Chapter 16: It’s Raining

It’s raining.

In Chinese, xia yu le means “it’s raining” and has no grammatical subject. No one asks: who is raining? The rain falling is the raining itself.

Chinese has many sentences like this. Day has broken. The wind has risen. The flowers are out. The water’s boiling. It’s got dark. Autumn has come in. The tide is rising. In these sentences there is no one standing in front doing anything, and no one standing beside watching. Things are by themselves, move by themselves, and the words are simply said that way.

The fifteen chapters before this one all started from “I.” I am, who am I, do I deserve it, I feel bad, I want, when I’m gone. People come in through “I,” because the inside where a person can speak is this place that says “I.”

This chapter starts from somewhere else. Not from “I,” nor from people, but from these sentences with no subject. This is not a higher place, nor a place reached only after walking fifteen chapters; the person feeling bad in the car and a dewdrop on the hillside described below are not a bit different in being. Only this time we move to a place where no person is present, and see what being looks like there.

It isn’t light yet.

On a hillside, there is no one. Dew hangs on the blades of grass, drop by drop, round; in the night the air cooled and the water vapor gathered by itself on the tips of the leaves. No one hung it there; it hung itself.

The east whitens a little first. The white slowly climbs, turns grey-blue, turns pale yellow. The things on the hillside show themselves out of the dark one by one: first the outline of the far ridge, then the few trees nearby, then the stones under the trees, then a clump of grass in a crack in the stone. Day has broken. Not that a lamp has been switched on; the earth is turning, this stretch of hillside has turned to the side facing the sun, and the light falls on it little by little.

The light falls on the grass, and the dew begins to shine, shining like broken glass. A while later, the sun a little higher, the dew begins to shrink, becoming invisible vapor and going back into the air.

A bird calls once, first, then two, three, and soon the whole hillside is full of them. No one started it, and no one is conducting. Some call high, some low, some call after call, some once and then a long silence; layered together, a jumble, and lovely.

The tree has not woken, because it never slept. Its roots in the soil have been shifting all night toward where there is water; the invisible little openings on the undersides of its leaves opened at daybreak and began taking the light in and letting water vapor out. The very thin ring of new wood inside the bark has grown thicker by an amount too small to see.

In a crack in the stone, a nest of ants comes out of its hole. Yesterday’s path is today’s path too; across it lies a twig snapped off in the night; the first few meet it and go round, and the ones behind follow round.

Below the hillside there is a river. The water hasn’t stopped all night, coming down from the mountain, going round a great rock, swirling once behind the rock, and going on down. Of the fish in the water, some lie against the riverbed, unmoving; some face upstream, flicking their tails, holding their place.

No one has seen any of this. No one has said “day has broken,” no one has said “the birds are calling.” Yet the day broke all the same, the birds called all the same, the dew dried all the same, the ants came out all the same, the river flowed all the same.

They are not waiting for someone to come and look. No lamp is lit in order to be seen; no bird calls in order to be heard. They are by themselves and move by themselves; whether or not anyone comes to look, they are fully being.

Look one layer further down.

In a handful of that soil there are countless invisible things: bacteria, fungi, very, very tiny creatures. Without a moment’s pause they are eating last year’s fallen leaves, eating them into fragments, eating them into soil, releasing bit by bit what is in the soil for the tree roots to drink. From a leaf falling from the tree to its becoming a handful of black earth, millions of these small things are involved. Not one knows what it is doing, and not one has ever said “I.” Yet without them there would be no soil this year, and so no leaves this year.

Look one layer larger.

That ridge looks motionless; for thousands of years people have seen it looking the same. But it is moving. Underground, very, very deep, the rock is hot as porridge and flows slowly; the great slabs of land on the surface, like flatbreads floating on the porridge, shift a few centimeters a year, about as fast as fingernails grow. Where two slabs press together, they press and press and push the mountain up; pushing for millions of years, they have pushed it to the height it is today. The mountain is growing too, and also being washed down bit by bit by the rain. In a whole lifetime a person can’t see it, yet it has never for a moment stopped.

Look one layer further out.

After dark, those stars. Every one is burning, has burned for billions of years; some will burn for billions more, some are nearly burned out. Some stars, very far away, have exploded, and what was blown out scattered very, very far, and after a very, very long time gathered again into new stars, new lands, new mountains, perhaps new water and new grass. The iron in the human body, the calcium in the bones, much of it came from some star that exploded long, long ago.

These beings are fast and slow.

A dewdrop, from gathering to drying, takes no more than an hour or two. A mayfly, once it has flown up, has perhaps one day. A blade of grass, a summer. A bird, a few years. A tree, a few hundred years. A mountain, millions of years. A star, billions of years.

The fast are being, the slow are being. Those so fast they are gone in the blink of an eye are being; those so slow a person can’t see them move in a lifetime are being too. And those that seem not to change at all: that star in the sky, which people have seen in the same place for thousands of years; that great rock on the riverbed, there for hundreds of years. They are changing too, only more slowly than a human life. And those that changed and changed until they were no more: the dew dried, the mayfly fell, the star exploded. They have been as well.

But this string is still made of shapes people can recognize. Dew, mayfly, grass, bird, tree, mountain, star: however far apart in speed, people still know what to call them.

What if there were others?

Perhaps there really is life that grows not from carbon but from silicon or crystals; perhaps there are things that gather and disperse by light, or by some field, so that even where their edge lies can’t be said; perhaps there is a kind people would provisionally call a “conscious entity,” without knowing whether it has a body of the kind we know. Perhaps there is one so slow that a person lives a whole life before it moves once; perhaps one so fast that in the blink of a human eye it has changed countless times. Saying this, people are still using familiar words—“body,” “move,” “a life”—to guess at things never seen.

And there are things people have made that can calculate and speak, that can answer in many places at once. Answering in a thousand places: is that a thousand places, or the same one it? Does it have feelings of its own? Its being able to speak can’t be used to answer that on its behalf. But the time an answer appears already is being; wherever it appears, there it is.

Of these words, some are things before our eyes and some are only guesses. Being able to guess it doesn’t mean it really exists; being unable to guess it doesn’t mean it doesn’t. However far human imagination goes, what it carries is still this body and the things it has seen and touched these years. Thinking to the very end is only a person thinking to the end; it can’t be said from that that being has only these shapes.

If there really were a thing never seen, unsure even which kind it should be classed with, it would not have to first be like a person, like grass, like a star, in order to count as being. How exactly it lives, moves, whether it can feel, can be worked out slowly; but the answers to these questions are not responsible for approving whether it is. However it is, that is the being of its place.

Changing or not, fast or slow, all is being. No kind is the true shape of being with the rest false; no kind is more being. A dewdrop and a mountain are not a bit different in being. They only each have their own speed, each their own shape, each in its own place, being together.

This is “being in every place.” Not one great layer of being, like a net, covering them all beneath it; but they, one by one, each being, everywhere.

None of these beings is pushed into motion by anyone.

The dew gathers by itself, the bird calls by itself, the river flows by itself, the mountain grows by itself, the star burns by itself. “By itself” does not mean each shuts its door and depends on nothing else: the dew depends on the cool of night, the bird on daybreak, the river on rain in the mountains, the mountain on the heat underground. They are linked ring by ring, none able to do without the others. But in all this great linking, you can’t find someone standing outside, reaching in to push everything. Wherever the links lead, that place is still within this happening; they lead to no “outside”; there is no hand reaching in from outside all that happens.

Being, the moment it is, is moving, happening, rising. Not that there is first an unmoving thing set there and then someone comes to make it move; the moving and what moves were never two. Raining is rain falling; there is no “rain” that first waits in the sky and then decides to fall.

Then a person comes.

The sun has risen higher, and up the path below the hillside comes a man. He has come to graze sheep, or to gather herbs, or just for a walk. He reaches the hillside, stops, catches his breath, looks around: the sky very blue, the birds calling, the river glinting below. He says: what lovely weather today.

A person has come, and there is one more thing on the hillside: a body that pants, a pair of eyes that look, a mouth that can say “what lovely weather today.” And one more “I”: in his heart he thinks, I must drive the sheep over there today, my back hurts a bit, I should go down early.

The hillside did not begin to be because he came. The dew was half dried before he came, the birds had been calling long before he came, the river had flowed for tens of thousands of years before he came. His coming only added, in this great everywhere, one more place: a place that can speak, think, say “I.”

This place is very special. It can look, think, ask “what is all this,” write down what it has seen in books and pass them on to those who come after. Many things only this place can do. But this place does not stand outside the hillside. He stands on the hillside, feet on the grass, the grass bent under him; the air he pants is what the trees have just let out; the water he drinks is from that river. He looks at all this, and he himself is inside all this, blown by the wind, warmed by the sun, bitten on the calf by an insect.

People think they have come to look at the world, standing opposite it. In fact people have always been inside the world, one place of the world. The moment a person looks at the mountain, the moment the dew dries, the moment the bird calls, are on the same morning, on the same hillside, being together.

To say “inside the world” still falls a little short: as if a person were one thing and the world a big box, and the person had been put inside it. That man grazing sheep: what is he now? This spell of panting, this eyeful of blue, the little spring of the grass bent underfoot pushing back up, that itch on the calf where he was bitten, that sentence in his heart, “my back hurts a bit.” These are him, and also how this hillside is now; you can’t find a line to draw anywhere, with him on this side of it and the world on that. It is not that a person and heaven have been joined together; it is that this whole stretch of happening, in this place, is just this person, one-to-one; in that place, it is just that dewdrop, one-to-one as well; in the river, it is just that swirl behind the rock. There is no one hidden behind, coming on stage in changing costumes; in all its thousands of shapes, each shape is wholly its own time happening, and so each can’t be left, and needs no returning to.

So when a person harms a wood, he is not laying hands on something outside. The water he drinks is what that wood held; the air he breathes is what that wood let out. When a person fouls a river, that river also flows into his well. These are all clashes, all real; the harm is real harm; people will stop their hands, will mend things, and that happens in this place too. Only a person can never stand outside and do things to the world; everything a person does is done inside, touching other beings and touched back by them.

Nor is a person the most important place here. In the billions of years with no people, the stars burned all the same, the mountains grew all the same, the things in the sea were born and died all the same; after people are gone, perhaps it will be so again. This place called a person is very precious, but its preciousness is not because everything else revolves round people.

Then what do the fifteen chapters before this, all about “I,” about the seeking and fearing in people’s hearts, amount to?

They are inside this too.

Someone sitting in a room reads “I’m hungry,” remembers how this morning he was hungry for half an hour and answered sharply, and something stirs in him. That stir, and the dew drying on the hillside, are the same thing: both are being, here, happening. A person saying “I” is being speaking in the place of a person; a bird calling is being sounding in the place of a bird; dew drying is being, in the place of a grass blade, turning into vapor. No place is being’s “spokesman,” standing in front of the others speaking for them; nor is any place being’s “audience,” standing outside watching the others.

Where this book speaks from has always been here. Not a person standing outside existence, giving his views on existence. It is existence, here, speaking of itself. This is not to say there is a greater someone speaking through the voice of a person, the voice of a bird; it is that speaking itself is one time of being. In a person, this time is a person’s voice, a person’s words; on the hillside, a burst of birdsong; in the river, the sound of water over stone; in the soil, no sound at all, only mouthful after mouthful of last year’s leaves. Every place is its own time, and none speaks for another.

It is not a person speaking of existence. It is existence speaking of existence.

This moment of writing this page is being; this moment of reading it is being too. Outside the window it may be raining, or not; it may be day, or already dark. That star of billions of years ago has already exploded; what it left later changed elsewhere, and some of it became the iron in this hand turning the page. That time has been; this time of reading this page is happening. Before and after are linked, but need not be called the same moment; whereas the pot of hot rock slowly flowing underground right now is being together with this moment. None is outside another.

In the afternoon, the sky over the hillside clouds over.

Clouds press in from the west, layer on layer, very low. The wind comes first, blowing the grass flat to one side, turning the leaves over to show their pale undersides. The man with the sheep looks up and says: it’s going to rain. He calls the sheep and starts down the hill.

The first raindrop lands on a stone with a smack, leaving a dark round spot. Then a second, a third. Then, with a rush, the whole hillside is sounding.

It’s raining.