[Aloof Buddhist Monk × Wealthy Heiress] [Forbidden, Tormented Romance × Turmoil in a Chaotic Age] [An Aloof Buddhist Monk Returns to Secular Life for Love] This is not a wish-fulfillment story! This is not a wish-fulfillment story!
On a night of torrential rain, she leapt from a cliff and collapsed, battered and bruised, outside the temple gate. He carried her inside.
She was a wealthy heiress fleeing an arranged marriage. He was a monk whom the abbot had found as a child at the temple gate.
She practiced Buddhism at the temple without shaving her head, and he taught her to copy sutras. Before the final stroke on the page was complete, they had both stopped breathing.
She asked if he would go down the mountain with her. He stood for a long time in the woodshed, then finally addressed her as “Benefactor.”
They met again at a Buddhist ceremony. He had become a respected master. She stood among the crowd, a scarf hiding half her face. He looked past the incense filling the hall and recognized those eyes at once.
She asked, “When you look at me, is it the same as when you look at all the other worshippers?”
After turning away, he whispered in a voice only he could hear, “It never was.”
But in a time of chaos, most who wait never see the end of it.
After a flood, she walked a long way downstream. The snow in the north, the lakes in the south, the sea in the east that he had told her about: she went and saw each one for him.
A mountain temple, a single bell. A man who never said “I love you” rang it once in his entire life.
