The Bell

Ming had spent fifteen years teaching philosophy to students who would never understand it. He lectured on Socrates, Kant, Sartre—dead men wrestling with dead questions. Yet none of it touched the hollowness that had begun spreading through his chest like frost on a winter window.

It all started with his mother’s funeral ten years ago. Then his best friend from university, taken by a sudden stroke. Then another colleague. Then his uncle. Death, it seemed, was finally getting everyone near him. And with each funeral, each eulogized life, Ming felt the absurdity more acutely. “What was it all for?”  The promotions, the publications, the careful accumulation of respectability—it crumbled to nothing in the end.

That night, after his father passed, Ming stood in his flat surrounded by books and academic journals. The silence was suffocating. He thought of the temple he’d passed months earlier and how the deep tolling of the bell had stopped him mid-stride. It wasn’t intellectual—it was ‘true’ somehow. The sound had seemed to penetrate the very thing he was searching for: an answer to emptiness itself.

He left at dusk, telling no one. A small note on the kitchen table. His mind was blank as he boarded the train.

The compartment was nearly empty. An elderly woman knitted without looking at her needles. A young man stared out the window with the intensity of someone wanting to flee. A mother and child played a silent game. “We’re all running from something”, Ming thought. “Or running towards it.” There’s probably no difference.

The train moved deeper into the countryside, chugging  through mist-covered mountains. Ming closed his eyes and let the rhythm lull him. “Let fate decide.”  He intoned.

When the temple came into view through the clearing mist, Ming knew. The architecture emerged from the landscape as if it had always been there since time immemorial, waiting for him. Prayer flags fluttered in colours that made him think of hope—red, blue, gold. He stepped inside.

The chanting hit him first—not as sound, but as vibration. It moved through his body and seemed to organize something inside him that had been scattered. Monks in maroon robes knelt before an altar. Others, pilgrims like himself, swayed with their eyes closed. The incense was thick, sweet, almost anaesthetizing.

A monk approached him, elderly, with a face that held the kind of peace Ming had only read about in books. His name was Tenzin.

“So you came.” Tenzin looked at Ming calmly.  He seemed to have been waiting for him.

Ming allowed himself to be candid. “I’ve been dying for years. I just didn’t know it. My parents, my friends—they’ve all gone ahead. And I realized I’ve been living like I’m already dead too. Just going through the motions. I thought… I thought perhaps here, I could find what Buddhism teaches. That suffering is the nature of existence, but that understanding it might free me.”

Tenzin nodded, unsurprised. “Many come with this realization. Come. Sit with us.”

For three days, Ming sat in the temple’s meditation hall. He chanted with the monks, though he didn’t understand the language. He listened to Tenzin’s teachings about the Four Noble Truths, about non-attachment, about sunyata — the illusory nature of the self. With each session, he felt the tension in his shoulders loosen. The emptiness he’d been running from began to feel less like a void and more like space—room to breathe.

On the fourth morning, Tenzin found him sitting alone in the courtyard, watching pilgrims come and go.

“You are thinking of staying,” Tenzin said. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” Ming admitted. “Here, there’s peace. Here, I’m not drowning.”

Tenzin sat beside him. They watched a young mother help her daughter down the temple steps. The child was laughing, pointing at the prayer flags.

“That child,” Tenzin said quietly, “she will suffer. She will lose people she loves. She will experience disappointment, loneliness, the cruelty of time. And still, she laughs. Do you see?”

Ming said nothing.

“When I was young,” Tenzin continued, “I came to the temple for the same reason. The world was too much suffering. I thought enlightenment meant escaping it. I sat in meditation for twenty years.” He paused. “I became very peaceful. Very empty. But I realized something: I was not understanding the teaching. I was running from it.”

“What do you mean?” Ming asked, though he felt the ground shifting beneath him.

“The Buddha did not teach that we should flee suffering,” Tenzin said. “He taught that we should understand it. Know it. Face it. Transcend it. Only then does it lose its power over us. I was hiding from the very thing I needed to embrace. The temple is not an escape. It is a place to learn. But the learning must happen in the world, with people, with loss, with joy.”

He gestured toward the child and mother disappearing down the mountain path. “That little girl—if she learns to face her suffering with wisdom and compassion, she will find peace while living. This is true enlightenment. Not the absence of feeling. The presence of understanding.”

Ming felt something crack open inside him. His carefully constructed escape dissolved. He thought of his students—young faces wrestling with meaning, just as he had. He thought of his colleagues, his neighbours, the thongs of people on the street he watched outside the cafe where he used to have coffee mornings. They were all, in their own ways, searching for what he was searching for.

Tenzin smiled. “You have already received what you came to find. Now you must take it back.”

“Back?” Ming whispered.

“Back to the world. Back to your students, your university, your life. This is where you will practice. This is where you will teach others, not with words, but with your presence—a man who has looked at emptiness and chosen to live anyway.”



Ming left the temple three days later. On the train ride back, he watched the same landscape unfold in reverse. The young man stared out the window. The elderly woman knitted. The mother and child played their silent game.

But Ming saw them differently now. Not as fellow escapists, but as fellow travelers. All of them carrying their own emptiness, their own losses, their own quiet courage.

He thought of his first lecture when he returned. He would tell them about Socrates, yes. But he would also tell them this: that philosophy is not an escape from life, but a way of meeting it. That suffering is real, but so is the possibility of meaning-making. That the greatest wisdom might not be found in temples, but in the choice to live fully despite everything.

The train pulled back into the station. Ming gathered his things. The platform was crowded with people—commuters, travelers, lovers reuniting. He stepped into the crowd and let himself be carried forward, no longer asking fate to decide, but deciding for himself.

There was work to do.