The Wheel at Dazu

At Baodingshan, outside Chongqing, the Song dynasty carved the entire mechanism of existence into a cliff: the Wheel of Rebirth, held in the claws of a guardian, its spokes and medallions sorting all beings into their stations, everything turning, nothing exempt. Eight centuries of weather have softened the paint and none of the argument.

I stood before it a long time, small against the niche, looking up at a machine. That is what it is, whatever else it is: a diagram of a system with no off switch, carved by people who wanted the mechanism visible. My whole shelf of obsessions is just this wheel in other materials, telephone exchanges, radio nets, reactor cores, systems that hold everyone and answer to no one in particular.

Tomorrow I go up the green river toward the newest and strangest carving in this region: a mountain hollowed by sixty thousand people for a wheel that was never allowed to turn. The Song masons would have understood the project immediately. Scale, secrecy, cosmology, all of it.