30. Enlightenment.

There was a long silence.

"What was it like?" She was testing him, still not certain he wasn't under a delusion. He considered the irony of this neutrally, as he considered most things. He was the only person in the world free of any delusion; how poignant then that this woman--this woman named after his first disciple all those hundreds of years ago--must consider him to be the one insane.

He knew what she meant by the question. She wanted to know about the experience of enlightenment, what it felt like, perhaps on the chance that he really was what he claimed.

There were of course no words to describe it. The state necessarily transcended words, or the possibility of communicating it through any other means, and it wasn't comprised of feelings or thoughts, but rather all cognition and none. But he was patient with her. It was right of her to ask; right of her to be curious.

"It is going somewhere, as something, and then returning, as nothing, without having moved, without any time having elapsed," he said. She blinked.

He had explained it this way before, and they had called him "tathagata," the one who "went thus." He had sensed the fear in people when they understood the implications of an identity going somewhere (nowhere) and returning (not having left, but now absent), cleared of its existence. An empty something returning to a vessel it never abandoned, an empty vessel containing everything, and everything that was nothing.

"What did it feel like?" she asked.

"It was the feeling of being someone, something, and then being clear and empty. It is the feeling of being free." This was a gentle description. As the fire of his final trance had risen, the whole world had been listening and watching without knowing it. A great battle was taking place in an infinite field he had been stretched across. Legend had him confronting the Mara, the demon of illusion, but of course there was no Mara; this was just a personification of the forces at work.

That battle was excruciating, and had gone on forever--was going on at all times, simultaneously, in a thousand thousand million places, yet it had never happened, not in the phenomenal world. To be a "tathagata" one entered a realm with no name and no existence, remaining there forever, but not having really crossed anywhere.

She lit a cigarette, watching its smoke curl up around her.