At dusk, the setting sun spread its dying glow across a thousand miles of yellow sand.
An ancient temple lay half buried in the sea of sand, like a secluded relic untouched for centuries or millennia, yet the soft tapping of a wooden fish came from within:
Tok, tok, tok...
Inside the temple, a drowsy old monk sat cross-legged in the dilapidated Buddhist hall. A wooden fish stood before him, and beyond it was a Buddha statue with broken arms.
Though desolation pervaded the place, this was no ordinary ground. People generally called it Desolate Zen Temple, the ancestral seat of the Buddhist Ascetic Sect, as renowned as Tiantai Temple, the ancestral seat of the Meditation Sect. Old Sha Tu and Monk Kuya had both trained here.
However, the Ascetic Sect's doctrine was to cleanse karma through austerities, forsake desire and sever attachments, freeing body and mind from material fetters.
For this reason, the Ascetic Sect did not establish temples. Its followers spent their entire lives tempering themselves in bitterly harsh lands. Desolate Zen Temple, deep within this sea of sand, was merely an old temple the Living Buddha of the Northern Lands had discovered on his travels. Afterward, he gathered his disciples here each year to discourse on Zen. If a new sect master chose another location, Desolate Zen Temple would naturally move there too.
The monk seated within bore the Dharma name Guan Zhi, meaning "watching the heart daily, holding fast to a single thought," a name bestowed personally by the Living Buddha of the Northern Lands.
Buddhist prodigies were all eccentrics in the eyes of the world, usually possessed of powerful obsessions. Monk Wuxin, for instance, had followed his heart in all things since childhood, believing that if everyone took a step back, the world could coexist