gradus :: returning to china

I am preparing to return to China. No, that does not mean I am packing a suitcase and booking a plane ticket. It means I am drawn to begin preparing for my proximate life which increasingly I feel will be in China. I do not yet know what I shall be doing, what career I shall follow. In great part that will be resolved after I have left this world. Just imagine. A peaceful passing. A period in the Gardens of Refreshment, when I shall still be able to communicate with those I have left behind in this world. And then the great examination, the weighing of the scales, the balancing of the books. The status I take with me from this life plus the accumulated experiences from my previous lives. That which has been accomplished. That which remains unfinished but with a desire to continue. That where the line may be drawn. That which I am fitted to do in the life to come. The great Halls of Learning are open and welcoming. What am I fitted to do? What would I most like to do? Which few families are most appropriate to receive me. I shall have, as I have had before, a choice. I shall choose my mother. The circumstances which offer the prospect of my completing what remains to be completed. Of beginning what needs to be begun. So shall it be.

I have lived in China before. When, in this life, I visited the city we westerners call Canton, I climbed a small way up the staircases of an ancient pagoda in a temple courtyard and I lived again myself as a boy serving that temple and climbing those steps.

A visit to the image of the bodhisattva in gallery 38 of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum is a staging post in the present part of my soul’s immortal journey. Soon I shall return to communicate with those whose hands created so much of beauty in the days of those who were then my distant ancestors.

I shall not travel alone.

francis cameron, oxford, 17 april 2012

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