The Nine Cloud Dream

Eight fairy maidens cross a stone bridge, and a young monk who should be thinking only of the Buddha lets his eyes follow them. That single flicker of longing costs him paradise. Cast down into the mortal world, he is reborn as Shao-yu, and lives the most dazzling life a man could want: first scholar of the empire, victorious general, minister, husband to eight radiant women who love him without rivalry. Glory heaps on glory until an old monk taps him on the shoulder and he wakes on his meditation cushion, the whole shining span of it gone in the length of an afternoon nap. Kim Man-jung wrote this for his mother, to console her in his exile, and its consolation is the hardest and gentlest thing Buddhism knows: that our triumphs and our loves are a dream we are always about to wake from, and that waking is not loss. Few books hold a whole life so tenderly and then let it dissolve.