"Bang", a strange sound came from the darkness.

We were startled, it was the sound of the beast grinding its teeth and sucking blood.

Darkness is the best breeding ground for crime, and I suspect that beyond the carpet is full of danger. The danger comes not only from wild beasts, but also from jackals in human skins.

I want to stand up and run forward to shield the dancing woman from the wind and rain and resist all sudden crises.

The five harnesses were tightly wrapped around my body, and I could only struggle in vain, unable to do anything in my eagerness.

"Click", the sound of grinding teeth is getting closer, more and more, louder and louder, and it has besieged me with me.

The pipa tune is steeply excited, sonorous opening and closing, and the iron horse and golden knife have turned into a war song.

The feet danced faster and faster, and suddenly their tiptoes rose and spun rapidly on the carpet like a ballet dancer.

I wanted to applaud her, and my arms were also banded, and I couldn't swing them freely.

"Zhengzheng, sonorous, sonorous, dangdang", the pipa sound is passionate to the apex, the strings are all broken, and no one is left.

All the while, I didn't see the dancer above the knee, let alone know whether she was beautiful or ugly. As soon as the strings broke, the dance couldn't go on, and the rebound pipa dance that I had been looking forward to didn't really appear.

The light was gone, and there were no more dancers, no more lute. All I could see was an empty colored carpet.

"Is this what you want me to see?" I asked aloud.

"Yes." The fat man replied.

"Where is the bouncing pipa diagram? Where is Maiki? I asked again.

The fat man asked rhetorically in the dark, "Do you only care about that?" Nothing else to say? ”

Suddenly, I was speechless, unable to answer the fat man, unable to follow up on the question, but asked myself in my heart: "Yes, do I only care about the rebound of the pipa diagram?" Do you only care about the kaiko who can perform with the graceful posture of the 'bouncing lute'? Behind all this, what am I looking for? Is it that we are too focused on what is on the surface and forget the real goal? ”

When I came to Dunhuang, my original purpose was to pursue my ignorant memories and uncover my life experience. However, as I indulged in depicting the bouncing pipa diagram day by day, I gradually fell into a new dilemma. Away from the fighting and killing on Hong Kong Island, entering the silence and tranquility of Dunhuang, is it the right choice or a misguide? Are you closer to your goal or farther away from your dream?

"The dance never ends, just as the Mogao Grottoes never collapse and are destroyed. What has changed is people's hearts, not years; What has changed is the rivers and lakes, not the origin. Even if some people wash their hands in gold, their hearts are still in the rivers and lakes; Some people are in the rivers and lakes, but their hearts are far and noble, and they are not stained by the sludge. Perhaps, what you are looking for has always been in your heart......" The fat man's voice became erratic and full of metaphysical meaning.

As I gazed at the colourful carpet, I began to realize that it was just a stage for dancers to perform, and that it didn't mean anything there, or somewhere else. Just like it doesn't matter whether the dancer performs the "rebound pipa" or not, once that dance is painted on the stone wall of the Mogao Grottoes, it is already eternal.

"What is the meaning of the bouncing lute, but rather the person who painted this image on the stone wall on that day—to follow the thoughts of that person's heart?" I pondered for a long time and finally came to a conclusion.

"It's only half right, people and the environment are inseparable, and the painter has that kind of thinking because of the social environment. What should really be pursued is the truth of that era. Everyone is putting the cart before the horse, everyone is carving a boat for a sword, and there are two more of us, does it make sense? The fat man sighed slightly.

In my eyes, the carpet turned into a floating cloud, slowly rising into the sky.

"It taught me a truth - the extremes of things must be reversed, and this 'anti' is not a reverse development, but opens a new door to a new world above the peak. As the philosophical theory says, quantitative change produces qualitative change, and on the basis of countless qualitative changes, a huge quantitative change is formed, and a new round of qualitative change is launched, and so on, and so on. In my opinion, the maiko that bounces the lute is a classic symbol that reminds us all the time - to find the door that allows those who are destined to 'change from quantitative to qualitative'. The fat man said.

The clouds are scattered, and everything is silent.

As I held my breath and listened into the void, it seemed as if two doors opened open. I could feel the slightly decaying air in the depths of the ancient cave begin to flow slowly, and countless dust that had been sitting for thousands of years instantly flew and fell due to the flow of air.

"There are people outside the people, there are mountains outside the mountains, there are heavens outside the sky, and there are endless ......" I instantly remembered the ancient saying of the rivers and lakes.

When people look up at the Mogao Grottoes, they think that here, these murals, and these Buddha statues are everything in the Mogao Grottoes, but in fact, they are not. The ancients gathered the strength and hundreds of years of work to Mogao Grottoes, definitely not to simply show painting skills, but-

I couldn't control my thoughts, but like a beginner swimmer, I could only float on the surface of the water, but I couldn't reach the deepest part of the water.

Limited by knowledge and insight, I can't describe or imagine the secrets hidden behind the Mogao Grottoes.

Compared with those big secrets, the rebound pipa diagram that the world talks about seems insignificant.

"That's exactly what I want to tell you, the big waves are the first to see the gold. Now that you've understood, the rest of the images don't matter. The fat man said.

"There's a door open." I say.

"Yes, a door is open, but where is it? Is it in the depths of Mingsha Mountain? How can I find it? Or, it opens deep inside some people and there is no way to reach it. The fat man responded.

"That door is in ......" I closed my eyes, and everything in the Mogao Grottoes was spinning in my mind.

I know the murals of each cave well, and I have also stepped on the corridors of each cave, carefully observing all the historical carvings left on the stone walls. Well, if there were one or two huge stone doors somewhere, I wouldn't miss them.

Judging from the sound, the door of the cave is at least two or three zhang high, so that it can cause such a huge momentum between opening and closing, and the sound of opening the door and the sound of air flow spread far away, forming a deep and empty faint echo.

In my memory, there is no such door in the Mogao Grottoes, and there is no cave with a stone wall that can accommodate such a tall portal.

"Zheng Zheng Zheng Zheng", the sound of the pipa sounded again, and the beam of light shot down from mid-air again. This time, a maiko with a lute in her arms and braided hair over her face appeared in the light.

She was wearing ethnic minority clothing, naked below the elbow and below the knee, and dozens of black braids on the top of her head, which hung down in all directions, covering half of her facial features.

I gazed at Maiko's face with all my might, trying to remember her appearance, but as she played the strings with her right hand, the braids shook like a beaded curtain, sometimes blocking my eyes and sometimes my nose, and I never got a glimpse of the whole picture.

Her ten fingers are unusually flexible, plucking freely on the strings, seemingly careless, but in fact meticulous.

In that pipa song, I heard the sadness of the change of dynasties, the cruelty of the bloody battlefield, and the loneliness of wandering in the rivers and lakes. This kind of music is not suitable for banquets and does not bring pleasure to the guests.

The pipa tune is tight, and it has the meaning of "Mount Tai's eighteen plates, and the plates are all dangerous".

My mood also hung high as the tune climbed, lest her fingers lose control and break the strings again.

When the tune reaches a height that can barely be tolerated by the human ear, the Maiko whirls in the beam of light, bends his waist abruptly, and holds the pipa in both hands and turns it backwards, which is exactly the posture of "rebounding the pipa" in the mural.

The pipa was behind her, her eyes could not fall on the strings, and the ten-finger twist to pluck the strings was completely opposite to when playing the pipa, which was equivalent to memorizing an ancient poem word by word, which was so difficult that you can imagine. What's more, all the playing movements are completed in the fluttering dance, and a person must take into account several dynamic changes such as dance steps, body style, music scores, gestures, etc., and if he is not careful, it will become a very discordant and chaotic dance, and he will make a fool of himself on the spot.

The sound of the lute continued, but the tune became extremely harsh.

I know that when the ancients composed pipa music, they arranged it in the harmonious order of "Gong, Shang, Jiao, Zheng, and Yu", and the high and low scales and the ups and downs all rhymed in unison. The same song, played in the main order, is extremely beautiful, and once played in reverse order, it becomes a kind of mean torture to the listener's ears.

Now, I hear this kind of lute music that tortures my ears.

In the song, the ancient battlefield after the end of the war suddenly becomes the Shura field, and countless dead who have fallen stand up again and return to the battle with their mutilated limbs. Similarly, in another chapter, the old king, who had been expelled and killed, made a comeback, overturning the palace of the new king, and bloodbathing the capital, killing all the people. In other words, the melody meaning shown by the rebounding pipa is all perverse, the exchange of good and evil, so that the beautiful world of harmony and tranquility instantly turns into a hell of water, fire and water.

I took a deep breath and exclaimed, "Enough, don't play any more!" ”

The sound of the pipa was too sonorous and high-pitched, and I drank this sentence three times in a row before I heard the fat man's response: "You and the world have been searching for the mystery of the rebound of the pipa, and now this eternal mystery has been revealed in front of you, but you have drunk it in a hurry, what do you mean?" ”

The maiko was still whirling, the strings were still ringing, but the scale was descending, and the tune was flattening, and it no longer evoked so many cruel associations with me.

"If that's the true meaning of the bouncing lute, I'd rather that bouncing pipa picture never appeared in the human world." I replied with a wry smile.

For a long time, scholars have been accustomed to admiring the bouncing pipa diagram, marveling at the superb playing technique, and forgetting the sound by stopping at the "picture". As one of the main musical instruments in ancient times, the pipa is to make sound, and it does not matter how its shape, color, and craftsmanship are, what people need is to hear its sound.

Pictures can't make sounds, so much so that people have forgotten that the most important of the five words "bouncing pipa" is "pipa" rather than "bouncing".

"Well, what you said is exactly what I was expecting." The fat man replied in a deep voice.

The lights dimmed, and the maiko disappeared silently, but the fat man didn't say anything, and the young man didn't come in to help me unbuckle my seatbelt.

In the boundless darkness, there was a sudden burst of laughter.

We were startled, shocked, and desperate to bounce up, but we were firmly bound by our seat belts.

The laughter was familiar, because it was one of my most authentic and precious memories.

It was a girl's laughter, about eleven or twelve years old, and the laughter was like a silver bell, crisp and sweet.

After laughing seven or eight times, the girl laughed and shouted: "Come and chase me, come and chase me, chase me, my sister will give you this orchid, come and chase me, stupid child, hehehehehe......"

I don't have many memories of my childhood ignorance, this is the clearest part of it, but unfortunately I never saw the girl's appearance, only a tender yellow Milanese bud in front of me.

The buds are shaking, and the stamens are already showing a stunning line, forever two feet in front of me.

I don't know who she is, but I can clearly feel that it was a very happy time.

"Split it with one palm, just like that, use all your strength, from the dantian qi sea to the Jizhong acupoint, don't be torn apart, you have to keep this strength into the right arm and right palm, and if you split it with one palm, this red brick will break. Just like that, split a thousand bricks, and your red sand palm is done. Come on, stupid boy, you try it......" It was another boy's voice, almost eight or nine years old.

Again, I couldn't see him, only a half-old red brick dangling in front of me.