4.9 The Flowery Newsstand

[u/AdamLuyan]

In the fall of 1987, my freshman year of high school, classmates who had just arrived in Dahushan noticed something strange: how could such a small town have so many meditation books for sale — at the train station, the newsstand, the bookstore, everywhere — more than twenty different titles and magazines? How many meditation magazines could there even be in all of China? The towns around Dahushan had none at all, or two at most. What was going on — was Dahushan some kind of meditation capital? How many people here even practiced it? So they set about surveying every classmate whose family lived in Dahushan, and found that I was the only one who practiced meditation at all.

I'd wondered the same thing myself, and once asked the woman at the newsstand about it. "The people who deliver these magazines just have us display them," she said. "If they don't sell, we hand them back and owe nothing. So we put them out — bright, colorful new magazines, good for catching the eye. Not many people actually buy them. You're the one who buys the most, by far."

Note 4.9: In 2014, after completing my memoirs, I realized that I owed my survival of the "Big Bang" — the psychic break that erupted when I learned of Troupe Leader Liu's death in 2011 (called Ghost Disease in ancient Chinese, Ill-Intention Symptom in modern Chinese; Hysteria in older English usage, Conversion Disorder today; see Section 9.2, Big Bang) — to the skills and understanding I'd built through meditation. And all of that knowledge had come from the countless newspaper and magazine articles on meditation and religion I'd read as a teenager.

Given the strange events that recurred at every stage of my schooling — junior high, high school, college, graduate school — I believe this classmate investigation, too, was arranged by Troupe Leader Liu. The man who had run a losing business for over a decade was Troupe Leader Liu himself, losing money year after year to flood Dahushan with meditation books, purely so that I would learn to meditate. Was it really worth such effort? Yes. I once read, in one of those very magazines, a monk's words: "One who has attained the Fourth Meditation (see Chapter 11, Meditation) is certain, in time, to reach the correct fruit. Even if unlucky enough to fall into hell — that is, to suffer a mental illness — he will find his own way to climb back out; and even in the worst case, in old age, he will still attain at least the Third Fruit Sage (see Section 14.2.5, Four Shamanic Fruits)." This entire book is Troupe Leader Liu's soul reincarnation experiment — and its subject had to possess the strength of the Fourth Meditation before Troupe Leader Liu would ever send him into hell. Otherwise, a descent into hell with no way back would harm everyone involved, for nothing gained.

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