I am amazed by some of those in attendance this night: the Tromo Trochi of Dhomu has returned from Potala in spite of his declared need to move west with his wares; the Dorje Phamo is there with all nine of her favorite priests; there are numerous famous guests from the palace reception—mostly younger people—and the youngest and most famous of all, trying to appear incognito in a plain red robe and hood, is the Dalai Lama himself, minus his Regent and Lord Chamberlain, accompanied only by his personal bodyguard and Chief Crier, Carl Linga William Eiheji.

I stand at the back of the crowded room. For an hour or so, the discussion group is a discussion group, sometimes led but never dominated by Aenea.

But slowly her questioning turns the conversation her way.

I realize that she is a master of Tantric and Zen Buddhism, answering monks who have spent decades mastering those disciplines in koan and Dharma. To a monk who demands to know why they should not accept the Pax offer of immortality as a form of rebirth, she quotes Buddha as teaching that no individual is reborn, that all things are subject to annicca—the law of mutability—and she then elaborates on the doctrine of anatta, literally “no-self,” the Buddha’s denial that there is any such thing as a personal entity known as a soul.

Responding to another query about death, Aenea quotes a Zen koan: “A monk said to Tozan, “A monk has died; where has he gone?” Tozan answered, ‘After the fire, a sprout of grass.’”

“M. Aenea,” says Kuku Se, her bright face flushed, “does that mean mu?”

Aenea has taught me that mu is an elegant Zen concept that might translate as—“Unask the question.” My friend smiles. She is sitting farthest from the door, in an open space near the opened wall of the room, and the stars are bright and visible above the Sacred Mountain of the North. The Oracle has not risen.

“It means that to some extent,” she says softly. The room is silent to hear. “It also means that the monk is as dead as a doornail. He hasn’t gone anywhere—more importantly, he has gone nowhere. But life has also gone nowhere. It continues, in a different form. Hearts are sorrowed by the monk’s death, but life is not lessened. Nothing has been removed from the balance of life in the universe. Yet that whole universe—as reproduced in the monk’s mind and heart—has itself died. Seppo once said to Gensha, “Monk Shinso asked me where a certain dead monk had gone, and I told him it was like ice becoming water.” Gensha said, “That was all right, but I myself would not have answered like that.” “What would you have said?” asked Seppo. Gensha replied, ‘It’s like water returning to water.’”

After a moment of silence, someone near the front of the room says, “Tell us about the Void Which Binds.”

“Once upon a time,” begins Aenea as she always begins such things, “there was the Void. And the Void was beyond time. In a real sense, the Void was an orphan of time… an orphan of space.

“But the Void was not of time, not of space, and certainly was not of God. Nor is the Void Which Binds God. In truth, the Void evolved long after time and space had staked out the limits to the universe, but unbound by time, untethered in space, the Void Which Binds has leaked backward and forward across the continuum to the Big Bang beginning and the Little Whimper end of things.”

Aenea pauses here and lifts her hands to her temples in a motion I have not seen her use since she was a child. She does not look to be a child this night. Her eyes are tired but vital. There are wrinkles of fatigue or worry around those eyes. I love her eyes.

“The Void Which Binds is a minded thing,” she says firmly. “It comes from minded things—many of whom were, in turn, created by minded things.

“The Void Which Binds is stitched of quantum stuff, woven with Planck space, Planck time, lying under and around space-time like a quilt cover around and under cotton batting. The Void Which Binds is neither mystical nor metaphysical, it flows from and responds to the physical laws of the universe, but it is a product of that evolving universe. The Void is structured from thought and feeling. It is an artifact of the universe’s consciousness of itself. And not merely of human thought and feeling—the Void Which Binds is a composite of a hundred thousand sentient races across billions of years of time. It is the only constant in the evolution of the universe—the only common ground for races that will evolve, grow, flower, fade, and die millions of years and hundreds of millions of light-years apart from one another. And there is only one entrance key to the Void Which Binds…”

Aenea pauses again. Her young friend Rachel is sitting close to her, cross-legged and attentive. I notice now for the first time that Rachel—the woman whom I have been foolishly jealous of these past few months—is indeed beautiful: copperish-brown hair short and curly, her cheeks flushed, her large green eyes flecked with tiny specks of brown. She is about Aenea’s age, early twenties, standard, and hued to a golden brown by months of work in high places under T’ien Shan’s yellow sun.

Aenea touches Rachel’s shoulder.

“My friend here was a baby when her father discovered an interesting fact about the universe,” says Aenea. “Her father, a scholar named Sol, had been obsessed for decades about the historical relationship between God and man. Then one day, under the most extreme of circumstances, when faced with losing his daughter for a second time, Sol was granted satori—he saw totally and intuitively what only a few others have been privileged to see clearly through the million years of our slow ponderings… Sol saw that love was a real and equal force in the universe… as real as electromagnetism or weak nuclear force. As real as gravity, and governed by many of the same laws. The inverse square law, for instance, often works as surely for love as it does for gravitational attraction.

“Sol realized that love was the binding force of the Void Which Binds, the thread and fabric of the garment. And in that instant of satori, Sol realized that humankind was not the only seamstress of that gorgeous tapestry. Sol glimpsed the Void Which Binds and the force of love behind it, but he could not gain access to that medium. Human beings, so recently evolved from our primate cousins, have not yet gained the sensory capacity to see clearly or enter the Void Which Binds.

“I say “to see clearly” because all humans with an open heart and mind have caught rare but powerful glimpses of the Void landscape. Just as Zen is not a religion, but is religion, so the Void Which Binds is not a state of mind, but is the state of mind. The Void is all probability as standing waves, interacting with that standing wave front which is the human mind and personality. The Void Which Binds is touched by all of us who have wept with happiness, bidden a lover good-bye, been exalted with orgasm, stood over the grave of a loved one, or watched our baby open his or her eyes for the first time.”

Aenea is looking at me as she speaks, and I feel the gooseflesh rise along my arms.

“The Void Which Binds is always under and above the surface of our thoughts and senses,” she continues, “invisible but as present as the breathing of our beloved next to us in the night. Its actual but unaccessible presence in our universe is one of the prime causes for our species elaborating myth and religion, for our stubborn, blind belief in extrasensory powers, in telepathy and precognition, in demons and demigods and resurrection and reincarnation and ghosts and messiahs and so many other categories of not-quite satisfying bullshit.” The hundred-some listening monks, workers, intellectuals, politicians, and holy men and women shift slightly at this statement. The wind is rising outside and the platform rocks gently, as it was designed to do. Thunder rumbles from somewhere to the south of Jo-kung.