《lord of light 01》.doc

Lord of Light Roger Zelazny Original scan by none. Proofing, layout and HTML conversion by Nadie. i It is said that fifty-three years after his liberation he returned from the Golden Cloud, to take up once again the gauntlet of Heaven, to oppose the Order of Life and the gods who ordained it so. His followers had prayed for his return, though their prayers were sin. Prayer should not trouble one who has gone on to Nirvana, no matter what the circumstances of his going. The wearers of the saffron robe prayed, however, that He of the Sword, Manjusri文殊菩萨 should come again among them, The Boddhisatva is said to have heard. . . He whose desires have been throttled, who is independent of root, whose pasture is emptiness — signless and free — his path is as unknowable as that of birds across the heavens. Dhammapada (93) His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha无量；紫面叶猴- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god. But then, he never claimed not to be a god. Circumstances being what they were, neither admission could be of any benefit. Silence, though, could. Therefore, there was mystery about him. It was in the season of the rains . . . It was well into the time of the great wetness. . . It was in the days of the rains that their prayers went up, not from the fingering of knotted prayer cords or the spinning of prayer wheels, but from the great pray-machine in the monastery of Ratri, goddess of the Night The high-frequency prayers were directed upward through the atmosphere and out beyond it, passing into that golden cloud called the Bridge of the Gods, which circles the entire world, is seen as a bronze rainbow at night and is the place where the red sun becomes orange at midday. Some of the monks doubted the orthodoxy of this prayer technique, but the machine had been built and was operated by Yama-Dharma, fallen, of the Celestial City; and, it was told, he had ages