Vanishing Bliss

 

The monk remained still as night unfurled its cloak across the sky. The last color bled from the stones, leaving only soft blues and silvers. Bats flickered in the growing dark. The mountain had vanished into silhouette, no longer a shape but a presence—unseen, yet there.

And within him, something had also dimmed.

The voice that had once narrated his every breath was quiet now.
He was not trying to be silent.
He simply had no need to speak—not even inwardly.

Instead, the world grew louder.

The rustling of leaves in the wind.
The crunch of a fox somewhere below.
The deep hum of crickets, chanting as if the earth itself were breathing.

And the monk, in his stillness, was no longer a man.
He was a pair of ears.
A surface of skin touched by breeze.
A presence, without center.

“Indeed,” a thought surfaced gently, as if drifting up from a dream,
“one of the highest pleasures is to be more or less unconscious of one’s own existence…”

The words echoed softly. Not with logic, but with recognition.

He remembered moments—
Standing on the edge of the sea as a boy,lost in the roar of waves.
Walking through spring woods, dappled in green light.
Listening to an old woman tell stories by a fire, his whole being wrapped in her voice.

In those moments, he had not thought, “I am experiencing joy.”
He had simply been absorbed.
Gone.
And that vanishing had been bliss.

Now, sitting before the mountain, he felt it again.
No longer trying to understand.
No longer trying to hold anything.

The distinction between the monk and the mountain, between the breath and the wind, between being and not being— thinned, and then vanished.

He was not aware of time.
He was not aware of himself.

And in that forgetting, he smiled.

Not as a man smiles, but as the moon glints on a still pond.