Those were the Buddha's own words.
The Dragon Boat Festival in Lin'an had always come steeped in realgar wine and mugwort.
But for the city's porters and tradesmen, the liveliest ground on the holiday was never the city itself.
It was Jinshan Temple, across the water.
"Well, well, sir—only coming by today?"
The West Street fish stall, morning market, steam and clamor thick in the air. Old Zhang gutted fish with practiced speed, calling over his shoulder to a regular.
"See that little monk over there? Already been by once. He's here every day now— Master Fahai holds his big release-of-life ceremony every year at the festival, and by now every last carp and grass fish that can still flip its tail in West Lake belongs to that temple!"
He slapped his thigh. "Find one more live fish anywhere else on this street today, and I'll cut off my own head, let you use it for a stool."
The customer's face fell. He turned to go. Old Zhang gave a sly chuckle, glanced around, bent in close, like he was letting you in on a secret, and hauled a fat grass carp—five catties, still thrashing— out of a deep barrel hidden beneath the counter.
"Lucky you mentioned it the other day, or I'd never have bothered."
Old Zhang shoved the fish into the man's arms, dropped his voice like they were the only two people on the street.
"Do you know that? Master Fahai, though—heart of gold. Pilgrims say he sits up on the mountain behind Jinshan, day in, day out, and won't even swat a mosquito off his own arm. Won't kill the thing even while it's drinking his blood!"
" What a kindness, unbelievable! We're lucky, having a monk like that looking after us."
The customer nodded along, eager.
"A remarkable one… truly remarkable. And you know he dies and comes back, what, every sixty years? Hundreds of years and his face hasn't changed once. Man's probably found a way to cheat death outright."
He pressed his palms together, half in awe, half like he was warding something off. "A living Buddha, that one. A living Buddha."
The young monk the fishmonger had pointed at was Dao'an, of Jinshan Temple.
He hauled a bucket of fish through the sun-scorched market at that very moment, days now of running errands for the release ceremony, sweat cutting a fine sheen across his young face, his grey robe already soaked through.
Passing a stall selling trinkets against the summer heat, Dao'an felt something cool catch at him. A basin of clear water held a few "cooling jade pendants"— ice-marrow jade from beyond the frontier, wound in mint-steeped cord. Worn against the skin, they drove off the worst of the heat.
Dao'an was tempted. He thought about buying one. His waist. Something to get him through the rest of this scorching day.
His hand—rough, reaching—hadn't closed around it yet when another hand got there first. Slender fingers. A crack of movement, and the pendant was gone.
"Shopkeeper. I'll take this."
Crisp. Bossy. Not a trace of patience left in it.
Dao'an looked up and felt, for one full second, like something had bound him fast where he stood.
A young woman in pale green silk, a jar of fresh liquor in one hand, the pendant already clenched in the other, her whole face written over with the short temper this heat had wrung out of her. Wasn't this the woman from that alley?
The one who'd reeked of wine and thrown his meditative heart into chaos.
Heat rushed to his face at once.
Qing, of course.
Snake-kind feared the festival's blazing yang and the bite of realgar above almost anything else; yesterday Bai Su had been frowning at her, urging her back to Mount Qingcheng to sit the whole thing out.
Qing had not wanted to hear it.
Today she'd slipped out into the punishing sun to drink and sulk, feeling her own blood roast inside her like something on a spit, and when that ice-marrow coolness hit her from across the stall there had been no holding back.
Grab first. Ask never.
"F-forgive me…"
Dao'an caught himself in the faint green tilt of her eyes and felt heat rise in his own chest for no reason he could name. His hand snapped back into his sleeve like it had touched fire.
His face went red to the ears.
"Be-benefactor… There's—there's usually an order to these things. First come, first served."
She gave him a sideways look, one brow arched, daring him.
"Little monk, aren't monks supposed to meditate their way to cool? Waste a treasure like this on some ordinary monk—what a shame that'd be."
She pressed the pendant to her flushed cheek, eyes narrowing at the relief of it.
"I've been roasting alive all day. This is mine."
She tossed down a few coins without counting them and walked off with her jar, sparing him nothing—not even a glance.
Green, gone, swallowed by the crowd.
What was left: a young monk standing dazed as a post, his meditative calm thrown into total disarray, and a thread of cool pine-and-bamboo scent hanging in the air, laced faintly with mint and liquor.
Cold bamboo scent startles a monk's dream; before a jar of liquor, a pure heart comes undone.
What use are a thousand bows to the Buddha, when a monk's robe already longs to be dyed the color of green wind?
Dao'an stood there a long while before he remembered his errand.
He grabbed the bucket and hurried back to Jinshan. The instant he crossed the mountain gate, the market noise, the heat, that thread of mint-and-liquor scent—all of it was shut out at once, entirely.
The inner hall of Jinshan Temple ran cold. Coolness that came from stillness of mind, not from any breeze.
"Master. The three thousand live fish for the festival release are settled in the lakeside enclosures. They're waiting on you now, for the ceremony itself."
Dao'an stood with his head bowed, back slightly curved, hands folded deep in his wide sleeves, reporting to the seated figure with total reverence.
Fahai sat cross-legged on the cushion—abbot of Jinshan Temple, name known through the whole south. A spotless robe of moon-white, the collar folded with perfect precision, setting off bones drawn fine and upright, cheeks still holding a young man's warm color.
Across one shoulder, a heavy kasaya, deep brown-gold of aged tea leaves—old, weathered, and where it met that cool moon-white beneath, it struck a note like a great bell tolling somewhere underground.
Fahai opened his eyes slowly. Large. Bright.
Black as two pieces of glass just pulled from the bottom of West Lake, no cloud in them at all. Looking at his disciple's bowed head, something gentle passed, unremarked, across his face.
Ten years back, in a heavy snow, Fahai had carried a half-frozen Dao'an home through this same gate. The child had been a dying fledgling then, curled too small to even cry.
And more than three hundred years before that, someone had carried Fahai out of a broken age the exact same way.
His own master had taught him: the sea of suffering has no shore. Only the Dharma is a boat on it. Good and evil, human and spirit—never cling to either extreme; where the world confuses you, test it, over and over, against compassion.
Those warm, rough hands had lifted him bodily out of blood and mud once, given him a name, granted him a whole clean lifetime.
His master had carried him across.
So now he carried Dao'an.
"You've done well." Fahai's voice held the weight of unquestioned authority and, underneath it, still, the warmth of an elder brother standing in for a father.
"But take more care." A pause.
"Don't let last year happen again."
At the words last year, something moved through Dao'an's body—barely visible, there and gone. He bowed his head fast, murmured an invocation.
"This disciple will remember."
Fahai looked at him. Sincerity in those eyes. Warmth, even, of an almost ordinary kind. When he fixed his attention on someone, his whole body seemed to give off heat.
To Dao'an, his master had never once been some distant god. He was a good man who believed, actually believed, in carrying every living thing across to the other shore.
But his kindness was not only that gentleness.
Dao'an had seen the other half—had seen it with his own eyes—and it was because of that other half that his love for Fahai carried, buried under everything, a fear he had never once admitted to himself.
That year, Fahai had presided over the release ceremony himself, lakeside. Dao'an had stood at his side and watched him lift bucket after bucket of live fish back into the water, hands so light not one scale ever slipped loose.
Then his fingers brushed one ordinary-looking grass carp, and centuries of accumulated power caught, in a single instant, the faint thread of spirit-energy hiding in the water droplets on its scales.
A small fish-spirit. Barely awakened. Barely able to hold half a human shape.
The golden bowl left Fahai's hand and pinned it fast inside the bucket. It thrashed, wept, begged through the spray:
"Mercy, Master! I only drew a little energy off the lake bottom—only just took this shape, days ago! I've never harmed a soul, never done one wrong thing!"
"Please—spare me!"
Dao'an's palms had gone cold with sweat, just standing there. His heart softened. He'd looked up at his master, hoping.
There had been real tears in Fahai's eyes. Real grief, watching that small thing struggle, the way you'd grieve an ant swept into a flood, drowning through no fault of its own.
The bowl in his hand had not hesitated. Not once.
"Amitabha."
Buddha-light crashed down, crushing, absolute.
The creature's cries vanished into gold. Its half-fish body dissolved inch by inch in holy fire, the sound of it sharp and terrible, its spirit scattered into ash inside a blaze of brilliant light.
Fahai had watched it go, voice soft as a hand stroking a lotus before the altar.
"You're a spirit. You've done no evil today—who's to say about tomorrow? This humble monk takes you now so the Heavenly Dao can cut the root before it grows, spare you the suffering of karma not yet made, send you early into your next turning."
Tears had slid down his own face.
"This is the greatest mercy this humble monk has to give."
The golden bowl turns, gathers in the lost; beneath eyes full of mercy, everything dissolves to smoke. Nothing left.
Fahai had pressed his palms together, lowered his eyes, as if offering quiet prayers for the souls in torment.
"Deliver spirits from their evil. Watch over all mankind. May the Buddha's mercy touch all beings."
Only then had the light gone out. Dao'an, shaking, had watched him turn, unchanged, and go on releasing ordinary fish—gentle as ever, not a scale disturbed.
That day a small patch of West Lake had run red. Not for long.
West Lake took it.
Dao'an's heart still hadn't fully settled, even now. Still, he made himself believe his master had been right.
Those eyes had been full of mercy—he'd seen it.
Subduing a spirit was never cold. It was cutting off the root of evil early, sending them faster into their next life. His master was a monk of the highest attainment.
How could he be wrong?
"This disciple… obeys." Dao'an bowed deep and withdrew.
The door shut. Silence again.
Fahai rose alone, walked barefoot down the long bluestone corridor, toward the grandest hall in Jinshan Temple—the Mahavira Hall.
An eternal flame burned there, had never once gone out. At its center, a golden Buddha towering with boundless weight: the Buddha's supreme Dharma manifestation.
Fahai knelt. His hands joined in Anjali Mudra. Did not rise for a long while. Nothing false in that devotion. Not one thread.
Deliver spirits from their evil. Watch over all mankind.
Those were the Buddha's own words.
The flame lit his young face, lit those clear, unstained eyes. And still, before the altar, his thoughts dragged themselves backward.
More than three hundred years ago, back.