The abbot stopped there, but anyone could tell he was far from calm.
"Died by hanging..." Jiang Cheng's mind flashed to a scene in the lewd Hall of Merit: Huiqing had reached out of her own accord and taken Monk Huicong's hand, placing it on her body.
Huiqing... had been willing. The other women like her had been willing, too!
Jiang Cheng's breathing quickened as he realized this. Suddenly, he began to understand those women, and that understanding terrified him.
"It was a tragedy. More than a dozen lives were lost just like that. Since becoming abbot, I'd never been so furious. I... I rushed out of the temple and found the village chief sitting on the stone steps, smoking his pipe. I asked him why he'd done such a thing."
"But do you know what he said?" The abbot let out a desolate laugh. "You can probably guess. The village chief narrowed his eyes, tapped the bowl of his pipe against his shoe, and said it didn't matter—that those stone women had hanged themselves. It had nothing to do with him. The stone women had cried outside the temple all night. Before they hanged themselves, some of them even cursed—but they weren't cursing their husbands, or the village chief who had brought them there. They were cursing us... us monks who'd watched them die and done nothing!"
"They said we, the monks who ate no meat and chanted the Buddha's name, had ruined their lives! They said all that talk of saving every living being was a lie—a lie! We wouldn't save even those poor stone women. We didn't dare, we couldn't, we wouldn't!"
"After the village chief said his piece, he slapped the dust off his backside and left. He didn't even collect the bodies. The village cemetery