For the first two years of your apprenticeship
you will study and practice eighteen hours a day,
steeping yourself in shade, texture and scent.
Weigh the fruit in your hand. Acknowledge
its excellence, forgive it its blemishes. Meditate
upon its prior manifestations: cockroach, emperor,
grain of sand. Enter its spirit. Pray for its soul.
With your front teeth make an incision either side
of the five-pointed disc where it was torn
from its mother-tree. Relish the zest.
Insert your thumbnail, trimmed
to a chisel point. Execute a spiral peeling.
At first, your crude mudras may either puncture
a protective membrane, spilling the lifeblood
of its segment of flesh, or detach
a sliver of peel the size of a small coin, leaving
the rest in place. Possibly, they will do both.
After a further five years of endeavour
you will be able to remove the skin intact
with a single sweep of either thumb, creating
a crude replica of the Bodhnath stupa
at Bhadgaon, festooned in streamers of pith.
Finally, as a Maharapurusa, you will, in the space
of the beat of a humming bird's wing, create
a living orange Buddha, complete with urna,
toenails and genitalia, umbilical cord pulsing.
You will place the shorn globe in your palm.
As you tug on a single strand of pith
the remainder will unravel like an old sweater.
One tap and the segments will topple,
naked as babies, to form the Dharmachakra.