The old monk at Eiheiji rises at four in the morning, same as he has for forty years. He folds his robe in the dark without looking. He knows where everything is.

But this morning something is different. His teacher — ninety-one years old and still sharp — did not ring his bell at the first hour. The monk waits. Then he walks down the cold corridor to his teacher's room and slides the door open.

The teacher is sitting upright. He looks, for a moment, as though he's meditating. He is not.

The monk stands there for a long time. He thinks about how many mornings he has heard that bell. How he stopped hearing it the way you stop hearing your own heartbeat. How he will hear it for the rest of his life now, in its absence.

He goes back to his room. He folds his robe again, slowly, feeling the cloth. He does everything the same as before, because that is what his teacher taught him: the form continues even when the form is gone.

This is mujō. Not a lesson about death. Just the fact of it — that the bell rang, and rang, and rang, and then didn't. That the robe is still warm. That the morning still comes.

The monk rings the bell himself at the second hour. His hands are steady. He is surprised by this, and then he isn't.