At the Heart of the Universe by Samuel Shem Page A

It’ll only take a second.”
    They climb up the steep path to the entrance to the temple, pay their next-to-nothing admittance, and walk in.
    â€œPep, look! Look, it’s magnificent! Just as it was, unchanged!”
    He’s already shooting pictures. “Beautiful.” He looks around. “And for the first time in China, we’re alone! It’s deserted! It’s breezy and shady and roomy... and quiet !”
    Clio floats through the first courtyard to a large building. Her eyes are drawn up to the graceful oblique way that the temple columns and beams handle the stress of the arches. Song and Yuan constructions. The cantilever arms—or angs —ride freely, balancing the bracketing system, a play of forces like the arches at Chartres. She looks down to the great open space within. There, fifty feet tall, are the three golden Buddhas, each on a golden lotus blossom, each holding its hands in a different position.
    This time around she feels more awed. Through her meditation lessons, she understands something of the person who gave birth to this sacred and beautiful place—and this time she isn’t focused on the four-month-old baby she’s just held in her arms for the first time and then had to leave for another day in the orphanage, but on the ten-year-old who is achingly real and right here with her and loved in a known way. She is tempted to kneel on the carpeted bench and light a stick of celebratory incense, but no. Not yet. Feeling guilty for taking time from her daughter, she moves quickly away, along through the silent courtyards and past the barred-up classrooms and through an arched moon gate framing a garden. She stops, staring at the garden. Mountains are symbolized by water-pocked rock; water is symbolized by a current of gleaming pebbles cracked off a mountain and worn smooth by thousands of years of river.
    She is amazed at the layers of beauty, both in the lushly flowered terraces and pavilions and gold-leafed statues and carvings and pools with carp reflecting the red-tile upsweeping lines of the pavilions, and in the metaphor—the enduring of this spirit, two thousand years later, in the midst of China’s prestressed concrete. She looks back.
    Katie and Rhett are together, he with his hand waving in front of her, conducting her in a song, perhaps Britney; Pep is clicking away.
    She hurries ahead—recalling, hoping she is still there—up to a final level, into the largest temple and a final gold Buddha of immense proportions. She walks around to the left, past piles of yellowing documents and abandoned prayer ribbons, into the shadow behind the big Buddha where thin light comes in through a slim door, and yes !
    Just as she remembers. Kwan Yin, the Chinese goddess of compassion, a bodhisattva: one who, on the verge of nirvana, turns back to help others along. The goddess of a thousand hands. Hands to reach back to all people to help them with their suffering. A twenty-foot-tall statue in shiny black wood, a smiling face filled with love, a small Buddha sitting on her head, another Buddha sitting in her raised right hand, and surrounding her a circle of arms and hands each with a small Buddha, hundreds of them, and a final outer circle of arms and hands, the Buddhas so small as to be almost unrecognizable, little buds. Clio recalls how, ten years ago, she happened to wander back here while the others lingered at the big golden Buddha, and found herself, alone, looking into these wise kind eyes. She stood there and suddenly and without thinking asked this goddess for help in mothering, in being a mother to whoever this little baby was, is, would be: “Please, goddess, help me to be a good mother. Amen.”
    Now again she is alone. Her hurry to get here has given her privacy from her husband and child. She stares up at Kwan Yin. A new sensation arises—of being lifted up, of gratitude. Kwan Yin. She who hears all the cries of the