhabited by those who could spin their minds for a moment and transform themselves into gods, taking upon them an Aspect that stre